Tuesday 15 June 2021

Jason Tandon : coda

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

As I have grown older, gotten married, had children, and paid far more attention to the world than when I was younger, I see poetry as an “unmixed attention,” to quote Simone Weil, and when “taken to its highest degree, [it] is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” To quote Weil further, I see a poem as a space where if I can “turn [my] mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” This is, of course, an ideal.

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