In honor of National Poetry Month, ten definitions of poetry by Carl Sandburg:

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break the silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
2. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.
3. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
4. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.
5. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief notted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
6. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
7. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.
8. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
9. Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
10. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

Posted Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:01:25 and filed under Poetry. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.