Ron Winkler: If poetry existed
If poetry existed, there would be no novels.
If poetry existed, there would be festivals celebrating the titles of poems, festivals for reading poems by the use of deep-brain stimulators, congregations for (and against) sistine sestinas, festivals for dancing the grammar, sleeping the haiku.
If there was poetry, we wouldn’t really sleep.
We wouldn’t creep either.
If poetry existed, we would have iambic tea, shampoos for troubadours, power plants using packed words.
If there were to be something like poetry, we would live in three-point-five-dimensional rooms.
And everyone would have a room.
If poetry existed, Ulysses would still be on his trip. And each country would have several Inger Christensens and Derek Walcotts.
At borders we would have to show our favourite book of poetry instead of a passport.
If poetry existed, there would be a Vatican for Metrics.
Brokers dealing with interpretations.
There would grow not only passion fruits but passionate panic fruits as well. And we would drink the milk of mother poems — for that poetry would be a fluid.
If poetry existed, we would clear 12 million hectares of tropical rain forest a year to save that poetry.
If poetry existed, no one would walk on stones anymore.
If there was poetry, literary criticism would be poetical as well.
And our capital would be called Poetry.
Electricity would be poetricity.
If poetry existed, nobody would be a poet.
If poetry existed, we would visit non-fiction parks every now and then, and drop some words into the cages.
If poetry existed, we could play the Himalayas on Sahara pipes.
Every new sentence would be our only home.
If poetry existed, there would be no desire for poetry.
Read more by and about Ron Winkler on www.poetryinternational.org.
If poetry existed. brave hilarious poem, that subtly reflects on our state of lake of appreciation, and a criticism to the loss of poetry in our lives.
Thank you. Interestingly enough, I did not intend to write a poem. I see it as a form inbetween, though in fact it appears as poem/ sort of a poem/ something like poetry.
I had notes on this for some time past, and tried to make them a poem. But I failed. I obviously needed to go beyond (that) intension. Initially I wanted to add a comment to this post: “to be continued”. So the whole text is one shape of a maybe larger text (with a different shape). Possibly I’ll change some lines, for this poem or whatever should not become some kind of a manifesto. That’s why, at least I hope so, the quantum of pathos is reduced here. Instead there’s some absurdity. For this piece was not planned as artistic finger-wagging. Maybe shown in the final line.
Thanks again.