SOURCE: Guest, Barbara. “Three Essays.” The American Poetry Review 31, no. 5 (September-October 2002): 13-15.

In the following essay, including three pieces that appear in Guest's 2003 publication, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing, the poet considers the aim of poetry, the role of imagination, and the many aspects of art at large.

Wounded Joy

The most important act of a poem is to reach further than the page, so that we are aware of another aspect of the art. This will introduce us to its spiritual essence. This essence has no limits. What we are setting out to do is to delimit the work of art, so that it appears to have no beginning and no end, so that it overruns the boundaries of the poem on the page. All of the arts share this need for delimiting.

Coleridge said that a poem must be both obscure and clear. This is...