"The Poetic Narrative of Our Time" by David Whyte

Excerpt:  "It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. This is poetry's province; a form of deep memory; a place from which to witness the intangible, unspeakable thresholds of incarnation we misname an average life."