Hi Poets, Writers & Readers.
Your comments are invited on Luciana De Palma's write-up on Poetry.
Your views will be published below the article.
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WHAT IS POETRY
by Luciana De Palma
 

I write poems since I was fifteen years old, although a few time ago I have found again some verses written when I was eleven years old. It seems to me to have written poems for a long time and in all this time I’ve never asked myself what the poetry is: it’s been a natural and spontaneous thing, like to breath. But from when I’ve had some poetry meetings with school students or when I’ve organized some public poetry readings or when I’ve received some prizes for them, the question that often I’ve heard addressed from people to me is: what’s poetry for you? I have to confess that every time I’ve felt in difficulty: how to explain the natural impulse of the writing, the continuous flux of thoughts and images, the feverish flame of the soul that all the nights and in every moment of the day burn always intense?
So, what is the poetry?
It is like a priest that trust in God and has to give the reason.
Or it is like asking to flower why its petals are yellow or red.
I hate to give definitions, these are the worse way to explore the infinite universe inside the human beings and I, that write poems, love the synthesis only after having fathomed a layer to make a solid level to fathom deeper. I live every moment “the poetry”: when I wake up in the morning, when I speak, when I dream, when I see the world. Poetry is a way to live and even if some greater Italian poets have said that the poetry is the most useless thing, they have continued to write and to be poets.
What is very clear is that today “to live” the poetry is difficult: it seems to the world that a poet lives on the clouds, far from the “real life”.
But how it needs to be in silence, to look over every border, to feel that deep and one truth, that truth inside of the human nature.
Who writes poems know how every line is born after many suffering moments: to go down the soul, even where the dark is darker, to come up taking a weight too much, to choose the right word and to say what has been found “as honestly as it can”, like a good friend of mine has written.
Poetry is honesty, is suffering, is a war that the poet fights inside and the world often doesn’t know nothing about.
When I organized a poetry meeting in my town, a boy, before unknown, told me that I was “brave” to read my poems in public because, he said, “the poetry is tiresome”: but I assure that when I finished to read he was still there, he listened every poem I read.
The poetry makes indicate the poet as “a different”: and sure there is a deep difference.
The difference is in all the reality that a poet sees, not wanting to hide the face under the earth.
The poetry is a window and every time we see trough it we see a different landscape, but each of these landscapes are a little part of the great truth and reading poems means just this: see and make larger the own soul.

THE POETRY AND THE DAYS
by Luciana De Palma

Everybody who tried sometime to put down few verses to compose a poem, in that moment has certainly felt the sensation of estrangement of themselves from the world and of the world from themselves, to return then to the world and go on with usual and necessary businesses.
But what has changed “after” those verses?
What happened going by the white paper to those ink traces on the same paper?
As between two banks, still on a cambered bridge, the poet has been hanging in the middle: that day has been divided in two parts, before and after the poem, the day of creation, the day the poet has given birth to him/herself again.
One comes back to life each time a poetry is read or written, one fords the river and for a long time the damp remains still stuck to the pegs.
“That” day becomes “the” day of our creation, our passage, our discover.
It’s like to have been pushed in the uterus of life and then to be surfaced again to the light, to the world; it’s like to have seen through some lines the whole universe in our mind and then to have left that silent, muffled place, taking back with us something we cannot explain.
Can poetry change a life? Maybe not, but the days, which a life is made of, are the privileged place where poetry plunges its roots, the days are the sky where poetry makes its foliage spreads, the days are as the branches on which poetry makes new buds open.
Someway poems we learnt at school time resist in our soul, someway suggestions and images return, someway ancient words make old desires rear up.
Poetry shakes, empties and fill up, poetry lifts up and throw on the ground and sure the soul doesn’t remain immune.
The true poetry has the “human being” inside: it contains men, women, their days, their life.
The poetry kneads itself to the days as the wind to the sand of the desert and in those long silences the dunes move, the horizons change, the landscapes overturn.
If in our daily life happens to meet poetry (a rustle among the leaves, a leaf falling to our feet, a perfume reminding something passed, a fortuitous and predicting love meeting), let’s allow to ourselves a divine act, let’s allow to make eternal that instant bridling it in sublime verses, in deep words: poetry makes we take possession again of those archetypical suggestions that are ours from time immemorial, that belong to us, that our soul keeps as incautious winds, as whipping gales, blowing and hissing: … life!

