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Nothing is more inelegant and ineffective
than an art conceived in another art's form.
Andre Bresson, notes on cinematography
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Carlos Drummond De Andrade in Search for poetry [1] tries to manifest poetry in a privative way. He claims that for poetry, the attractions, anniversaries, personal incidents, perfection of the body, what one thinks or feel, the nature itself or a man in society, fatigue and hope or fading memories do not matter. One must avoid dramatizing or invoking, investigating and lying. It is the poem that recalls the poet, that is to say, there is a poem waiting to be written; a poem who lives lonely and dumb in the state of the dictionary. The poet must be patient and does not flatter the poem. By accepting the poem it will find its own form, a final and concentrated form in space. When a poet looks at the words of the poem, he will see each one with thousand secret faces under a neutral face asking one simple question: Have you brought the key?
Carlos Drummond resembles Mario Zambrano, the Spanish philosopher in “Poetry and Philosophy” where she claims:
“Every poet is a martyr to poetry; he delivers his life, his entire life, without withholding any being for himself, and continually and with greater lucidity assists in this delivery. [...]Power and will do not interest it, nor enter in its horizons. Conscience in it does not mean will to power. And this is the main difference. When poetry speaks of ethics it shall speak of martyrdom, "of sacrifice." Poetry suffers the martyrdom of knowledge, dies of lucidity, of awareness. It suffers, because poetry keeps being mediation and in it consciousness is not a sign of power, but instead an unavoidable necessity for a word to be heard. Clarity is needed so that what is only laid out in the fog becomes firm and precise; it acquires "number, weight and measure." For poetry will not capture that which already has "number, weight and measure." [...] but it will find the number, weight and measure that correspond to that which is still unformed.” [2]
These sort of statements could be find in many traditional poets like in Vladimir Holan, T. S Eliot, Valéry, Mallarmé, Nichita Stanescu and etc. If every poet is a martyr to poetry and the poem recalls him asking the key, so what is poetry? “Poetry cannot establish itself, cannot define itself. It cannot, in sum, pretend to find itself, for then it would be lost. ” says Zambrano.
In such a difficult situation that not the poetry nor the poet accept the responsibility of defining poetry how could we speak of the aspects of the experience of poetry in Digital media? As for Carlos Drummond we have no other way but choosing a negative approach; that is to say to speak of what is not poetry?
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