Poetry is Knowledge

Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power abandonment.
An operation capable of changing the world,
poetic activity is revolutionary by nature;
a spiritual exercise, it is a means 
of interior liberation.

Poetry reveals this world;
it creates another.

Bread of the chosen; accursed food.
It isolates; it unites.

Invitation to the journey; return to the homeland.
Inspiration, respiration, muscular exercise.
Prayer to the void, dialogue with absence: 
tedium, anguish, and despair nourish it.
Prayer, litany, epiphany, presence.
Exorcism, conjuration, magic.
Sublimation, compensation, 
condensation of the unconscious.

Historic expression of races, nations, classes.
It denies history: at its core all objective conflicts 
are resolved and man at last acquires consciousness 
of being something more than a transient.

Experience, feeling, emotion, intuition, 
undirected thought. Result of chance; 
fruit of calculation. 

Art of speaking in a superior way; primitive language. 
Obedience to rules; creation of others. 
Imitation of the ancients, copy of the real, 
copy of a copy of the Idea. 

Madness, ecstasy, logos. 

Return to childhood, coitus, nostalgia for paradise, 
for hell, for limbo. Play, work, ascetic activity, 
Confession. Innate experience. Vision, music, 
symbol. Analogy: the poem is a shell that 
echoes the music of the world, and meters 
and rhymes are merely correspondences, echoes,  
of the universal  harmony. 
                        
Teaching, morality, example, 
revelation, dance, dialogue,  
monologue. Voice of the people,    
language of the chosen,  
language of the chosen, 
word of the solitary. 

Pure and impure, sacred and damned, 
popular and of the minority, collective 
and personal, naked and clothed, spoken, 
painted, written, it shows every face 
but there are those who say it has no face: 

the poem is a mask that hides the void — 
a beautiful proof of the superfluous 
grandeur of every human work!