how is a person touched by art or literature

Ezekiel's poems often touch upon language and the writing process. In "A Time to Change," Ezekiel imagines the poet as "a stubborn workman" who must toil over language in order to reach towards "the perfect poem." This "perfect poem" is characterized by "precise communication of a thought" (p 5). In "On Meeting a Pedant," Ezekiel revokes language, which is "cold as print" and "insidious" for the pleasures of the world: "Give me touch of men and give me smell of / Fornication, pregnancy and spices" (p 9).

Another example of the theme of the power and limits of language in Ezekiel's work is "A Word for the Wind," which laments the speaker's inability to find a word for the wind besides the ones which are already assigned to the wind. Ironically, Ezekiel's poem flows exactly like the wind he is describing, and becomes itself a "word" for the wind. Ezekiel does not shy away from enjambment or the manipulation of rhythm as his words twine over the lines of this poem. For example, lines 3-5 evoke the flowing nature of the wind as the thought stretches over three lines: "verses / moving slowly like the wind / over grass" (21).

In his later poems, after his language simplified greatly, Ezekiel expresses being tired of lofty, complicated, and non-direct language: “I am tired / of irony and paradoxes . of the bird in the hand / and the two in the bush / of poetry direct and oblique / of statement plain or symbolic / of doctrine or dogma” (157). Ezekiel’s poetry turns in the later part of his career towards directness and succinctness.