Word Temple

Upon researching Copper Canyon Press for a paper, I realized something quite beautiful about their chosen symbol, which all have seen countless times, as Copper Cayon is a bastion for poetry in America, a symbol itself of how we cannot give up on poetry audiences, that such a venture can succeed both critically and popularly.



The Chinese character for poetry includes two parts. 'Word' and 'Temple'. The accuracy and, in its own way, poetry of this Chinese conception of poetry is something I feel often lacks in our contemporary Western culture. Is this not what each of us seeks in our own writing? To take human words and allow them by our own hands to transcend, not unlike a pagoda, to encompass a basic human experience, to speak directly to both the nature of us and the nature of something greater? Yet have I found a more fitting description for what poetry should have always been and must still be considered today, despite our mass media culture. Words can still ascend, transcend, transform. To say something all can understand intuitively, across our many divides, something all can feel, may be the closest thing we have to Godliness, even for we agnostics....