What is poetry
Paz
Poetry is unexplainable, yet not incomprehensible.
A poem is the language of rhythm—not by rhythm (song), or simply by the rhythm of language (all languages have characteristics, including prose).
Rhythm is the difference and similar relationship, this sound is not that sound, this sound is similar to a sound.
Rhythm is a primitive metaphor, and it encompasses everything else. It says something: continuity is repetition, time is no time.
Lyrical, epic, dramatic, poetic is continuous and repetitive, a day on the lunar calendar, a ritual. "Event" is also a poem (drama) and a ritual (festival), but it lacks one major element: rhythm, that is, the reproduction of moments. We repeat the eleven-syllable verses of Gongora and the last few monosyllabic verses of Ujdovro's Artasol, over and over again; Swann listens to Venturiel's sonatas, Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia, and Sehismondo finds himself dreaming with his eyes open, also over and over again. But the "event" happens only once.
Instant melt in other nameless consecutive moments. To save it, we have to turn it into a rhythm. "Events" open up another possibility: moments that will never be repeated. As a boundary, this moment is the last: "event" is a metaphor for death.
The Colosseum is an "event" before words – and a denial of itself. If the participants in this "event" are truly faithful to their principles, they are all dead. Moreover, the true manifestation of the final moment requires the extinction of mankind. An event that cannot be repeated: the end of the world. There is one place between the Colosseum and the "event": bullfighting. It's dangerous, yet it's also style.
A poem, consisting of only a single syllable, is no less complex than the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost. The basic lesson of Satsa Hasrika Sutra is that it uses 100,000 verses, while Exsaksari uses only one syllable, Essa. All language, all meaning, colleague's ultimate language and the meaninglessness of the world, are condensed in the voice of this vowel.
To understand a poem, the meaning is first and foremost: to hear it.
Words enter through our ears, appear in front of our eyes, and disappear into contemplation. Every time you read a poem, it tends to cause silence.
To read a poem is to hear with our eyes; to listen is to see with our ears.
In the United States, it has become common practice for poets to read their poems to the public. This is a dubious practice, because the ability to really listen to poetry has disappeared, especially since modern poets are writers, and therefore "they are their own emotionally pitiful actors". However, the poems of the future will be oral. The collaboration of several talking machines, a group of poets composed of listeners, it will be the art of "listening to the information to be combined". When we read a book of poems today, isn't that what it is?
When we read a poem or listen to a poem, we don't smell it, taste it, or touch the words. All these feelings are images of the mind.
In order to experience a poem, we must understand it; in order to understand it, we must hear it, see it, think about it—transform it into an echo, a shadow, nothing. Understanding is a spiritual activity.
Duchamp said that since something in three-dimensional space casts a shadow of a two-dimensional space, it should be possible for us to imagine the unknown thing of four-dimensional space, and we are its shadow. As for me, I am obsessed with seeking something that is once spatial, and it casts no shadow at all.
Every reader is another poem, and every poem is another poem.
Although poetry is always changing, poetry does not move forward.
In everyday conversation, one sentence forms the basis of another sentence, which is a chain with a beginning and an end. In a poem, the first sentence contains the last sentence, and the last sentence calls for the first sentence. Poetry The only thing we rely on to deal with the time of linear motion is to deal with the advance.
The moral conception of the writer does not exist in the material he deals with, nor in the arguments it makes, but in his treatment of language.
In poetry, skill is another name for moral ideas: it is not a control of words, but a passion and aesthetic conception.
The false poet speaks of himself, almost always in the name of someone else. The real poet is talking to others even when he speaks to himself.
The distinction between a "closed" work and an "open" work is not absolute. In order to be complete, the reclusive poem requires a reader to intervene and interpret it. The same is true of open poems, which contain at least a minimal structure: a point of departure, or a "turning point" for Buddhists, a "turning point" for thinking. In the former case, the reader opens the poem; in the latter case, it is the reader who completes it and closes it.
A page of white paper, or a page of paper with nothing but punctuation marks, is like a cage with no birds in it. The work that really opens is the one that closes the door: the reader opens it and releases the bird, the poem.
Open the poem to look for "this" and find that "that" is always something completely different from what we expect.
Whether open or closed, the poem demands that the poet who wrote it leave a legacy, that the poet who read it be born.
Poetry is the struggle between meaning and eternity. There are two extremes: poetry contains the full meaning, which is the meaning of the whole meaning; or poetry denies that language has any kind of meaning. In modern Maramé represents an attempt to write a previous type of poetry. The Dadapa represents the latter. A language other than a language, or the use of language to destroy language.
The Dadas failed because they believed that the defeat of language would be the victory of the poet. Surrealism declared that language was the supreme dominion over the poet. Young poets, on the other hand, sought to abolish the distinction between creators and readers: to discover the point of rendezvous between the speaker and the listener. This is the heart of language.
To complete Nietzsche's work, it is necessary to adopt an attitude of negativity as much as possible. At the end of the road, drama awaits us: the festival, the completeness of the work, and its temporary embodiment and dissolution.
Adopt a negative attitude as much as possible. Contemplation is there waiting for us: the return of language, transparency.
What Buddhism has contributed to us is the end of relationships, the abolition of dialectics—a kind of silence, which is not dissolved, but a decision of language.
The poem must provoke the reader and force him to listen—to listen to himself.
Listen to yourself or force yourself. Where to go?
The activity of poetry is born out of despair in the face of the incompetence of words and ends with the omnipotent awareness of silence.
No one is a poet unless he feels the temptation to destroy a language or to create another, unless he experiences a meaningless charm.
