For a poet, everything is useful

Slovenian poet Ales Steger, Spanish poet Jaime Santirso, Chinese poets Zhang Dinghao and Mu Ye discussed the topic＂for a poet, everything is useful＂.

Ales Steger said that Greek Schiffs pushed the rock uphill in Greek mythology. When he almost made it to the peak, the rock rolled down again. He kept doing an unattainable task. Poets and writers do the same. They keep pushing their limits to the perfection. Despite the fact that they will never be implausible, they insist fighting against the impossible.

Just imagine the numerous phrases that pop into our minds every single day and how we also learn some new ones from others. We can safely say that we throw ourselves into the ocean of language and words. This is from a horizontal level. In a vertical level, there is some vocabulary that we might be familiar or not that familiar with. The distance from the real world forms a crack which keeps our heads level and even makes us tremble for it. Why is it? We do not know. But it is the truth. Some particular things do play an important role for some reasons we do not understand. This is from the characteristic of language itself.

Zhang Dinghao believed that everything in the world is equal in front of poetry. In terms of the occurrence of inspiration, it doesn’t matter when or where. Truth to be told, every minute of life worth recording. Besides, sentences, phrases and even punctuations are equal in front of poetry. They share the same amount of importance. Only when you treat them and use them like they are equal will a whole poetry be strong like a solid building with unbreakable strength.

Jaime Santirso said that language is needed to carry the poetry. If we want to show others the abstract thoughts that we might not even realize, we need to find this language. How we track down this language differs from poets to poets.

The variety of decisions on different languages shapes poets of different types. It is language that separate poets from each other. We can tell authors of the poems by the language used. That’s why languages are not something intangible but ways of expressing our thoughts and feelings. We say “we are sad” or “we are hungry” in our daily life. However, this kind of expression is not poems. So how to express ourselves with appropriate words and languages in a poetic way is no piece of cake. As a Chinese saying goes, “each bird sings not to sing, but it has a song to sing.”

One of the meaningful part of writing poems lies in how you can share your experience and thoughts with readers. If you have a good command of using poetic language, you may pass your ideas to others. Each poet has his own experience. Hence, reading poems is like looking into a mirror. By reading others and observing their stories we can read ourselves as well.

Mu Ye said that this topic reminded him that Oden once said that poetry won’t make anything happen. This encouraged him to think of that everything can be interpreted to poems. He used excerpt from one of his poems as response to the topic: practice minus practice, that’s how you get a poem.