Quotes to Know: Allen Grossman

"Poems should have an empowering strangeness about them which summons its audience rather than receives its audience." The Sighted Singer, 122.

Here's a poem with that sort of strangeness, or part of one: the prefatory poem to Susan Howe's Pythagorean Silence:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwe that were wood
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwhen that a wide wood was

In a physical Universe playing with


xxxxxxxxwords


Bark be my limbs my hair be leaf

Bride be my bow my lyre my quiver

At which you have to turn the page, and start the poem, summoned. Yum!