The haunting (Gamble)

It is difficult for me to believe that a piece of writing can be significant/relevant/consequential if it does not give the reader some (at least slightly) challenging experience in which to participate; a poem in which the poet presents a problem and then resolves that problem without the help of the reader is tidily finished to the point of being dismissible. How can poems matter to us if they don’t stay with us for some duration of time after we have finished reading them? And why would a poem stay with us if there was nothing in it to trouble or perplex us a little bit? Poems must haunt the reader.

Hannah Gamble