Poetry is a gesture, a complex act; something that, starting from the hand, goes through the whole body, runs through the world and reaches the brain.
The word of poetry is complex, multisensory, emotional; but also abstract, metatestual, as it is forced to synthesize a wide experience that is being in the world and living it from within. It is reflection on the world, thought. It is phisys. Experience. It is here, in a place, in a body.
Poetry is listening to this journey through the body, which is also the body of the world; it does not say it passively, at the mercy of the world and the senses, but it says it in a form, in a distillate that is the summary of a struggle, the overcoming of an instinctive sensitivity.
Poetry is listening to a feeling of indefinite that permeates us all, that forces us to be temporary and transient. Humble, in our finiteness. This feeling demands its own form, its visibility, without censorship. If this feeling has to do with metaphysics, we do not know, because it does not change the call to come to terms with the anghelos, the elusive of form, its gold.
Poetry is the experience of the IO, not the EGO; that is, of something, of someone who ulcers himself in us in the name of the whole species. Poetry is therefore on the one hand subjective because we cannot delude ourselves that we are disappearing totally in the voice, that we are erasing the biography, on the other hand objective in the sense that it calls us to the obligation to speak on behalf of all.
Poetry is an encounter between EGO and I, between us and the OTHER who lives there. It is an encounter between his body, his form, and the body, the form of the world. In this sense poetry is an object of shared responsibility, between the poet and the reader.
It does not end in the act of writing it, but it needs a sense that tells the world; it needs knowledge and acceptance. It needs a name, a name that baptizes it. The controversies about the poet’s responsibility are incomplete and misleading if one does not take into account the fact that poetry is a gesture offered to the Community. If poetry is not, the responsibility is also of the voices that have not listened.
Poetry is surrendered look. If the word of the world expresses desire and power, the word of poetry expresses attention, the effort to see through. In this seeing, poetry does not make fences; rather opens wide the doors.
Poetry is poor and peripheral. Such is today. Its metaphorical function, or meta-historical, its ability to rename things has been absorbed by other more powerful means. First the cinema. Poetry is, therefore, for today, an act of primordial contact between skin and earth. Without intermediaries. Without fences.
Poetry is “always”. It exists, it is the language of the world, in a mysterious perception that chooses the poet as messenger. By destiny. It is not the world and must not coincide with the world. The world is its battlefield, it cannot ally itself with the world.
Poetry is consciousness of the world. It is the world that is thought. If it coincides with the world, totally, it is condemned to drown like the modern narcissus.
We cannot think that we have totally clear ideas about poetry. We can have a project, we can have approximations This is what we feel when we write poems: a painful approximation towards the fullness of form, which is like reckoning, a being put – don’t put yourself – to the test.
Poetry and poet are not exactly the same thing. It is preferable an honest man bad poet, than an excellent dishonest man poet. Worthy man and high poetry do not always coincide.
Poetry is therefore also, checkmate, disillusionment; it is, through its form, evocation. Poetry is word expelled from the earthly paradise to say the evil, pain, deformity and harshness of the Law.
The poet tries to get rid of his biography to enter the imaginary of the species, to create new imagery, but he has to reckon with this distance, with being in the present – perhaps because of the desire to relive that absolute time that preceded the loss.