"Poetry demands of its readers a version of literacy that's the near-neighbor of illiteracy: its obscurities (which might be as minimal as the artifice of meter and line breaks; as we know, the obscurities of poetry have no known upper limit) license the reader or demand of the reader that she give up, at least for a time, 'deciphering' the words in front of her in favor of the 'different meaning' or 'invented' poem that spontaneously arises. You have to be either an expert or—it nearly amounts to the same thing—lack all the expectations that ordinary educated literacy installs in readers. A good poem offers not communication but communion and imagination. It asks the reader to become, at least for a moment, the writer or the breather of the poem. It inspires."
-Joshua Corey
