Yesterday, while reading a slim book of poetry on my lunch break, I happened upon a line that I’ve already attributed to the influence of some kind of higher power. At the back, under the publisher’s logo, was the following factoid:

The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: “word” and “temple.”

I sat back in my chair, struck. In almost any other context, this would slide out from the grip of my attention as if greased. It is a thought shaped exactly like the bland, low-hanging profundity that literally drove me from facebook. But for some reason “word” and “temple” stuck, and I went to bed last night wondering why. This morning the answer was just waiting for me, already awake and dressed and waiting with coffee. “Word” and “temple” sounds familiar because it plugs two rather vivid moments from an trip that I recently took in to one another. From my trip notes:

Poetry, or at least the sort of poetry that tries to to do this, gets at something vital & shared. It’s a naming of things; a responsibility for concepts outside of context. Conceptual gestation. Trial. To take poetry seriously is to take seriously the proposition that most “things” have no name, which is already to be negotiating the boundaries of sanity.

Then, a little later :

A perfectly suitable definition of sanity could be just a regional agreement of norms; agreements that are broken in policed ways by religion to give some access to this, the emotional territory that lies just beyond our daily borders.

And now I’m a little hopped up where that takes us, this shared departure from norms, this guarded passage across the threshold of what is socially O.K. and in to territory we would otherwise label as unstable at best, deranged at worst.