Christian Wiman on poetry’s power to rouse us from the slumber of familiarity:

Sometimes the mystery of existence— that we exist at all, that we feel so homelessly at home in this place — gets embedded so deeply in life that we no longer feel it as mystery. Language, too, partakes of this sterilizing sameness, becomes in fact as solid and practical as a piece of wood or a pair of pliers, something we use during the course of interchangeable days. Poetry can reignite these dormancies (“words are fossil poetry,” as Emerson put it), of both language and life, send a charge through reality that makes it real again.

— Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 60.