From Harpers Magazine, September 2004:
Poetry is like faith -- it isn't meant to be understood but to be received in a state of grace. No one should say "this is clear," because poetry is obscure. And no one should say "this is obscure," because poetry is clear. What we must do is search out poetry energetically and virtuously so that it will surrender to us. But we need to have forgotten poetry completely before it can fall naked into our arms. What poetry cannot bear is indifference. Indifference is the devil's armchair. Bu it is indifference we hear babbling in the streets, dressed grotesquely in self-satisfaction and culture.
. . .
Visible reality, the facts of the world and of the human body, are much more full of subtle nuances, and are much more poetic than what imagination discovers. One notices this often in the struggle between scientific reality and imaginative myth, in which -- thank God -- science wins. For science is a thousand times more lyrical than any theogony.
The human imagination invented giants in order to attribute to them the construction of great grottoes or enchanted cities. Later, reality taught us that those great caves are made by the drop of water. The pure, patient, eternal drop of water. In this case, as in many others, reality wins. After all, it is much more beautiful that a cave be a mysterious caprice of water -- chained and ordered by eternal laws -- than the whim of giants who have no other meaning than that of an explanation.
. . .
The mission of the poet is just that -- to give life (animar), in the exact sense of the word: to give soul . . . The light of any poet is contradiction . . . Poetry doesn't need skilled practitioners, she needs lovers, and she lays down brambles and shards of glass for the hands that search for her with love.
Frederico Garcia Lorca
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