remind

Wendell Berry, What Are People For? p88-92 The Responsibility of the Poet:

It has seemd to me increasingly that a poem--a good poem--exists at the center of a complex reminding, to which it relates as both cause and effect. The process of this reminding is too complex ever to be fully mapped or explained..
Fundamentally, the existence of a poem reminds first its poet and then its readers of the technical means of poetry, which is to say its power as speech or song: the play of line against syntax and against stanza; the play of variation against form and against theme; the play of phrase against line; and of phrase against phrase within the line; the play of likenesses & differences of sounds; the play of statement with and against music; the play of rhyme against rhythm and as rhythm; the play of the poem as a made thing with and within and against the histories--personal, literary, national and local--that produce it. all this happens in any writing but poetry is poetry as aware of its conditions (recently read where? ~ the literary is writing that is aware of and responds to its conditions - good). it is *attention* - re-minding, yes, calling and keeping to & in mind. (..please, help me to be responsive to my blessings..)
Auden: as praise. this attention is prayer. acknowledgment, gratitude. 'whatever else it does, a poem must praise all that it can, for being and for saying' - all that it regards, praise for being ~ Making,Knowing, Judging. in The Dyer's Hand.

A poem, that is, has the power to remind poet & reader alike of things they have read & heard. yes. Also--and this is partly why the subject is so complex--it has the power to remind them of things they have not read & heard, but that have been read & heard by others whom they have read & heard. yes. this is is it? how I may have known I felt an affinity for ie Kierkegaard before ever reading Kierkegaard.
Thus the art, so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. TSEliot on tradition. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. yes. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence. yes. calling. to mind. keeping. honoring. -N Ginzburg ~ 'my world is a barren one, in which cadences rise to the surface.'
Poetry can be written only because it has been written.
'It survives / in the valley of its making / a way of being, a mouth' ~ Auden, In Memoriam W. B. Yeats
A poem, too, may remind poet & reader alike of what is remembered or ought to be remembered--as in elegies, poems of history, love poems, celebrations of nature, poems of praise or worship, or poems as prayers. liturgy ~ poetry as enactment of thanking. One of the functions of the music or formality of poetry is to make memorable.

By its formal integrity a poem reminds us of the formal integrity of other works, creatures, and structures of the world. The form of a good poem is, in a way perhaps not altogether explainable or demonstrable, an analogue of the forms of other things. By its form it alludes to other forms, evokes them, resonates with them, and so becomes a part of the system of analogies or harmonies by which we live.
Thus the poet affirms and collaborates in the formality of the Creation. This, I think, is a matter of supreme, and mostly unacknowledged, importance.

A poem reminds us also of the spiritual elation that we call 'inspiration' or 'gift.' Ted Hughes re TSE, A Dancer to God. the muse, or the inner 'true self', met in dreams, takes over. the fire and the rose. Or perhaps we should say that it should do so, it should be humble enough to do so humility is endless, because we know that no permanently valuable poem is made by the merely intentional manipulation of its scrutable components. but -thorpe- can we always tell the difference? may be ~ Hence, it reminds us of love. It is amateur's work, lover's work.
What we now call 'professionalism' is anathema to it. A good poem reminds us of love because it can not be written or read in distraction; it can not be written or understood by anyone thinking of praise or publication or promotion. It is ruined utterly by what Donald Davie has called "the fluctuations of philistine but sophisticated fashion." ..To those who wish to defend of the possibility of good or responsible work, the distinction (between amateur & professional) reminas useful today because of the need to discriminate against professionalism. Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward.. tend always to narrow the ground of judgement. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the grounds of judgement. The context of love is the world.
The standards of love are inseparable from the process or system of reminding that I am talking about. This reminding .. is to a considerable extent what poets respond to and is to a considerable extent what they respond with.