Will Poetry Save the World?

 

Jean-Pierre Siméon, Goncourt de la Poésie in 2016, answers optimistically ´yes´. Poetry he says, using in his support quotes from poets like Aragon, is a different order of the verb, it recreates the reality and brings worlds together in the most unexpected ways. 

Poetry saves the world, he says, because it can change our way in which we are aware of the world. ´La poésie est ce qui n'exige pas d'être compris et qui exige la révolte de l'oreille´, he quotes Aragon. Not the mind, the brain, the sight...just the ear should rebel. A revolution of the earsight leading to a revolution of the hearts and minds.

Celan often repeated Adorno´s ´To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric´ (Cultural Criticism and Society, 1949), acknowledging its power but when words lost their essence, meaning is re-invented. Dictators - new and old - are delighted to hear poems about themselves or in their honor. There are the same words we use to express love or the clay-words poetry plays with to redefine the new layer of reality.

I am still finding my way through poetic worlds. As a reader keen to travel to another worlds of the mind yet reluctant to reclaim my space. I am also skeptical by nature and cynical sometimes, because no one can save the world if words lost their meaning. However, I still believe in the mesmerizing power of the Shir HaShirim and Celan and Apollinaire and Eluard and Forugh Farrokhzad and of all the many poets I haven´t read yet.