dakota el mañana

Pablo Neruda . Keeping Quiet

Some people speak of poetry as therapy, but I don’t have this experience. For me, the therapy is in finding the right words and getting them in the right order. There is not any therapy in personal revelation.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them.

“Poems tell more than they say. They convey, as if mutely, the condition of the mind that made them, and this is a large part of their meaning and their worth … [The poet’s] poems, as I heard them that evening, told that they were the work of a mind that had taught itself to be quiet for a long time. [These] lines were qualified unremittingly by a silence that they came from and were going toward, that they for a moment broke. One felt that the words had come down onto the page one at a time, like slow drops from a dripping eave, making their assured small sounds, the sounds accumulating. The poems seemed to have been made with a patience like that with which rivers freeze or lichens cover stones. Within the condition of long-accepted silence, each line had been acutely listened for, and the acutely listened to.”

“Dealing with time is not for sissies.”