Always for me a poem is about tracking what is not said and the particular places I can go to know what that is by what is stated. As if there are always two poems in my ear. What amazes me is how specific the ‘other’ or phantom poem can be… Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can record this ‘other’ poem and make it my own. But mostly it is a fragment felt and struggled with. I find myself left to develop the ruins of what did not come through.

Peter Gizzi, “Poetics Statement”, in American Poets in the 21st Century: A New Poetics, edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell