“Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but
which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the
natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past
and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew
or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is
the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and
of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own
accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of
language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts
and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of
institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. The dialects
of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue’s
forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but
the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt.”
an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture,
Survival is the triumph of stubborness, and spiritual stubborness, a sublime stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when there are so many things that should make it futile. Those things added together can go under one collective noun: “the world”.
For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.
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