[attempt to translate the abovementioned thoughts on poetry] poetry is the art to put in words what can't be formulated.
i'm pondering a little about that poetry after some reading of incomprehension and wonder. the works of a friend. the swimming about in her words and the nibbling on their meaning. stirred by the reflexion of something beautiful or the cold of the cracks in the image. stirred, without understanding. convinced of a revelation, without the faintest idea what it could be. that mysterious touch hasn't got a lot to do with the clearly defined descriptions in prose, which direct my imagination meticulously towards a certain seansation or experience. poetry, as i seem to discover now, is much closer to the shady world of association, that grants music and abstract art their strenght. also poetry is more homest. more honest than prose, who -even when she prentends to be speechless- stammers in eloquent sentences and by writing about the boundaries of language is in fact delivering a speech about the broad range of words and their power to touch. however the prosewriter may want to be and however hard he tries to admit the impotence of language, he will always, as i am doing right now, strangle his own argument by having formulated it with meaningful words. poetry doesn't know this inability to describe its own limitations. because she isn't busy telling or explaining or sketching an image that leads to a story or an understanding. poetry leaves room for the holes that exist in our expression. the extacy and the black, the nothing and the frenzy [this too falls short]. and because poetry is gattering the uncertain letters from the caves and happy-treasuries of the human being and chucks them on paper, because it leaves holes and chooses the wrong words in places where that happens also in the wordless reality; therefore poetry can [like music and plastic arts] sincerely speak about the impotence and thus about the unintelligible happiness and unbearable pain. that's why inscrutable poems are exciting and that's why you can weep about an incomprehensible collection of words. the only requirement to take part in this journey of exploration is honesty. the reader must be able to admit that the conventions on language and logic have their restraints and next to open the door to the the strange twist, that we named association. the twist that allows us continuously to flow between the different layers of our world [observation, imagination, memory/present, future, past]. that ability has often suffered from the pragmatic functionalism that society demands or flattened off by the commonplace connections of the televison propaganda [balaclava in black van=bank robbery, two pair of socks on the ground=one pair of naked people in bed], but it never dies. every human being can smell that this red woollen mitten has the smell of granny's french winterchalet, every human being can feel that the windcover of that microphone tickles exactly as the stuffed animal with its huge wooden house and every human being can -looking at the elegant 3 on the sign of room 37 of the british museum- suddenly think back to the flowerdress of that beautiful french speech therapist. as soon as the reader finds that honesty [the same with which the poet wrote] stuttering verses will be resounding and the unspeakable will find a voice.
04IX1999
it is like the king that ruled over a people that suffered and grew smaller every day; the king saw nothing, because he wasn't growing smaller himself. until the day that his last subject died and the king lost his job. he then kept growing smaller every day because of famine and loneliness until he died himself.