Writing in the dust

In an essay on “The Government of the Tongue,” the late Seamus Heaney drew on the incident of the woman caught in adultery to explain the purpose of poetry:

“The drawing of those characters [by Jesus] is like poetry, a break with the usual life but not an absconding from it. Poetry, like the writing, is arbitrary . . . . it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.”