Between shouting and silence, between meaning and meaninglessness with all meaning, poetry appears. What does this stream of words say? It is saying: it is saying nothing that is not silence and shouting what has been said. Once this was said, the hustle and silence ceased. It is an unreliable victory, always threatened by words that do not say anything, by silence that says "nothing".
If you believe in the immortality of a poem, you will believe in the immortality of language. We must bow to the evidence: language also has life and death; any meaning will one day cease to have meaning. Does this cessation have no meaningful meaning? We must bow to the evidence...
The Triumph of Words: Poetry is like those female nudes in German paintings, symbolizing the triumph of death. A living monument to the glory of the rotting flesh.
Poetry and mathematics are the two ultimates of language. Outside of them, there is nothing—an unexplainable realm; between them, it is vast, but it is a limited realm of speech.
Obsessed with silence, the poet relies only on speaking.
The word has its roots in the silence that precedes speech—the premonition of a language. Silence, after words, is based on a language—a silence that becomes a symbol. Poetry is the orbit between these two kinds of silence—between the desire to speak and the silence that merges desire and speech.
Beyond the repetition of surprise:——
What the poem says
Poetry has been likened to mysticism, to sexism. The approximation between them is obvious, and the difference is not necessarily inconspicuous. The first and most important of these distinctions is meaning; or is it better to say the purpose of poetry: what does the poet say? Mystical experiences—including those of atheist schools such as primitive Buddhism and Dengdaism—are seeking contact with the Supreme Good. The purpose of the activity of the poem is primarily language: whatever the poet believes and believes, he is always more concerned with words than with what they refer to. This is not to say that the universe of poetry lacks meaning, or that its meaning is superficial. I am merely saying that in poetry meaning cannot be separated from words, whereas in ordinary conversation, even in the conversation of mystics, meaning lies in the place to which the word points, in something outside the language. The principal of the poet's experience is the experience of language; in poetry, every experience immediately acquires the nature of language. This is true for all poets of every age, but since Romanticism this preoccupation with language has become an attitude of consciousness which we call poetry, which is not present in the classical tradition. Poets of the past, like poets of the modern day, were keenly attentive to the value of words; but they were less sensitive to meaning. The obscurity of Gongola does not contain criticism of meaning, but the obscurity of Maramé or Joyce is first and foremost a criticism of meaning, and sometimes a destruction of meaning. Modern poetry is inseparable from the criticism of language, which is at the same time the most radical and deadly way of criticizing reality. Language now occupies a position that was once occupied by God, or by some other external substance or extroverted reality. The poem itself does not deal with anything external, and the text deals with another text. Meaning does not exist outside the poem, but within the poem; it does not exist in what the words say, but in what the words say to each other.
Gongora and Maramé, Dunn and Rimbaud, can't read in the same way. Gongola is indeed superficial; these difficulties are grammatical, linguistic, mythological. Gongola is not obscure; he is complex. His sentence-making is unusual, shrouded in a veil of myth and allusion; the meaning of every sentence, and even the meaning of every word, is elusive. But once these puzzles and mysteries are solved, their meaning is clear. The same was true of Dunn; he was a poet no more difficult than Gongola; he wrote in an even more condensed style. The difficulties of Dunn's poetry are expressed in language, wisdom, and theology. But as soon as the reader finds the key, his poems are open like a temple. Dunn's best poems contain a kind of sexual, intellectual, religious self-contradiction. For these two poets, they were concerned with something other than poetry: nature, society, art, mythology, theology. The poet spoke of the eyes of Polyphemias, the whiteness of Galatia, the horror of death, the presence of a young girl. In Rimbaud's main works, his attitude is completely different. First of all, his work is a criticism of reality, but also a criticism of supporting reality and maintaining the "values" of reality: Christianity, morality, beauty; secondly, his work is an attempt to lay the foundation for a new reality: new love, new love, new people. All this will be the mission of the poem: "The alchemy of words." "Maramé is even more strict. His work—if a few pages of paper leave a few symbols, an unprecedented expedition and the remains of a shipwreck, can be called a work—is something more than a critique and negation of reality, it is the positive of existence. The word is the positive of reality: not nothing, but an idea, a pure symbol, it no longer indicates anything, it is neither existent nor non-existent. The "drama of the spirit"—the work or the words—is not just a "stand-in" for the universe; it is the real reality. In Rimbaud and Maramé, language returns to itself, it no longer refers; it is neither a symbol of external reality nor a relation to external reality, whether material or transcendental. For Gongola, a table is "square pine"; for Dunn, the Christian Trinity is "the skeleton endowed with philosophy, yet the milk of faith". Rimbaud does not speak to the world, but to the words in which the world is entailed:
She was rediscovered!
Who? eternity.
It is with the sun
A sea of coexistence
The difficulties of modern poetry do not arise from its complexity—Rimbaud is much simpler than Gongora or Dunn—but from the fact that, like mysticism or love, it demands utter surrender (and equally utter vigilance). If the words are not ambiguous, I dare say that the nature of the difficulty is not intellectual, but moral. It is an experience that contains meaning that negates the external world, even if it is temporary, as in philosophical thinking. In a word, modern poetry is an attempt to get rid of all conventional meanings, because poetry itself has become the ultimate meaning of life and man. Thus, it is both the destruction of language and the creation of language—the destruction of words and meaning: the realm of silence; yet at the same time, words are seeking words. There are many who despise this exploration as "utter madness." Nevertheless, for more than a century there have been a few lonely geniuses, some of the noblest and most talented, who have always trampled on this land and have not hesitated to devote their lives to this absurd cause.
(Translated by Wang Yangle)