I agree...

...with what Amazon reviewer Martin H. Dickinson says about poetry (in his evaluation of Adam Zagajewski's book Eternal Enemies: Poems):

Powerful, memorable poetry: 1) evokes our emotions; 2) possesses physicality appealing to one or more of our senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste; 3) stays grounded in the concrete, specific world even when bordering on the general and philosophic; 4) speaks directly to us in a distinctive, unique voice and 5) opens outward toward a timeless, universal horizon.

Boleslaw Lesmian said this:

But beyond the self there exists some tone in the soul: some elemental song without words, waiting for the necessary words to come in a creative hour...

1877 - 1937

Adam Zagajewski's "To Go to Lvov"

To Go to Lvov (at Poetry Foundation)

That poem is one the finest things I've ever read.

And here's an article about him in The Guardian: 

"Lvov story".

It's going to be...

...7° Fahrenheit here in my Arkansas region on Monday night. All the ghosts that hover chronically in my yard will be frozen in mid-float. If I go outside on Monday night and poke those ghosts with a stick, they'll fall to the ground in a loud tinkling of protoplasmic shards. 

Schopenhauer sometimes knocks...

...on my door at odd hours. I always let him in for a little visit. If I had cognac, I would pour him a glass. I try not to say very much. I just let him pace and muse. He soon grows weary of my blinking presence and then exits the premises, with a raised imperious eyebrow and a muttered farewell.

While he's here, I always fall into a trance of wonder.

I think he would frown on me if I told him about the impression his thought makes on me. As I understand it, he was a metaphysician, a technician of ultimate reality. But when I use the word "metaphysical," I mean something looser, more informal, something not exactly related to philosophical technique. And the word signifies for me a resonant quality of beyondness that is ambiguously edifying. Whereas for Schopenhauer, whatever is beyond (the noumenal) is undifferentiated urge, an intuition of which should stimulate spiritual despair. 

Maybe "mystical" would be a better word choice than "metaphysical" for me. I've always been hesitant to suggest to him that there might be a quality of magnetic, attractive strangeness about the veiled world his conceptions indicated. Perhaps I should muster the gumption to ask him about that on some future visitation.

Because isn't there something Schopenhauer-esque in the hypnotic macabre of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in the subtle Romantic ambience or "aura" of Walter Benjamin's essays, in the fatalistic hilarity of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, in the darkly transcendent sound of Mahler, the cathartic symphonic disquiet of Allan Pettersson? 

Whatever the freak it is that Schopenhauer uncovered for me as the possible interpenetration of the noumenal is a "thing" that nevertheless challenges all categories of conception and semantics.

His "will" or morphological force is farther than gods and language. A kind of spiritual empyrean. I sometimes think its texture is implicit in the vast melancholy of our dreams, the primal wild of our nightmares.

But maybe I've ensnared myself within a many-years-long misreading of the great philosopher. Maybe he was merely speaking toward and into a kind of hyper-quiddity as such. And not, as I make of it, a speaking toward and into depths beyond even despairing substance. Depths that I would, with a kind of semantic wantonness, signify with the word "metaphysical."

amazon.com

There are at least a trillion-trillion...

...things to write a poem about. It doesn't matter all that much what a poem maker chooses for his or her literal theme. What matters is that a subsidiary, ineffable theme should run in parallel to the verbalized one.

The presence of this invisible, congruent, and unexpressed theme is accomplished through style, which is made up of attitude and aesthetic sensibility. Almost all the poems being written are missing that spectral element of the unspoken. Almost all the poems being written are just people saying stuff in short lines, who then declare, "I have made a poem!" Not so fast, I reply.

A poem should have something in common with a great painting or a great piece of music -- an uncanny implicitness. Something metaphysical and unsayable should haunt the poem.

You know you have read an actual poem when you realize your soul has just been made strange, when a kind of mystical paranoia infuses the nerves of your reading eyes. Something unexpected, astounding, and ghostly has been opened by the poet. You're not just reading a weather report, so to speak, of someone's neurosis or wading through a solipsistic memoir composed in stanzas. No...when you've encountered an actual poem, the laws of an unknowable physics have tilted your orientation, have altered the dimensions of your consciousness.

What is there but not written is what makes a poem a poem. See the works of Tomas Tranströmer and Adam Zagajewski.

My computer is tuned in...

...to Czech Classic FM. (I had to download the Microsoft Silverlight thingie.)

I like to listen to classical music coming from way over there. And I like to listen to Czech people speaking Czech. I have no idea what they're saying, but I'm not overly concerned about my disability. Czech sounds cool, intelligent, and cultured. I especially like to hear those female program announcers talking -- such evocative aural presences!

And when I think about classical music and Czech culture, I'm reminded of Bohuslav Martinů.