Manifesto

SECRET, IMAGINATION OR ATTENTIVENESS

Real poetry is like a sail at the open sea. At the open sea means boundless, with no security measures, no prejudice, no superstitions, no conventions. At the open sea, means to reject the strategy of safe land, cast away the safe dose of common sense which would, sooner or later, make us imitate our very selves, reject the strategy of land which means the laboriously learned questions of roads pinned to the maps and city plans. Poetry is somehow like calling out to……Perhaps all poems are such calling, perhaps this is the task of poetry. Calling. But who? What for?

A Secret

Poets come with a secret and depart with it. A reader tries to find the poet` s secret, reconstruct it, give it a name, take it for his own. True poets are bound to have some secret or other. It is this secret that makes them go forward, develop, search, create. This secret makes an imprint on their work, is their mysterious road sign and the source of inspiration. Poetry exists as long as there is a secret. A secret is the invisible side of the poem. Is it the dark side? Sometimes it is. But it also happens that it encloses in itself an inner light, like in a painting in which, from behind the layer of paint, radiates the unknown, hypnotic glow. The light of some unidentified You. A secret in a poem operates on the level of sense. Sometimes in the way of thinking. Who knows if a change of language in poetry will not consist in a change of thinking. The change of language itself is something local and temporary in contrast to the change of the way of thinking and approach. Let us then protect this secret, stop trying to guess it, allow it to defend itself against us, so that it grows more and more mysterious.

Imagination

A call for return of imagination. This real, human and perhaps even superhuman. To this imagination which causes a human to be human no matter what the situation or the circumstances are. Imagination that carries us to other dimensions of earthly existence. Imagination that gives a man his freedom. The very act of creation is freedom. Creation in its full dimension. Not only the freedom to chose a word, but also the freedom of thinking, building imaging, transforming, creating. It takes only one step from imagination to traveling. Because traveling is a part of imagination; traveling down the interior of your very self and traveling down the interiors of reality. Imagination unites the unreal with the real, the attainable with the unattainable, the possible with the impossible. Unites, but also builds the dramaturgy of our life. Imagination does not differentiate between the significant and the less significant, the near and the far, as it happens in reality, but unites the most unimaginable pictures. In these unimaginable pictures a man finds his real ego. Imagination follows the unexplored before roads and paths. It has no limits and no end, and therefore is the experience of infinity. In this unusual world, beyond time and beyond space, each thing may become something else than it is. The division into subjects and objects is insufficient. Imagination escapes such divisions. The changing meanings and senses refer us to the glittering kaleidoscope like a gigantic stained glass window lit by the sun. Its effect is unexpected, multiple, immediate. I makes vision more open and precise.
A given thing is not this thing.
A given thing refers us to another name.
Imagination has something of virtual reality. The sum of the stimuli is directly proportional to imagination. There are no dark spaces in imagination. Imagination brings us closer to the language used by the angels. It imperceptibly draws back the curtain and lets in the delicate, unreal light of illumination.
Could we ever create anything without imagination?

Attentiveness

Attentiveness if the indispensable element of cognition and understanding. Every line, every word examines us on our attentiveness. A true poet is a master of attentiveness. Attentiveness refers not only to the moment when we are reading a poem, but to every instant which has contact with feeling or observation. We deal with poetry every day but very often we are unaware of it. Attentiveness opens us up for something further. Further or subsequent in time which we would not have experienced if a tiny detail had not been noticed Perhaps in a dream about a poem becoming an object, such as a pebble or a tree, sounds the echo of attentiveness. To create objects-events that live in harmony with the surroundings, with the seasons of the year, and constitute an important element in the landscape of our observations.
Is there anything more than just conventional observation that is left on closing a book of poetry?
Do we really manage to decode what the poet wants to share with us?
Do we manage to discover his creative intentions?
Do we share his poetic intuition?
Do we transmit on the same wavelength of sensitivity?

I HAVE MADE MY CHOICE
I am writing in the times of DNA manipulations and artificial intelligence.
I am writing on the eve of the trees that after genetic mutation will start to glow!
I am writing on the eve of a meeting with my own clone
I am writing on the eve of “last minute” trips to other planets
I am writing on the eve of thinking processes being taken over by microprocessors
I am writing, though

I do not know why, but over and over again recurs Plato` s idea that in his State there would be no place for poets. It seems that the modern civilization is the civilization that carries out Plato` s idea to the point. The civilization which uprooted a poet, that rejected a poet, which turned a poet into somebody completely useless. Who nowadays listens to a poet` s voice? Who learns from poems? Who stops to think over at least one metaphor? Holderlin seemed to anticipate it in his prophetic folly when he wrote: “ What need is there for poets in the time of distress?” What need is there for poems in the time of silicone and placebo? Perhaps people who started from the metaphoric language , after years of experiments on thinking and language, would come back again to this language of metaphor. After his meeting with Paul Valery, Eliot planted a tree to celebrate the fact that the world welcomed a new poet. Let there be more and more of such trees. Because if anything survives, it will be poetry.

Ewa Sonnenberg