THE STREET'S KISS

Poetry is news from the frontiers of consciousness

A poem is a mirror walking down a high street full of visual delight

Poetry is the shook foil of the imagination. It should shine out and half blind you

It is the sun streaming down in the meshes of morning

It is the white nights and mouths of desire

It is made by dissolving halos in oceans of sound

It is the street talk of angels and devils

It is a sofa full of blind singers who have put aside their canes

A poems should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song

A poem must sing and fly away with you or it's a dead duck with a prose soul

Poetry is the anarchy of the senses making sense

Poetry is all things born with wings that sing

Like a bowl of roses a poem should not have to be explained

Poetry is the voice of dissent against the waste of words and the mad plethora of print

It is what exists between the lines

It is made with the syllables of dreams

It is far far cries upon a beach a nightfall

It is a lighthouse moving its megaphone over the sea

It is a picture of Ma in her Woolworth bra looking out a window into a secret garden

It is an Arab carrying colored rugs and birdcages through the streets & a great metropolis

A poem can be made of common household ingredients. It fits on a single page yet it can fill a world and fits in the pocket of a heart

A poet is a street singer who rescues the alleycats of love

Poetry is pillow-thought after intercourse

It is the distillation of articulate animals calling to each other across a great gulf

It is a pulsing fragment of the inner life an untethered music

It is the dialogue of naked statues

It is the sound of summer in the rain and of people laughing behind closed shutters down an alley at night

It is a bare lightbulb in a homeless hotel illuminating a nakedness of minds and hearts

Let the poet be a singing animal turned pimp for an anarchist king

Poetry is the incomparable lyric intelligence brought to bear upon fifty-seven varieties of experience

Poetry is a high house echoing with all the voices that ever said anything crazy or wonderful

Poetry is a subversive raid upon the forgotten language of the collective unconscious

Poetry is a real canary in a coal mine and we know why the caged bird sings

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations

It is the voice of the Fourth Person Singular

It is the voice within the voice of the turtle

It is the face behind the face of the race

Poetry is made of night-thoughts if it can tear itself away from illusion it will not be disowned before the dawn

Poetry is made by evaporating the liquid laughter of youth

Poetry is a book of light at night dispersing clouds of unknowing

It hears the whisper of elephants and sees how many angels dance on the head of a pin

It is a humming a keening a laughing a sighing at dawn of a wild soft laughter

It is the final gestalt of the imagination

Poetry should be emotion recollected in emotion

Words are living fossils. The poet should piece the wild beast together and make it sing

A poet is only as great as his ear. Too bad if it is tin

Poetry is perpetual revolt against silence exile and cunning

The poet a subversive barbarian at the city gates constantly challenging our status quo

He is the master ontologist constantly questioning reality and reinventing it

He mixes drinks out of the insane liquors of the imagination and is perpetually surprised that no one staggers

He should be a dark barker before the tents of existence

Poetry is what can be heard at manholes echoing up Dante's fire escape

Poetry is religion. Religion is poetry

It is the humming of moths as they circle the flame

It is a wood boat moored in the shade under a weeping willow in the bend of a river

The poet must have wide-angle vision each look a world glance and the concrete is most poetic

Poetry is not all heroin horses and Rimbaud
it is also the powerless prayers of airline passengers
fastening their seatbelts
for the final descent

Poetry is the real subject of great prose

It speaks the unspeakable it utters the unutterable sigh of the heart

Each poem is a momentary madness and the unreal is realist

A poem should still be an insurgent knock on the door of the unknown

A poem is its own Coney Island of the mind its own circus of the soul its own Far Rockaway of the heart

Let a new lyricism save the world from itself








                                    Lawrence Ferlinghetti






















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