There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
In nature there are few sharp lines.
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
Only silence perfects silence.
For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown.
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.
If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'
Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.
I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can't keep your mind off.
Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
