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Excerpt from Addie Williams journal dated Feb. 22, 1982. Readers need to remember that as her daughter typing this, it was typed from her long hand writting, (which at times is very hard to read), so if the punctuation is wrong, I am sure it was on my behalf, as I was not the english teacher.
Poetry is a disease which I never knew till now. It infects the welling spirit with the exponential
expression of all itself in concentration as it condenses in its own essence and plummets to the depth and density of its own black hole of self-devouring involution. It is to powerful to leave to run its own course, like a cold. It must at times be abruptly stopped in its trajectory with all the delicacy and fines of a sledge hammer en route to the center of an oak stump.
The composition of poetry releases the soul to too much liberty and too little discipline of the earth bound. It can almost totally release the spirit to abandon and certainly to spiritual license, which goes beyond the traditional benevolence of mere poetic license (that is, verbal and artistic license). The danger implicit here is that the spirit became vain, intoxicated with the easy freedom gained from verbal rapture, that it may soar all through the verbal abysses of the mind where genetics and learning and hope and fear are stored and strike a discordant, inexact formula upon the exuding juice of the mix, and call its truth - innocently, even redundantly - sometimes inaccurately.
Moreover, the poet cannot divorce his or hers poetic mysticism from their flesh and blood realism, wherein veins flow with chemical prediction and neurons vibrate to circumstance.
What can be said with poetry that cannot be said with prose? Soul, that's what. Soul directly
rather than "round the mulberry bush".
Poetry sings the essence of truth artfully and displays naked the anatomy of truth in a golden halo of sublimity or of abject ugliness fitted to the aesthetic quality of the raw truth that it lays bare.
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God Bless
Michelle~
Your mother's wisdom overwhelms me. This is the essence of poetry and prose when done with the soul and not just the mind.
Dan S.