Brodsky -- language as encounter

from Lev Loseff's Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life 


Poetry was not something to be "gotten," mastered, and regurgitated in paraphrase. It was not something notched on the belt of attainments. It was, rather, a struggle waged in fear and trembling, an encounter with the very stuff of language that might put our core assumptions about existence into question.  

                                                                               – Sven Birkerts, a Brodsky student