Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
Interpretation
Honesty is fundamental in art, as it reflects the truth in poetry and human connections.
This quote by Paul Celan emphasizes the interconnection between truthfulness and artistic expression. He suggests that just as a handshake symbolizes genuine human interaction and trust, a poem crafted with sincerity conveys authentic emotion and experience. The implication is that both art and human relationships thrive on honest engagement, which leads to the creation of meaningful, impactful work.
In practice
In a poetry workshop, to encourage authenticity in writing.
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.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
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
no one bears witness for the witness
in the air, there your root remains, there, in the air
When I sang my American folk melodies in Budapest, Prague, Tiflis, Moscow, Oslo, or the Hebrides or on the Spanish front, the people understood and wept or rejoiced with the spirit of the songs. I found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mine, they understand each other in the common language of work, suffering, and protest.
I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.
Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.
If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.
Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.
I want my audience to be constantly captivated, bewitched, so that it leaves the theatre dazed, stunned to be back on the pavement.
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