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| Tadeusz Makowski, "Children on a beach" (1930) |
The poetic comes from deviating. Neurosis isn’t automatically poetry, but poems are neurotic. A poem is a coherent rambling. If there is only coherence or only rambling, poetry disappears.
The rhythm of poetry is like that of a mourner’s. Two steps forward, one step back… the fluttering funereal banners and the colourful paper flowers… listening to the sad singing and the sound of ghosts.
Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.
Poetry is the restlessness before realisation. The things that excite us are what we do not know, things we accept but cannot interpret. Things that cannot be passed even between parent and child, wife and husband. Think about why, when given the praise we’ve craved, we burst into tears.
Poetry is not emotion or metaphor but patterns. Patterns are retrospective and predictive at the same time. There are no patterns without metaphoric meaning. Patterns both come from and enable metaphor.
Lee Seong-Bok (1952). Aphorisms on Poetry. Londres: The London Magazine. (tr. Anton Hur).
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