Poet´s Choice

I’ve always liked poems that take reading as their ostensible subject and treat it with the genuine intensity it deserves.

Here, for example, is a tiny two-line poem that fills me with a sudden sense of liberation. I recently discovered this poem by the 11th-century vizier Ibn ‚Ammar of Silves, at the head of an anthology of poems from Arab Andalusia.

Reading

My eye frees what the page imprisons:
the white the white and the black the black.

/ Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post 7.7.02