John Berger:
Sometimes, I’d like to write a book
A book all about time
About how it doesn’t exist,
How the past and the future
Are one continuous present.
I think that all people— those living,
those who have lived
And those who are still to live—are alive now.
I should like to take that subject to pieces,
Like a soldier dismantling his rifle.wrote Yevgeny Vinokurov.
ONCE IN A POEM
Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace.
Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments:) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.
Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories…. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.