Classic Poem

Last winter, there was this one time when I was just talking with some of my juniors who want to be writers and I asked: " With poetry, what if we tried starting out from discovering what the " poetic thing" is, instead of starting out from language? " We can't exactly say what the " poetic thing " is, and we don't know if starting from the point of not exactly being able to say what the " poetic thing " is doesn't possibly bring us to some Zen-like state, is what I said one time last winter when I was just talking with a few of my juniors who want to be writers. There was this time I said I'd tried to find some examples in the diaries of Chon T'aeil and The Record of Imje . Even though poetry is fragile like a mason jar, we get a taste for what it is when we use it.