A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that poetry serves as a means of communication, expressing deeper truths and emotions that may reach someone in the future.
Paul Celan's quote reflects on the nature of poetry as both a form of dialogue and a vessel for unexpressed thoughts and feelings. It compares poems to messages in a bottle, indicating that they are sent into the world with the hope they will connect with others, transcending time and space to find meaning in a receptive audience. The reference to an 'addressable Thou' highlights the desire for connection and understanding, suggesting that poetry seeks to engage with an open and responsive reality.
In practice
In a discussion on the power of poetry during a literary festival.
With a changing key, you unlock the house where the snow of what’s silenced drifts. Just like the blood that bursts from Your eye or mouth or ear, so your key changes. Changing your key changes the word That may drift with flakes. Just like the wind that rebuffs you, Clenched round your word is the snow.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
no one bears witness for the witness
in the air, there your root remains, there, in the air
The actual making of a record is the most exciting part of this business.
I always had a dream about trying to make a movie that had no dialogue in it, that was just music and pictures. I still haven't done it yet, but I tried to get close in the beginning.
I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.
Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
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