Karr, Untitled, 2013
The Kingdom of Poetry
This is like light.
This
is light,
Useful as light, as charming and
as
enchanting …
… Poetry is certainly
More interesting, more valuable,
and
certainly more charming
Than Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Atlantic Ocean
And other much admired natural phenomena.
It is as useful as light, and as beautiful.
It
is preposterous
Precisely, making it possible to say
One cannot carry a mountain, but a poem can be carried all
over.
It
is monstrous
Pleasantly, for poetry can say, seriously or in play:
“Poetry is better than hope,
“For Poetry is the patience of hope, and all hope’s vivid
pictures,
“Poetry is better than excitement, it is far more
delightful,
“Poetry is superior to success, and victory, it endures in
serene blessedness
“Long after the most fabulous feat like fireworks has
mounted and fallen.
“Poetry is a far more powerful and far more enchanting
animal
“Than any wood, jungle, ark, circus or zoo possesses.”
For Poetry magnifies and heightens reality:
Poetry says of reality that if it is magnificent, it is also
stupid:
For poetry is, in a way, omnipotent;
For reality is various and rich, powerful and vivid, but it
is not enough
Because it is disorderly and stupid or only at times, and
erratically, intelligent:
For without poetry, reality is speechless and incoherent:
It is inchoate, like the pomp and bombast of thunder:
Its perorations verge upon the ceaseless oration of the
ocean:
For reality’s glow and glory, without poetry,
Fade, like the red operas of sunset,
The
blue rivers and windows of morning.
The art of poetry makes it possible to say: Pandemonium.
For
poetry is gay and exact. It says:
“The
sunset resembles a bull-fight.
“A
sleeping arm feels like soda, fizzing.”
Poetry resurrects the past from the sepulcher, like Lazarus.
It transforms a lion into a sphinx and a girl.
It gives to a girl the splendor of Latin.
It transforms the water into wine at each marriage in Cana
of Galilee.
For it is true that poetry invented the unicorn, the centaur
and the phoenix.
Hence it is true that poetry is an everlasting Ark.
An omnibus containing, bearing and begetting all the maid’s
animals.
Whence it is poetry gave and gives tongue to forgiveness
Therefore a history of poetry would be a history of joy, and
a history of the mystery of love
For poetry provides spontaneously, abundantly freely
The petnames and diminutives which love requires and without
which the mystery of love cannot be mastered.
For poetry is like light, and it is light.
It shines all over, like the blue sky, with the same blue
justice.
For poetry is the sunlight of consciousness:
It is also the soil of the fruits of knowledge
In
the orchards of being:
It
shows us the pleasures of the city.
It
lights up the structures of reality.
It
is a cause of knowledge and laughter.
It
sharpens the whistles of the witty:
It
is like morning and the flutes of morning, chanting and enchanted.
It
is the birth and rebirth of the first morning forever.
Poetry is quick as tigers, clever as cats, vivid as oranges,
Nevertheless, it is deathless: it is evergreen and in
blossom; long after the Pharaohs and Caesars have fallen,
It shines and endures more than diamonds,
This is because poetry is the actuality of
possibility. It is
The
reality of the imagination,
The
throat of exaltations,
The
procession of possession,
The
motion of meaning and
The
meaning of morning and
The
mastery of meaning.
The praise of poetry is like the clarity of the heights of
the mountains.
The heights of poetry are like the exaltation of the
mountains.
It is the consummation of consciousness in the country of
the morning!
Delmore Schwartz
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