फिर कविता के बारे में

पिछली पोस्‍ट पर कुछ बातें उठी हैं, उनके बारे में अपनी राय जल्‍द ही; इस बीच पोलिश कवि चेस्‍वाव मिवोश का एक टुकड़ा, जो कि उनकी किताब 'न्‍यू एंड कलेक्‍टेड पोएम्‍स: 1931-2001' (संस्‍करण : 2003) की प्रस्‍तावना से लिया गया है.

I strongly believe in the passivity of a poet, who receives every poem as a gift from his daimonion or, if you prefer, his Muse. He should be humble enough not to ascribe what is received to his own virtues. At the same time, however, his mind and his will should be alert. I lived amidst scenes of horror in the twentieth century-- that was a reality and i could not escape into a realm of  'pure poetry' as some descendants of French symbolism advised. Yet our hot-blooded reactions to inhumanity rarely result in texts artistically valid, even if such poems as my 'Campo dei Fiori', written in April 1943 in Warsaw when the ghetto was burning, continue to have some value.

I think that effort to capture as much as possible of tangible reality is the health of poetry. Having to choose between subjective art and objective art, I would vote for the latter, even if the meaning of that term is grasped not by theory but by personal struggle. I hope that my practice justifies my claim.

The history of twentieth century has prompted many poets to design images that conveyed their moral protest. Yet to remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter is one of the most difficult puzzles confronting a practitioner of poetry. It calls for a cunning in selecting one's means and a kind of distillation of material to achieve a distance to contemplate the things of this world as they are, without illusion. In other words, poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries.

(Photo by Judyta Papp, Krakow 2002)