Luciana De Palma
 

COMMENTS BY

Rama Krishna Perugu
perugu.ramakrishna@gmail.com
21 August 2007

Poetry is the language of nature,reality,truth,and emotions...
Poetry is impassioned ex-pression,which is in the countence of all science...
Poetry is nothing but he thought and words in which emotion spontaniously embodies itself...
Poetry is the most vital and lasting achievement of man...
Poetry is not ideas ,it is made with thing s and words that signify things...
Poetry is special use of languag ,but the value of any use of languagies to say something,:
it is medium of communication,between two humanbeings...
Poetry is the fine particle with us which expands rarifies,
raises, our whole being without it mans like as poor as beasts man is poetical animal...
A poem should not mean but be....

Dnyanesh Chakradev
email : dchakradev@gmail.com
Fri, 24 Feb 2006

For me, poetry is not arrangement of words in stanzas. Rather , poem is person's alter ego. Its incarnation of inner feelings, emotions and a deep
commitment to the world outside. poetry enlivens the inner spirit , provides and opportunity to share the inner sense of beauty, happiness and
worldliness.

I write poems in Marathi, Hindi and English. Thereby, I live in three cultures. then my joy is three fold. i don't let others and myself to build narrow domestic walls around me. A poem is like a mother which nourishes us during our constructive days and enable us to become a mother too.

Sony Dalia
tscmouli@hotmail.com
Thu, 9 Feb 2006

I am Sony Dalia, from India.Here are my views on poetry:
Poetry is a divine a way of communication. It surmounts barriers, defies linguistic explanations, demolishes destructive demonic dictatorships. Poetry is a pleasant way of greeting and interacting with people - known and unknown. There is poetry in a glance, a smile, a syllable and a blossom. The rainbow delights and radiates nuances of poetic expression. So does a poet, without anticipating any thing in return.
Rhyme , no doubt, makes a poem eminently readable. Rhythm lends grace to the movement of the narration. But, these are not of paramount significance. Attitude plays a vital role in composing and appreciating a poem. we can say that a poem is highly personal at one level and equally universal at another level. If more than one person relates a poem to his/her own experiences , the poet can be crowned with success.
Poetry is not dated. It remains eternally relevant , reverential and referential. Ability to relate and reflect enable the audience enjoy poetry exquisitely. Poetry has no set situations nor constraints to convey a poet's view point. Universe nay, muleteers its domain. Desire to communicate poet's) and a wish to exchange ideas reader's) render the art of composing a poem challenging, exciting, exhilarating. I am deliberately employing the term' composing' here. Fusion of divergent elements and creativity result in a melodious song/tune. In poetry too.!  Cheers !

Leo Mahoney
chance@frontiernet.net
Date :2 Oct 2005

Though Ms De Palma tells us that she's been writing poetry since she was either 11 or 15 years old, she doesn't tell us how long that's been. Poetic license?

On a more serious note, though, her remarks are, perhaps, a bit elliptical. Could that be because she says she hates definitions? In that case, it might have been more useful to those of us who think more abstractly if she had included a couple of sample poems -- or portions of them -- by way of examples of her characterizations. Concreteness, clear and fetching and novel imagery, aurally appealing language: aren't these the conditions of poetic craft?

Anyway, I think I recognize a successful poem when I am able to hear, conceptualize and feel its meaning (almost) simultaneously. Ms De Palma's descriptions of what poetry is may fall short of her own talent, in this accounting; but we cannot know unless we are given her poetry to enjoy.

Thank you for the chance to respond.

Manoj Thakur (India)
thakur196@yahoo.co.in
Date: Mon, 30 May 2005

What’s poetry? - What qualifies few simple, plain words to be a poem? Is it the common thread that binds them together? Or it’s the duality of the words to describe one thing and try to prove something else at the same time?
Is poetry a way to reach the place, to touch the emotion, to churn the thought, to describe the situation, to serve the social concern that is impossible otherwise? Or it’s the way of presenting the omnipresent things in a different manner?
Is it the medium of sharing the impression that an individual called poet have, in his ever enduring quest for unknown? Or it’s the art of imposing your own individual way of thinking on others, using subtle words?
Is it food for thought for the masses? Or it’s the wine to be relish only by its connoisseurs?
What poetry really is?
Manoj Thakur