Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance - Carl Sandburg..........Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject - John Keats .........Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge - William Wordsworth ..........Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand - Plato .........No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language - Samuel Taylor Coleridge .........One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves - W. H. Auden ...........Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash - Leonard Cohen .........There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know - William Cowper .........Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood -T. S. Eliot ..........Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason - Novalis...........He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life - George Sand .........A poem is never finished, only abandoned - Paul Valery ........A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland - Kahlil Gibran.............Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance - John Keats..........To be a poet is a condition, not a profession - Robert Frost........A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself - E. M. Forster.........Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo - Don Marquis...........Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things - T. S. Eliot ..........You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in - Dylan Thomas .........Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words - Paul Engle......... There is not a joy the world can give like that it takes away! Lord Byron

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Gouda's Arabian Night of Poetry in Hong Kong

Nadwah - Hong Kong 8 October 2011

Egyptian poet Sayed Gouda featured a poetry reading on Friday 7 October 2011 at Book Attic, which was filled up with attendants of different nationalities. Gouda recited more than 20 of his new poems. The Arabic reading was accompanied by reading the translation in English, French, German, and Chinese with spiritual music of different origin

Joy Al-Sofi - USAWith The Light of Freedom in Our Eyes

Joy Al-Sofy - USA

Oh Egypt, Oh Egypt! / (I hope this means what I hope it means / An end to tyranny not just to Mubarak’s regime.) No matter what, / Today we zare together / Smiling and crying / All at the same time / We have heard the cry

 

I whom you see I'm not human....

Jumoke Verissimo - Nigeria

1. I whom you see I'm not human / Before you is the wrist of a town / The voice that cloned hearts to being / My hands acts as lever, bracing grief / I have welts that's wealth on my back / Here is the one who smiles at torture /

I have dressed my soul in steel / I eat out the infliction of afflictions

 

Thus spoke Tamara

Fahredin Shehu

I have polished the eyes of suffered child / Removing steamy layers of his vision / To see a sparkling teeth while I smile / And my soul’s dormant and well hidden planet of hate / I have washed the stratosphere of disasters  / Their parents layered meticulously in his being / With tears with love impregnated / I have peeled all membranes of polluted spirit

 

Capturing Innocence

By Asma Abdel Halim

The West train arrived at mid-morning in the capital city. My mother told us to put on clean clothes and get ready to leave

A PILGRIM’S POETRY, Sayed Gouda
by Jorge Palma
 What can a pilgrim do, especially if he is a poet? Well, he can briefly tell about his eternal day, give a profile of himself, speak about his journey along the paths of his fate. Already written?  Decreed in advance? Each of us would gladly

 

Borders Crossing Between Art and Life

IN 2006 Emily Jacir fired a .22-caliber gun successively at 1,000 white books ranged on shelves for the installation piece “Material for a Film,” which commemorates the 1972 assassination of the Palestinian intellectual

 

Lessons to Learn from Struga Poetry Evenings

Sayed Gouda - Egypt / Hong Kong

 In our countries, we always ask, ‘Is poetry still important? Is poetry dying?’ These questions arise from what we see of small turnout to poetry readings that some readings have no audience at all! The huge audience I saw in Struga made me believe that the

World Book Club

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

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