Terri Witek in “What Poetry Can Do: Part 1” Best American Poetry Blog
“Because of my own limitations, the wildest language I occasionally speak inside English is poetry—but if it has to be only this, the deep, repeatable weirdness is enough. I am thinking a little about Pasiphae and the bull —how she needed the wooden skin of a cow to lie with the great bull of her desire. The resistance she forges between herself and what she can’t possibly understand is how she tricks herself into making a minotaur—and here let’s just say metaphor. What poetry can do is prove it’s worth crawling past ourselves—even through huge fakeries–to test the simple impossibility of letting unlike things lie down together. To let ourselves be filled with an aching strangeness that makes things both better and worse. ”
