The Discovery of Poetry~ Teaser Tuesday

Hosted by MizB at should be reading.

Here's how to play:

*Grab your current read

*Open to a  page

*Share a few “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

*Please no spoilers!

*Share the title and author.

Today's pick is a Frances Mayes book (from 2001) that I picked up after starting Under the Tuscan Sun again. I've never felt qualified to even read poetry much less write it. I've tried but love the idea of getting a professor's take on reading and writing it. 

From Page 1: 

"What motivates a poet to write? When Emily Dickinson said about her art, 'My business is circumference,' she was talking about her desire to explore experience by drawing it into a circle of her own, a world. Similarly, Wallace Stevens wanted  each poem to give 'a sense of the world.' D.H. Lawrence thought the essence of good poetry was 'stark directness.' Telling or uncovering truth is the prime motive of poets like Muriel Rukeyser, who once asked, 'What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.' William Wordsworth valued 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' When William Carlos Williams called a poem 'a machine made of words,' he simply meant to say that the best-formed poems function smoothly, with oiled and well-fitted parts, not far from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideal, 'The best words in the best order.' 

"Many poets aspire to reach 'the condition of music' --some aim for heavenly music of the spheres, while others want the words to 'boogie.' William Butler Yeats thought, 'We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.'"

Please share your own Teaser Tuesday post or leave your teaser in the comments.