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Are they just mantras or do they carry some explicable deeper meaning for you? I'm still unaware of what makes poetry so fascinating to people.

• hprotagonist 7y ago
  huh, the last sentence of my post got dropped; put it back now. No, they're not mantras. The easy answer is that rhythmicity of language is just fundamentally compelling to our minds at a very basic level, and poems are a way that we can bend and twist and revel in and celebrate with language that gets that. There's often a "oh, you clever ... " satisfaction as a reader when the poet picks _just_ the perfect word to rhyme off and you're left almost gasping with ... something indescribable ... at how _right_ it was. It's a thing of beauty. In translation, Hafiz: "... the Beloved / has just made such a fantastic move// that the saint is now continually/ tripping over Joy// and bursting out in laughter/ and saying "I Surrender!"" Watching someone, often someone long dead from a time and a place I can't even imagine, working within an often highly constrained form to produce something that still packs a punch -- something that can still reach out and wrench something loose inside your head, something that can communicate things that are probably ineffable -- when it happens to you, you'll know.