Poetry is the memory of those instants of presence, of plenitude experienced during the years of childhood, followed by the apprehension of non-being underlying those instants which become translated as doubt, and then by that hesitation that constitutes life; but it is also a reaffirmation, it is our willing that there should be meaning at the moment meaning falls away.  This takes work, certainly.  A long exercise of transgression within the image, not in what it contains of the conceptual but it its tendency to close upon itself, in its self-mirrorings, in its illusions.  The task involved is called writing, because words are necessary to deploy fully the dreams in which the desire for being aims to release the intuition that keeps it alive.  It’s the task of a lifetime.

--from 'The Place of Grasses';  Yves Bonnefoy, 2008