Actuality.

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