Simon Critchley, ABC of Impossibility, 2015

The poet issues reminders for what we already know and interprets what we already understand but have not made explicit. Poetry takes things as they are and as they are understood by us, but in a way that we have covered over through force of habit, a contempt born of familiarity, or what Fernando Pessao’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro calls ‘a sickness of the eyes’. Poetry returns us to our familiarity with things through the de-familiarization of poetic saying, it provides what Careio calls ‘lessons in unlearning’ where we finally see what is under our noses. What the poet discovers is what we knew already, but had covered up: the world in its plain simplicitly and palpable presence.