“presences”

“What is left out of these images is the idea of contact, and contact, of the most intimate sort, is what poetry can accomplish. Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.

I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.”

Louise Glück from Proofs and Theories

Rothko said a similar thing about his work, that they weren’t ‘paintings,’ but ‘presences.’

(Thanks James.)