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Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.