We live in language and it gives us the power to reach across the void between human beings. We live in sentence upon sentence. We speak and write millions of sentences in a year, crafting and refining what we think and know and believe and wonder about. Language is how we will most primarily offer ourselves to others, and that we will do mostly in sentences. Let them be sentences that are precise, that hold paradox and human complication and do not falsely resolve. Let them be sentences that always bear the truth.
Elizabeth Alexander — the fourth poet in history to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration when she welcomed Barack Obama to the White House with her eternal poem “Praise Song for the Day” — takes up the question of what it means and what it takes to be a poet in Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales (public library). She writes:
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