“For me, poetry proliferates and flourishes in the intellect’s blind spot. But you have to have the intellect first; you can’t skip that step. I find intelligence to be most interesting when it’s tested — not when it’s challenged, but when we restrain it from being the default mode by which we apprehend the phenomena around us.” (Christina Pugh, “On Ghosts and the Overplus,” Poetry, March 2016)

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)