Poetry and reality by Oretta
The difference between poetry and reality? Between nature and its description in poetic form? There is none: poetry like nature is part of reality in the broadest sense of the term. The only discriminant, which
makes it possible to give meaning to poetic reading, is the poet herself. But the poet is a human being, and therefore a natural element, just as, in some way, the ink with which she writes is derived from nature, together with the sheets on which she sleeps behind the wooden frame of a window overlooking a garden.
What makes Oretta different from her readers? Probably a series of characteristics, which vary from person to person: physical and psychological, evironmental conditioning, a spiritual inclination, or moral stature.
So why does Oretta see what we do not? What is it that distinguishes what we observe from what she observes? Perhaps we live and see reality, while the poet, with her gift of detachment, sees truth. From a window, that of an insane asylum, Oretta perceives the unchanging eternal hiddden behind constant transformation. She sees the trees that remain the same in a garden exposed to the passing seasons. This continuous mutation her poetry binds in a single, inseparable reality: it matters little that there are days and nights, or the four seasons which the earth circling around the sun imposes upon us, the living creatures of this planet.
The eye of the poet is far reaching, it goes beyond this fragmentation, just as all the various species of living things that people the garden on which Oretta looks meld with each other in the unchanging words that represent them on paper. Even the cycle of the year is stayed. Autumn bears within itself the seed of the season that will follow and absorb it completely, but under the snow those plants that greened in the previous season will resist, will grow stronger in springtime, and then explode in all their vigor with the warm months that follow.
Exalting this movement, the poet innevitably weakens it to the point of erasing it altogether: accelerating the turning of the earth around the sun, she can capture its permanence, and therefore its eternity. Within these endecosyllables we find still words which placed side by side form a prelude to involontary movements that set the whirling pace of the writing, a cadence sensed behind the words, jumping from one to another. Thus it is that the elements of nature, so numerous in Oretta’s poetry, can exist only in relationship with one another; they diversify in meaning, explode, only to reunite in the empathy of their form. The adjectives, those that describe colors, rather than serving as a support to names, act as nouns, just as the plant life takes the role of animals. In this waltz which closes with each round there is equally a place for man, for “you” and “I”, and for our artifacts and inventions. Only the poet stands apart and in this way closer to the reader, while the flowers, insects, colors, airplane, automobile, and church bell, in their semantic and expressive diversity, are drawn together in a single Heraclitian river. In this great oneness beyond time is waged the war of time itself, of sun and snow, of violets and bees, of streaks of light and the enveloping dark. In the eyes of the poet, in virtue of the sacrifice of the leaves strewn upon the ground, some trees withstand the cold. They are regenerated in continuation, in the same way that the slender shoot manages to catch the solitary ray of sunlight, that love engulfs illness, and hope returns to triumph over grief.
makes it possible to give meaning to poetic reading, is the poet herself. But the poet is a human being, and therefore a natural element, just as, in some way, the ink with which she writes is derived from nature, together with the sheets on which she sleeps behind the wooden frame of a window overlooking a garden.
What makes Oretta different from her readers? Probably a series of characteristics, which vary from person to person: physical and psychological, evironmental conditioning, a spiritual inclination, or moral stature.
So why does Oretta see what we do not? What is it that distinguishes what we observe from what she observes? Perhaps we live and see reality, while the poet, with her gift of detachment, sees truth. From a window, that of an insane asylum, Oretta perceives the unchanging eternal hiddden behind constant transformation. She sees the trees that remain the same in a garden exposed to the passing seasons. This continuous mutation her poetry binds in a single, inseparable reality: it matters little that there are days and nights, or the four seasons which the earth circling around the sun imposes upon us, the living creatures of this planet.
The eye of the poet is far reaching, it goes beyond this fragmentation, just as all the various species of living things that people the garden on which Oretta looks meld with each other in the unchanging words that represent them on paper. Even the cycle of the year is stayed. Autumn bears within itself the seed of the season that will follow and absorb it completely, but under the snow those plants that greened in the previous season will resist, will grow stronger in springtime, and then explode in all their vigor with the warm months that follow.
Exalting this movement, the poet innevitably weakens it to the point of erasing it altogether: accelerating the turning of the earth around the sun, she can capture its permanence, and therefore its eternity. Within these endecosyllables we find still words which placed side by side form a prelude to involontary movements that set the whirling pace of the writing, a cadence sensed behind the words, jumping from one to another. Thus it is that the elements of nature, so numerous in Oretta’s poetry, can exist only in relationship with one another; they diversify in meaning, explode, only to reunite in the empathy of their form. The adjectives, those that describe colors, rather than serving as a support to names, act as nouns, just as the plant life takes the role of animals. In this waltz which closes with each round there is equally a place for man, for “you” and “I”, and for our artifacts and inventions. Only the poet stands apart and in this way closer to the reader, while the flowers, insects, colors, airplane, automobile, and church bell, in their semantic and expressive diversity, are drawn together in a single Heraclitian river. In this great oneness beyond time is waged the war of time itself, of sun and snow, of violets and bees, of streaks of light and the enveloping dark. In the eyes of the poet, in virtue of the sacrifice of the leaves strewn upon the ground, some trees withstand the cold. They are regenerated in continuation, in the same way that the slender shoot manages to catch the solitary ray of sunlight, that love engulfs illness, and hope returns to triumph over grief.