"My favourite definition of a poem at the moment comes courtesy of Valéry: ‘A prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.’ I think poetry will always hesitate between music and meaning, and individual poems will settle at various points on the continuum. Sometimes, too, the hesitation will be part of the poem’s primary affect. The idea of song also reinforces that sense of poetry as something that once existed only as musical utterance – chant and charm and incantation. A 1974 anthology of Māori poetry translated into English is called The Singing Word, and that seems fair enough." Bill Manhire PN Review

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