for the poets

i'm at my parent's home in Ontario, visiting, and i was nosing through my boxes of books here... found an interview with Dennis Cooley in an issue of CV2 that i reread, and especially enjoyed the following quote. one of the things i love about Cooley as a poet (and a person) is this enthusiasm and this interest in the potential of poetry, coupled with an insightful awareness of the artificiality of such writing:

"The thing is you can never know what a reader will do with what you write. You try to work 'in' some things, or you are aware of ways in which what you encode might be made available to a reader. You also realize that what you write may be meaningful in ways that may not have occurred to you. But I hope always for readers who will be attentive, generous, willing to discover. I count on those who are patient to possibilities. I hope for readers who know a lot about poetry and who respect it as a developed form of activity. I imagine all poets wish for the same. What poetry never can be, I've come to believe, is a naked expression that speaks from the core of a person to the very centre of another person, or that refers unproblematically to the 'real' world. It can appear to do this, but it is always a mediation and always an artifact. It's an extremely heavy mediation, as a matter of fact. In one of the profound contradictions of our culture, many of us want to believe that what is perhaps the most intensely mediated language act, poetry, somehow speaks transparently and unproblematically to immediate experience. All of us born speaking sonnets, and in English, too. Just as God intended. As Nature speaks." (Cooley, CV2 26.4)