Russel Edson

"Poetry, which, paradoxically, is not really a language art as we know fiction to be, is ... more related to painting. But even more, perhaps silent film, because dreams, if not completely, are mainly wordless. The babyish subconcscious doesn't know how to speak. It is the land of physical understandings. Its language is a language of images. Poetry is a physical art without a physical presence, so that it often finds itself in cadence to the heartbeat, the thud of days, and in the childish grasp of the reality of rhymes." 

 from  The Writer's Brush, Donald Friedman, 2007, Mid-List Press, Minneapolis, p. 116.