The phrase, “centre and circumference,” the title of this poetry collection, comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 essay, A Defence of Poetry.* Shelley’s metaphor is how I have come to imagine poetry – in fact all the arts – as well. In his essay, Shelley (1821/1840) writes,
… Poetry is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. ...Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts. ...
In a world obsessed with facts (even deceptive “alternate facts”), Albert Einstein insisted that “imagina-tion is more important than knowledge.” Many scientists and philosophers, including Arthur Zajonc (2014)**, have likewise restored imagination to its place as the ultimate source of all ways of knowing both self and external world. In the least, there are many ways of knowing. Poetry, far from being an afterthought and poor second to regal science, liberates and revitalizes thought. Far from being diminished by science, poetry can inform and rescue science as well as, in turn, be inspired by science.
Far from representing a forever turning-away, inward, from the world, poetry (nerve endings of which reach both outward and inward in constant dialogue) is an essential instrument for knowing the world. “Subjectivity” is an instrument of greater, not lesser, “objectivity.” The poet’s unconscious is stimulated by worlds within and beyond, in a kind of eternal dance. Words, as written, read, spoken, and heard, are the fruit of this dance. The poet does not write in a void. All creativity is intersubjective, the fruit of dialogue.
I hope that the poems in this collection enlarge the compass of your imagination, of your world, and of your engagement with it. I have a further wish that dwells in the invisible bond between poet and reader. In the words inscribed by Beethoven on his Missa Solemnis, “From the heart, may it go again to the heart” (“Von Herzen, möge es wieder, zu Herzen gehen!”).
