An Experience

"'To read a poem should be an experience, like experiencing an act' [Wallace Stevens, 'Adagia,' Collected Poetry and Prose]. The idea of the artwork as an experience also produces a basis for aesthetic judgment. One can (and should) ask, 'Does this artwork provide a unique, distinctive experience, one that hasn't already been experienced, known, understood?' Walter Benjamin describes shock and distraction as the modern mode of consciousness (or unconsciousness), in which most of our experience is not really experienced and doesn't actually exist for us at all. Although art should be the antidote to this nonexperience of distraction, most of what we read simply repeats and re-presents what has already been experienced (or nonexperienced). A real work of art makes us stop and pay attention. It breaks through our crust of habit and routine."
~ Reginald Shepherd, "On Difficulty in Poetry"