I think a poem, when it works, is the action of a mind on the page, and the reader, when he engages in it, has to enter that into action. His mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is the movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so that by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.
—Anne Carson, The Paris Review