Poetry Doesn't Look Back

my opinion about the act of writing or reading poetry

Is poetry knowledge or participation, immersion in written or spoken words?

Is the need to write poetry a need to complete the circle of one’s understanding about himself or about the world or a simple roll of the circle, a play, like many say that art is only the human functioning in his homo ludens dimension?

My opinion is that poetry is a question thrown in the murky ocean of poetry reading.

Like all other artistic efforts it can have an answer or no answer at all. Long-lasting creations become volcanic rocks piling up countless answers. Undefined questions are buried in the depths and others bring their own sediments and lava, making them grow.

It is a truism to say that every artistic act comprises the relation between creator and public, otherwise the art dies like a butterfly in its chrysalis. And it is better to fly at least one day than to die suffocated in your own weaving.

I can see in poetry, more than in other arts, the human thriving to be born, to give birth and to be reborn from questions. A poet writes a poem-question for himself or for the others. If the message is received, his question becomes an answer. Then he writes a poem-answer. Which will become another question. Time is modeling the artistic form, the shape of the individual creation through questions and answers. The scientific effort is like a construction in a bee or ant house, growing cell after cell, while poetry is a passage from the aleph state to the omega state of a poet’s knowledge.

Being like this, poetry lives as a proof for what is timeless in the human spirit. It breathes in each era inside the same alveolus, while prose creations change like sea foam under storms. Poetry represents the epoch’s vibration within the individual, not the opposite, therefore it is less vulnerable to social or political upheavals, which can overturn the poet’s life but not the immutability of his creation.

Poetry stands still. Like a dew drop that cannot decide to fall from a leaf’s ridge. The poet is consuming his inner light, following his own road from question to question, from an answer to another answer. Behind him each poem stands on the road like a viable question or answer.

I don’t think that poetry can reach the omega state of knowledge in the artist’s life. She is always bringing things into another light. My question is if poetry can be written walking the road back, from omega towards aleph. Maybe not. Maybe that is the role of philosophy. I think that poetry is written and received from the seed towards the grown-up tree. Poetry doesn’t look back.