I admitted to Annika that I'd never realized how close Berlin is to Sweden. (I thought it was farther south.) "You'd never know I work with geography from my knowledge of maps," I wrote.At the end of a long e-mail in reply, she wrote:
"P.S.: Geography isn't really about maps, is it?"
Right, not to me. To me, geography is another story, a way of talking about living in the physical world. It's a cousin to those other maps of our lives: religion, or poetry.
— Excerpt from an interview with Jack Gilbert, talking about Story almost as if he were talking about Earth's tectonic plates:
"Your actual being is changed. My heart, for instance, was partially made by the songs of Frank Sinatra and by movies I went to when I was growing up. My heart was shaped by stories, by pictures, by songs.
"I believe we are made by art, art that matters. Not what’s ingenious, clever, or hard to read. Not a mystery puzzle.
"I think if a poem doesn’t put emotional pressure on me, I don’t feel uncomfortable in the sense of feeling more than I can feel, understanding more than I can understand, loving more than I am able to be in love. Real poetry enables me for that. I think it’s about putting pressure on me. If it doesn’t put pressure on the reader, what’s it for?"
[image of geography book from pillipat's flickr]