4 short quotations on poetry/reading from Donald Revell's Invisible Green: Selected Prose

1) "To see poems as the culmination of reading or of any process is to turn them against themselves, to make obstacles out of energies, shadows from daylight..."

2) "Poetry is the fate of reading, a phase of transformation....The Muse is fuel. The man's book is a fire."

3) "Poets compel their reading to come alive: conjury, not canon; act, not re-enactment."

4) "A poem is something to do in the meantime -- not a pastime, but as an active preparation..."