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 beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
Avant-garde is French for bullshit
Songwriting wasn't my gift. I think you have to cultivate a gift; you have to practice and develop craft around your gift so that you can execute it in more convenient, efficient ways.
I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.
You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.
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