Emilio Villa

1914 – 2003 / Italy

Poetry Is

poetry is evanescence
poetry is life sentence, release
on words, liberté sur parole

poetry is a blind guide to an ancient
enigma, to an inaccessible
secret

poetry is an argument
dynamic and jarring

poetry is a rag tag cos-
mology we can
raise and wave,
it's a small (abregée) cos-
mogony: unaware,
seamless, unstitched,
breathless, in tatters

poetry is to forget
forgetfulness

poetry is to separate self from
self

poetry is what's completely
left out

poetry is emptying without
exhausting

poetry is constraint to the remote,
to the not yet, the not
now, the not here,
the not there, the
not before, neither not after,
nor not now

poetry is breeching

poetry is to burn and give birth
in the same vocal gesture

poetry is being-there multiplied
by not being-there, remembering
to trans-be-there traversely
like a watershed

poetry is a misunderstanding about
what I don't know exactly,
but a misunderstanding

poetry is infinite impotence,
limpid, lucid, hallucinated

poetry is intersection
interjection
intersession
interruption

poetry is a low blow

poetry is transit and exit

poetry is infusion and trans-fusion

poetry is memory of what is not
and what must not be; that is
the culminating, liminal Self
the Self as an incomplete cosmos
never to be completed

poetry is tying—untying

poetry is the ritual scene of
infinite uncertainty, of the
inaccessible Infermity
(Infirmitas)

poetry is a streak
a swerve
a splay
a spade

poetry is crib—cradle
it's nook—needlei
of the Trans-Organ
of the trans-organic
of the Indistinct
of the In(de)terminable

poetry is ash

poetry is diagonal
it's ramble
inside the manifest body
of Universal Inexistence
of Global Entropy

poetry is stiffened laziness
an arm hanging from the
branch of the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil; that is
a Monkey in Brazil
always hanging by an arm
from the branch of a tree (it's the Preguiçaii )

poetry is terrorism in the domain of speech,
a bang in the cloister of language

it's terror in the depths of rhetoric

poetry is liberation from knowing
escape from the known
a release from mechanics

and at the same time it's falling, sinking
into repetitive, obsessive, iterative
mechanics, which are also the
mechanics of hinting, of the
norm, of ritual (of strict
obligation, of rhyme, of number,
of essence)

poetry is the implosion of zero time
and in(de)finite degree

poetry is unleashing, un-phrasingiii, a potential
threat, breaking, robbing,
destruction

poetry is smashing, shattering, shaking
it's a clash between
strength and restraint
that tends to erase.
We are truly
infinitely mad

poetry is almost everything: that is everything, less
what it really is

poetry is impermanence crossed with
trans-manence
it's impertinence

poetry is counter and encounter (spontaneous
and predestined) between neurosis and unconscious,
between archetype and Self

a monotonous and perpetuated ring between
impulse and obsession
poetry is aggression

to write poetry is to cut slits, produce cracks,
point out filaments in the
curtain, in the Barred
Wall

poetry is a fight against the night
poetry is night against the night
poetry is a rub against the voice
poetry is friction against the Dragon's skin
poetry is this
it's this and that
and so be it
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