Reading/401

Sunday 23 March 2008

Translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger on reading poetry: “I’ve read it every day of my life since I was thirteen. It is, among the man-made artifacts, my primary source of knowledge of the stuff of this world and the next. Its limitless archive of tiny and piercing, vast and enveloping perceptions of “the way things work and move” (Keats) has forever altered and continually alters my own. It is my religion, in as much as it is an affirmation of the sacrality of all things; it brings me news from the unknown, beyond my imagination; it is a daily opportunity to talk with the dead. Bursting into sound, running through its cycles of silence and sound, ending as silence: a poem is the Hindu history of the universe.” From Written Reaction: Poetics, Politics, Polemics.