Pietisten

Poetry Corner

by Arthur Mampel

Sometimes I think poetry is a phantom language that communes secretly and, with a clarity so far reaching, it informs the very heart of human expression; it is that place within, where the internal voice has its own soap box. Poetry is that mysterious inner language speaking directly to the soul.

Museums of great artistic works, concerts of music, and for that matter, all of the arts, can translate a living, breathing song that is able to calm the depth of being and the chaos that rages in our private world. It speaks to us in a way that common prose does not.

Paul Kalnack speaks of music as “a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls”

Too often poetry can stop a conversation in its tracks. There seems to be an awkward silence when poetry suddenly breaks into the conversation. It is like hearing a forbidden language that has no place in the public domain.

I think that poetry brings clarity to conversation, because poetry is alive! It is passionate! It communicates with force and with meaning. As Paul Kalnack said, “Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, ‘I am alive, and my life has meaning.’”