Don McKay on How does poetry connect us with our environment?

Currently the Poet for April on the Words at Large website is Don McKay.You can read Don's response to a set of questions there which include the following:

How does poetry connect us with our environment?

On this subject I have written quite a lot in Vis a Vis. Briefly, I think the qualities of attention that are endemic to poetry—a longing which is, unlike many other versions of desire, without the urge to possess—are also attitudes which we ought to bring to the naked world. Poetic attention assumes that the other is valuable in itself, and not solely as a category of human affairs (a "resource" or an aesthetic adornment, for example). The genre sometimes known as "thing poetry" often encourages that attitude by approaching ordinary objects as mysterious, independent beings. If you can find the secret power in a chair or spoon, finding it in granite will be a snap.