Thursday 23 February 2012

Sixteen definitions of poetry and some attributes.

Poetry is language despite itself.

Poetry is rarely sense - and never meaning.

Poetry is a search for morals within the immorality of language, a search for freedom restrained (and defined!) by the despotism of the word.

Poetry is rhythm and melody. It tunes itself to the primordial utterances of a savage, to the deafening gushing blood, to the open wound of the initiated individual, desires the pounding heart of the chased prey.

Poetry is one weapon of the working class hero, along with a body privatised and sold off on the labour market. Along with the will and the potenza of the poor.

Poetry is never done with. It is never done. It never quite is.

Poetry watches the State machine more attentively then how the latter spies it. It escapes coding, and taps into the streams that the State machine floods with stolen waters, where nothing really flows but stagnates under CCTV surveillance, and conjures currents of its own invention, blows its own winds and in them flies its own flag.

Poetry responds to the demand of the straight-jacketed self, a most improbable leap of non-sense, from one cliff over here to another over there, annihilating distance.

Poetry is a limit tending to zero and infinite at one and the same time, and the omnipotence of human imagination.

Poetry is the tool whereby a unity of consciousness in nature is sought to be restored, the aesthetic par excellence alchemically morphing into the ethical.

Poetry is fatum, fate, that which has been said, announced, pronounced. It is a new law.

Poetry is an intrinsically revolutionary practice.

Poetry is a short-circuited formula where ‘game minus rules’ most definitely does not equal cheating. The apostate of civilisation, the anti-prodigal son. The offspring that negates its genitor.

Poetry is a riddle, on the run. A paradox when chained in prose.

Poetry is music. A tribute to silence.