Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that poetry provides a deep sense of belonging and return to one's true self.
Paul Celan's quote 'Poetry is a sort of homecoming' conveys the idea that poetry serves as a refuge or a return to familiar emotions and experiences. It reflects the notion that through the act of writing or reading poetry, individuals reconnect with their innermost thoughts and feelings, effectively coming back to a place of safety and understanding in a chaotic world.
In practice
In a workshop about creativity, one might say, 'As Paul Celan said, Poetry is a sort of homecoming, reminding us of where we truly belong.'
With a changing key, you unlock the house where the snow of whatβs 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.
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the βnot 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.
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
When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
Dresses that are truly beautiful are never unfashionable.
Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
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