Poems fall outside the usual laws of language…Jack Underwood QUOTES FOR WRITERS

Poems and black holes have a lot in common. Both have a singularity, for instance. Poems also keep their centres hidden, and like black holes they do not return a final value but indicate a place that falls outside of the usual laws of the language we use to the describe them. The critic Cleanth Brooks wrote of ‘the heresy of paraphrase’, the act of describing a poem outside of the terms of its particular configuration; a poem is precisely these words in this order, laid out like this, and so it follows that to paraphrase what a poem is saying – using different terms, in a different order – is a heretical act.
Jack Underwood from A Song About Singularities, Granta