" It was the same with poetry. Other than Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends I was skeptical of modern poetry and mostly ignorant of older stuff. Then at a retreat my friend Al Andrews recited a Billy Collins poem called “The Revenant.” (Once again, you should probably google it and read it right now.) I was staggered, not only by the poem itself but by its effect on the room. The next day Al read something by Mary Oliver, and I began to think that perhaps there was something to this whole “poetry” thing. First I read Collins’s Sailing Alone Around the Room, then Nine Horses, then I fell into Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems, and then more Mary Oliver, then Heaney, Hopkins, Shaw, Levertov, and so on. I’m not saying I’m some kind of expert on poetry, but after having read it for a few years I at least know something of what it’s capable of, and now when I write my own poems it’s humbling to realize how difficult it is to produce something effective, let alone beautiful—whether or not it rhymes. "

― Andrew Peterson , Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making