“…where lives the virtue of poetry…”
Yesterday, Canada’s Chris Banks baldly posed the question to his Facebook friends “What is authentic poetry?”. I (mis)remembered, after my own initial contributions to winding or snarling the ensuing thread, I had written a poem that addressed at least “the virtue of all authentic thinking” (and I’m hardly the first to imagine or suggest that poetry can be a kind of thinking). I post that poem, below.
It was written at the same time as the poem that opens Ladonian Magnitudes, “topos tropos typos’ (a confession”, itself composed before even my first trade edition, Grand Gnostic Central. It’s title is a quotation from Charles Olson. Whether it is possessed of any qualities that might be construed as “authentic” I leave to the judgement of the reader. For my part, I cite again, as I did first in yesterday’s thread, Novalis, from his Fragments and Studies 1799-1800, #671: “Schwer schon ist zu entscheiden, doch einzig mögliche Entscheidung, ob etwas Poesie sei oder nicht”: It’s already difficult to decide, but it’s the only decision possible, whether something is poetry or not.
“Unreal, that is, to the real itself”
where lives the virtue of poetry
and all thinking free
of the tyranny of the real
in perceiving the real
flow, elementally
fluid, hence watery
form forms
breath
seen in Winter
as slippery
hard and cold
as ice to the head
cracked
as the sea, unfathomable
God as Melville says
pondering
from the masthead
a shriek above
the water
a shriek
above the water
the same
Poeta Doctus 
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