Yesterday, while reading on my lunch break, I happened upon a line that caught me off guard. At the back, under the logo for Copper Canyon Press, was the following factoid:

The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: “word” and “temple.”

I sat back in my chair, a little dazed. In almost any other context, this would slide out from the grip of my attention as if greased. It is a thought shaped exactly like the bland, low-hanging nuggets of wisdom that drove me from Facebook. But for some reason “word” and “temple” stuck long enough for me to go to bed last night wondering why. This morning the answer was just waiting for me, already awake and dressed and waiting with coffee. “Word” and “temple” are familiar because they plug directly in to two rather vivid moments from a trip that I recently took. From my trip notes:

Poetry (or at least the sort of poetry that tries to to do this) gets at something vital & shared. It’s a naming of the unnameable; a responsibility for concepts outside of context. Conceptual gestation. Trial. To take poetry seriously is to take seriously the proposition that most “things” have no name, which is already to be negotiating the boundaries of sanity.

Then, a little later :

A perfectly suitable definition of sanity could be just a regional agreement of norms; agreements that are broken in policed ways by religion to give some access to this, the emotional territory that lies just beyond our daily borders.

Words. Temples. These are proven sites of negotiation; spaces where norms can be safely set aside in the service of the sacred. Both bring you to the edge of this dim boundary, offering (but not guaranteeing) safe passage across the threshold of the sane and in to a larger self.