A Truing of Vision

A Truing of Vision

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways.  Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us — more range, more depth, more feeling: more associative freedom, more beauty.  More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our existence is also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.

~Jane Herschfield, from TEN WINDOWS: How Great Poems Transform the World

 

Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.

2 thoughts on “A Truing of Vision

  1. Beautiful. It inspires me to take greater care with my own writing which has been, recently, mostly an exercise or an outpouring. Thank you Carmel.

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