Random

I've been reading Mark Strand's The Weather of Words and enjoying it immensely, which is to say, you might like it, too. Perhaps. I'm not going to presume. However, here's a small sample from the essay, Introduction to the Best American Poetry 1991.

"Hearing poems read, like reading them, is different from other encounters with language. Nothing else we read prepares us for poetry...

"We are better prepared for reading fiction because most of what it tells us is already known. In a poem, most of what is said is neither known or unknown. The world of things or the world of experience that may have given rise to the poem usually dissolves into the background. It is as if the poem were replacing that world as a way of establishing its own primacy, oddly asserting itself over the world."

Anyway, you might like to check it out. I'm mulling over the ideas of known and unknown, replacing the world, primacy...

I bought it used from Amazon and was amused to find that when it arrived it had a little Post-It note stuck to the cover that said "Random."