Verse Versus Violence in Evaluating Poetic Power

Inspired by the theme: the Poet and the City, we heard seven, very different, and very poetic, reflections that centered on questions of why? Why is poetry important? Art? Culture? Human life? The discussions touched on poetry, wonder, evil and good, and the marvels of magic, and they mingled with the echoing inspiration of the Festival’s opening musical tour de force the evening before and the great poet Omar Khayyan. The Forum’s opening day thus put forward new questions and left us with themes and the fragments of answers, all in a ferment of enchantment and its mysteries.

And the central messages? That poetry, art, and culture are not only powerful allies and instruments to address the immense challenges that face the world: the environment, conflict, man’s violence and brutality. They are also the value of values, the reason for life and for living. God created the world and saw that it was good, and that it was beautiful. And poetry, and thus the poet, has a special power, drawing on the power of words and language, on the mysterious and the real. That power can serve to further evil, but also to support and magnify what is good.

Seven speakers reflected on these themes and their implications for the challenges and stresses of today’s world.

Bertrand Vergely, poet and theologian, introduced five topics that lingered through the day: folly, wisdom, wonder, the face, and politics. Plato’s infamous call to banish poets echoed the reality that poets reflect mankind’s finest and its worst elements. Since the poetic imagination knows no bounds, poets challenge both reason and responsibility. Culture can take us straight to barbarity, witness concerts at Auschwitz and raw films with evil on display like Apocalypse Now. Yet beauty has an absolute value; indeed, it is the central value, the genius of mankind’s very creation. Poetry offers a fine path to recovering meaning.

Poets and language have a special and deep power that lends them force and vision in the search for truth and meaning. Poetry allows us to ask life’s core questions and ask them deeply: why? Why am I here? How do I conquer despair? How do I relate to others? And it allows us to answer with the deep reality of this moment of being and to seek happiness there. In an ancient war, a tribe would kill the poet because that would kill the community’s spirit. But even more, poetry is about touching the heart. It is about freedom and liberty, for all the senses. The poet forces us to say yes to life: as James Joyce wrote: “Yes, I said yes, I will yes…”

The human gift of language and words distinguishes mankind from all other creatures. It is the most powerful force in culture and civilization. In nomadic cultures, as in ancient kingdoms, the power of the poet, using language and imagination, lay both in remembering and as mediators, with God as with others, and between past and present. Salamatou Sow reflected on how the lifesprings of the Peul – cow, women, and God – translated into the core values of courage and generosity.

This reminder of the realism of spirituality and its mediation through language echoed through the discussion, like the Swiss cowbells Faouzi Skali mistook for signs of remarkable Swiss piety. Poets, we were reminded often, preserve memory and explain the present.

Pluralism and diversity are central to today’s urgent, real, and daily challenge: living together. And, argued Saida Bennani, culture and poetry are both the challenge and the path to solutions. It is the plea and the mark of self but also the key to collective life and to coherence, whether in one’s home or in the society and nation.

The day and the speakers exhorted us to seek both inspiration and wisdom from poetry. In the face of death and despair, the very gift of life calls us to appreciate the moment. Xavier Guerrand-Hermes’ near death in an accident gave him both new appetite and joy in life and the will to pursue new directions.

So the final message is hope. Poetry may not offer the best guide to politics or policy, but the inspiration of beauty in art and poetry’s insights into the soul are guides. We may, like Prospero in the Shakespearean play, The Tempest, need in the end to break the wand of magic and confront reality, but the enchantment of the soul that art offers us can help us to imagine the paths that will lead us in new directions.

The Poet and the City: Bertrand Vergely, Leili Anvar, Frederic Ferney, Salamatou Sow, Saida Bennani, Younes Ajarrai, Xavier-Simon Guerrand-Hermes.