Extraido de la columna de Jeanette Winterson en su página web, mes de Julio 2006:
I put up a poem this month that seems to me to be about the essential practicality of the poetic vision. You don’t need to be a poet to have a poetic vision. A poetic vision is prepared to be open, to let things in. The exactness of translation, vision into language, is the job of a poet, but the vision itself is probably the job of all of us.
We are grateful to poets because they put into words what we have felt/are feeling. I can’t say enough how important it is to go on feeling.
This month’s poem makes the poet and his poem a thing of practical application. I have never believed that poetry is disconnected from the real world, or is a pretty adjunct to it.
I believe that poetry is a user’s manual – a way of defining what things matter, and, as Coleridge put it, ‘keeping the heart alive to love and beauty.’
Poetry is there when we need it, and we need it regularly. Simply, it turns ordinary life into a meditation, and it reminds us that meditation – the ability to settle and focus and concentrate our energies, is a necessary part of ordinary life.
The whiz-faster, flick-through, hurry-past, phone-in-one-hand-sandwich-in-the-other-got-no-time-for-anything in life is not life, which is why poetry rebukes it. Poetry is slow enough for breathing and blood flow. It prevents cardiac arrest, calcification, and is even good for the common cold.
Take some with you on your summer holidays.
