7 Poets from 7 corners of the world

From top (left) to bottom right) :


Abby Sze (Hong Kong, HK)

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Mallika Menon (Trivandrum, India)

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Daniel J. Brick (Saint Paul, MN, USA)

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 Leah Ayliffe (Toronto, Canada)

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Fabrizio Frosini (Florence, Italy)

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Diane Hine (Perth, Australia)

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Galina Italyanskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russia)

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Introduction

by

Daniel J. Brick

Many years ago, in a poetry class for beginners, I read one of my early efforts which contained the following three lines:

         " A young poet drops his pen, astonished

          by the twenty lines he has just written,

          certain it is the Poem of Total Realization."

The teacher, who was supportive of our weekly efforts, smiled and said, "I remember thinking I had written that poem when I was sixteen." I can now agree wholeheartedly with her: the Poem of Total Realization is an adolescent fantasy. A mature poet recognizes it as a fool's errand, because, first, no single poem can encompass the variety of all human experience. Second, the writing of such a poem would end a poet's career, since all of his future poems would be mysteriously contained in that magnum opus. It would take all the oxygen into itself, and leave all the living poets breathless and gasping.

What we learn from writing poems over a long expanse of time is that each one takes further along the path of our daily life, leading eventually to whatever fulfills our existence. Each poem illuminates for its moment the darkness surrounding us, and in that light we can see the World in its glory or, sadly, in its degradation. Finally, we will carry within, not only the poem as a piece of literature but also the

emotional growth it promotes.

Our poems express our individual selves. It is not just self-expression, although that's the surface impression often conveyed. It's something far more deeply interfused, as Wordsworth memorably put it. We filter our experiences through our poetic selves to make poems which reveal both the Self and the World. When we look back at our poems, a day or a decade later, we are often surprised by the discoveries about life they carry within. Robert Frost put this very succinctly: a poem, he wrote, begins in delight and ends in wisdom. But that wisdom is never A Big Statement; it's not an abstract idea, or a philosophy. It's like a window opened to admit more light. It takes the form of an insight that points to emotional growth, and propels our lives toward ever richer states of being.

And so it fulfills the very nature of poetry that we 7 poets publish our poems in a common anthology and witness how these diverse poems reflect each other, relate to each other, amplify each other. Poetry is the most democratic of all the arts, because its essential material - language - is a given in every person's life.  This makes poetry accessible to every person as a reader and writer.

Walt Whitman celebrated this democratic core of poetry eloquently:

        "The messages of great poems to each man and woman are, Come to us on  equal terms, only then can you understand us. We are no better than you"

        what we enclose you enclose, what you enjoy we enjoy.


(Daniel J. Brick, Saint Paul, MN, USA)