A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.
Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.