4 a.m. + robusto con zucchero é poesia

“Because we cherish life, we cherish the poem as a life-sustaining force. Its strength is the strength of an object: a thing made, a thing present in the orders of our perception.”

- Robert Kelly, A Controversy of Poets

When the amalgam of human poetics is ultimately accepted as a viable part of the evolution of our species, and thus honored on a Sunday afternoon with a brass band or twenty-gun salute (that would be ironic), it will be the poets of the time that attempt to bring forth a meaning of poetics with poetry.

There will be poets on the stage, poets in the field, and poets behind the scenes. I wager there will intellectual attempts to classify millennia of breath and language as art, while others will submit a historical discourse about individual poets and ‘schools' that changed the schema before the schema was ready for change.

This is the nature of our art, our Poetics. It is not difficult to see, the repetitive insistence of poetics as it advances culture, the importance of poetry in defining contemporary efficiencies and maladies in society with emotional and abstract forms.

What is difficult to see is the truth of poetry apriori. It is a sensation; something known even while it is tantalizingly out of reach.

In the moment, in the making of the line, in the capture of articles that define a wanton wandering expletive, there are signals of the poet moving forward and leaving his true time behind. Yet, there she remains on the page.

Later when the poem is published, regardless that it has been alive on the page for months and years, the reader experiences the rebirth of the poem. It recurs every time the poem is read - the truth of the poem is revealed.

The effect poetry has on humanity is in the very nature of what makes poetry so important to human culture. They are clues to a sensibility of the poet's surroundings, to the poet's language, to her need for explanation, and the urge of time at her back.

Poetry is a release and a capturing, a dichotomy in language and breath of the ferocious inner-point that is contemporary human experience in nature. It always will be.

That is why we honor it. That is why we repeat its terms when we write poems. We are obliged to. We need to. It has become a part of who ‘we' are as a species, to be creative in the ways we seek to express our selves.

Therefore, if I were to guess how they might honor poetry in the future, it would have to be a world-wide event; an interpretation of the importance of the nature of poetry to the existence and development of human kind. My suggestion:

A plum for everyone in attendance. That is to say delicious, so sweet and so cold .”