Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Engle

Engle treats the “missing” less like a puzzle to solve than a landscape you have to walk through, half-blind. The opening images are stubbornly physical: hills, leaves, ditches. Whatever’s lost isn’t hovering in some tasteful realm of abstraction; it’s sunk into the ordinary mess of the world, where recovery depends on accident as much as effort. That matters because it deflates the romantic myth of the poet as a confident finder of truths. Here, even the poet doesn’t know whether the thing can be retrieved at all.

The sly turn is in the middle: “whatever you find, is always only part of the missing.” Discovery doesn’t cancel absence; it itemizes it. Every recovered detail becomes proof of what still can’t be reached, like finding a single shoe and suddenly feeling the whole person who’s gone. Engle’s intent is to redefine the job: writing isn’t the delivery of a complete artifact but the creation of a record that admits its own incompleteness.

Then comes the hardest, most modern claim: “writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.” Not inspiration first, poem second, but drafting as diagnosis. The subtext is almost procedural: meaning isn’t a preexisting message the poet transcribes; it’s what emerges when language is forced to make choices, to name, to connect, to leave gaps. Contextually, it aligns with mid-century workshop culture Engle helped shape at Iowa: the poem as a process of making, revising, discovering what the work actually contains. The poet, like the reader, learns by reading the finished attempt.