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Invitation
If you are a dreamer, come in, Poetry Collections Support the Artist The Soul Food Cafe is working collaboratively with family of Edwina Peterson Cross to ensure that her work gains recognition and is published. Any donations will be gratefully received. You can minimize currency exchange by using Paypal to make your contribution.
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Lemurian Poetry Cottage
What is Poetry? If you ask two people you will get two answers . . . if you ask two poets, you will get two poems. In 390 B.C., Plato wrote that poetry was not composed by art, but by inspiration. He went so far as to call it "possession" and say that poets were not in their right minds when composing. Coming full circle, W.H. Auden, in 1962, declared that poetry was not magic, that its purpose was rather to tell the truth, "to disenchant and disintoxicate." Between the two opinions and the two time periods, many people have tried to craft an answer to the question, "what is poetry?" Some poets seem to almost contradict themselves as they struggle to describe something that is so essential and yet so miraculous. Shelly called poetry "the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds," but he also said; "a Poet is a nightingale, who sits in the darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." Wordsworth said that poetry was the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity, adding elsewhere that it was "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Keats believed: Matthew Arnold defined poetry as "simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things - hence its importance." John Ruskin declared it "the presentment, in musical form, to the imagination of noble grounds for the noble emotions," and Edgar Allen Poe called it "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty." Following are some interesting ideas and some dancing words exploring the question, "what is poetry?" And what is the answer in the end? What is poetry to you? I have nothing to say and I'm saying it and that is poetry. (John Cage Jr.) The poet is the priest of the invisible. (Wallace Stevens) Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind. (Don Marquis) Poetry: all that remains after you remove all that isn't poetry. (Robert Priest) Whatever else, poetry is freedom. (Irving Layton) Poetry is any written or spoken use of words which seeks to express -through a combined sense of sound and meaning, music, emotion and idea - the full capacity of language(s), testing the very limits of experience, imagination and what can be said; any theme or subject, level of diction, is available to the poet, although poetry has tended to deal primarily with intersections of the universal and personal, returning continually to the subjects of love, death, time, memory, family, nature, beauty, history and the gods. (Todd Swift) Poetry can be wittier and funnier than any kind of writing; it can tell us about the world through words we can't forget; it can be tough or it can be tender, it can be fat or lean; it can preach a short sermon or give us a long thought. And it does all this through the music of words. (Gerald D. McDonald) Poetry is so many things besides the shiver down the spine. It is a new day lying on an unknown doorstep. It is Peer Gynt and Moby Dick in a single line. It is the best translation of words that do not exist. It is hot coffee dripping from an icicle. It is the accident involving sudden life. It is the calculus of the imagination. It is the finishing touch to what one could not finish. It is a hundred things as unexplainable as all our foolish explanations. (David McCord) A good poem celebrates life and quickens us to it . . . the good poet cannot fail to shame us, for he proves to us instantly that we have never learned to touch, smell, taste, hear and see. He shames us through our senses by awakening us to a new awareness of the peaks and abysses locked in every commonplace thing. But he shames us with such joy that the sensations of joy are lost in the delight of our awakening. We realize, exalted, that the good poet stirs us to an energy of being that we could not have known by ourselves, and we grow to love him in gratitude and joy. His gift of life is in his power to shape his experiences - and thereby to live them - in an ardor of sensation and energy beyond our daily reach. But beyond it only until he quickens and extends us to his higher power. (John Ciardi - From an Eulogy to William Carlos Williams) What is Poetry? Who Knows?
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