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Poetry in perspective

 

 

I have formerly stressed that I am part of those who continue to believe firmly, that poetry is not always a child of its disturbed or not era. I also think that as the special art of knowledge — let me underline here the discerning definition of Wallace Stevens “Poetry is the scholar’s art” — poetry will persist in the years to come, to attract visionary wisdom, dissecting and redistributing the hard matter of the reality that surrounds us sometimes so oppressively. The poetic writing will continue to exercise the fundamental, innate with its self-privilege, that is to have a lead and to foresee or to envisage the new landscapes of man.

Imagination is not just “the mistress of the world”, as Pascal had claimed with emphasis, but the prop, I think, and at the same time the upgrading of the world idol itself. In this distinguished with two meanings time conjunction, where the world, electronically at least, shrinks, becomes a dynamic village of contact, poetry in fact, undertakes the additional weight to enlarge the world in reverse, to notionally broaden, to give it at last its correct dimension, working as the particular counterweight in the one-dimensional upbringing of faces or face-less. 

The ancient and certainly unbreakable continuity of the greek poetry guaranties amongst others, that beyond the experience of senses there will always be the upright and in one piece experience of the Poetic Mind, that has the gift to abolish idols and lies of phenomena, what namely is used to call, in the most superficial manner, “axiomatic realism”. I am convinced that the more the world unambiguously shows that is possessed by self-destruction strains, even more poetry will act in reverse, as a tendency of conservation and survival and pure self-insurance of the human factor. It’s the existence that insists on clashing with its enslavement.

The metaphor, this meaningful verbal order, that provides poetry with essences and elements together, will give even more pledges of maintenance of the immemorial balance, which is, that the imaginative exists in the same degree, life exists on planet Earth. Over the fatal graphical representations of the phenomenology of the world, a great possibility of expansion of the consciousness will subsist through poetry and that is the ability to remain functional in second-degree viewing.   

Undoubtedly, poetry will continue to act in many ways — from one hand it will get pulled and gravitated towards the pole of reality and whatever that may potentially mean and from the other hand it will get stimulated by the fancy with all its dynamics. In the indisputable chaos that is ready, anytime, to open up before us, chaos that is insinuated and threatened among others by the nuclear armament, in a particular disarming sincerity, presaging our biological end, poetry of these days comes to help us see clearer the order in the place of disorder, the rhythm in the place of anarchy and lack of symmetry. We ought, “through the various actions of contemplative adaptations” as the famous Cavafy verse defines, to secure the poetic dimension of the world.

The freedoms of speech activities, the verbal mutuality predetermine in their own way the conception of the creatures. If indeed “imagination and not fabrication is the supreme sovereign of art, as of life”, like Joseph Conrad claims, then our responsibilities for the preservation of our right to dream in the forest of words are especially now increased.                                                       

                                                                                          Yorgos VEIS