Here’s an excerpt from an interview with award-winning Toronto poet Matthew Tierney where he’s asked about the special relativity of poetry, kind of. His answer dips and dives but it’s worth a look (from Maisonneuve):

Linda Besner: If we think of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the idea is that time goes by more slowly for objects that are moving than for objects that are static.  Here’s a koan for you if you wre trapped on this traffic island for all time: which is moving faster, the reader or the poem? A poem in its printed form is static—it’s just sitting there on the page—but the ideas in it are highly kinetic.  The reader is sitting there reading, but his or her mind is racing in all directions chasing after the poem’s meaning. Which has higher velocity?

Matthew Tierney: Whoah, tough one. I think to answer the question, though, you have to pin the poem down. Maybe part of the appeal of poetry is that it’s unpindownable.  Its very attractiveness is in its failure to do what it sets out to do, which is to stop time. I always think, when I’m writing something—and it kind of pisses me off—how long I spend writing a poem and how quickly people read it. I mean, you can spend years writing a poem. And it takes about a minute for someone to read. So it feels way out of whack, the amount of reading time people give to something. But maybe I shouldn’t put equals signs between those two types of time, reading time and writing time.  I do feel like in a poem that’s working really well, it’s like all parts of it are more alert and aware of each other than you are. It’s a challenge to read poems in that way, to pay that kind of attention, not just zip through. Muldoon would say that reading a poem is like reading the mind of the writer at the moment they wrote it. Muldoon would say the heightened state in which you writing poetry is the state you need to be in to read it. HONK IF YOU LOVE MULDOON!

(A passing car in the traffic ocean has let out a sound infinitely more obnoxious than the cry of seagulls.  Tierney waves after it, shading his eyes from the island sun.)

Matthew Tierney: Lots of Muldoon fans out today. Anyway, he’d say that this is where the difficulty and the enjoyment are. I know when I go back to read my own poems they’re faster than I am, they escape me. I was in a compressed state of focus when I wrote them and I can’t get back there

You can read the rest of the interview here.