1. What is poetry?
This is a long and very hotly debated subject. It seems that every person and every generation has an opinion about this. Poetry has a very long tradition reaching back to the time before writing was used to record human thoughts and activity. So in its earliest form, it was an oral activity. Even though poetry today is generally designed to be read from the page, oral presentation is still very important. The impact of a poem that is presented orally can be quite different than when it is simply read from the page.
So what is poetry? Which, by the way, is different than the question, what is good poetry?
To me, poetry is the use of language, written or oral, to communicate ideas and/or emotions in a generally shorter form than what is generally appreciated as prose. There are many ¡®traditional¡¯ forms for organizing the language of poetry but it is an evolving structure that each generation experiments with to find new ways to present its view of life or the nature of the universe.
Contrary to popular opinion, there is little new under the sun except our mechanical appreciation of how the universe works. Consequently, the themes of love, hate, anger, fear, wonder and the list goes on, have, for many generations, been explored using poetic forms. Since we seem to be working with the same themes, poets are always struggling to express these themes in new ways in the language of the day.
2. What does poetry mean to you?
Poetry, quite simply, is the means for self-expression. Hopefully, the thoughts or feelings embedded in any poem I write are shared by others and when they read my poem they can say aha!
3. Where do your inspirations come from?
My inspirations typically come from everyday observations but occasionally a single word is enough to get the engine running¡£
4. What kind of poems does a judge look for?
If it is a contest with a theme or particular style, the poem should first have some relationship to the theme and conform to the requested style. Following that, the judge evaluates the poetry on its craft. How well were various poetic mechanisms (rhyme, assonance, metaphor¡­ long list) employed to achieve the goal of the poem. Is the poem consistent. That is, are all tenses proper, is the rhyme scheme maintained throughout, is punctuation used properly, do line breaks support the meaning/intent, are similes/metaphors maintained properly throughout and the list goes on. Being a contest judge is a difficult task and the toughest part is to be objective and minimize your personal biases.
5. How do you write a good poem?
First - learn the craft. Building a house without knowing how to use the tools doesn¡¯t make much sense and usually doesn¡¯t make a quality house.
Second - read, read and then read some more. Read contemporary poets and poets of olde.
Third - write, write and write some more. Have a waste basket nearby.
Fourth - after you¡¯re tired of writing, go back and revise, revise and revise.
Fifth - show your work to other poets, listen to feedback. Sometimes this is tough but none of us is as good as we think we are.
Sixth ¨C follow your heart.
The Painted Word

If you look closely at a word,
you see the artist¡¯s pencil lines,
the layers of paint, the shadows
that make it whole.

If you look at two words together,
you feel the artist press
his soft brush onto the canvas,
his lips just moving to confirm
the colour of his mind.

If you see all the words at once,
you hear him breath
the shadows in, the colours out,
and beneath it all,
the whisper of his heart.

6. What poems do you like most?
I like poems that speak to me. This is of course different for each person but poems that cause something inside to resonate catch my attention. Generally I do not appreciate abstract poetry but rather poems that employ the natural world to illuminate some human condition.
7. Who is your favourite poet?
I can¡¯t say that I have a favourite poet. I like poems and those that stick with me come from many poets.

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1. What is poetry? What does it mean to you? Where do your inspirations come from?
Poetry is a literary art form written in verse, which employs the usage of metaphor. For me, poetry offers the opportunity to create something unique. Inspiration comes from everything that surrounds me ¨C family, friends, the media
2. I know your poems won a lot of awards, Could you tell me what kind of poems a judge look for?
I have only won a few awards and I am still waiting to win First Prize in something. A judge looks for originality, strong use of language and interesting metaphor.
3. how to write a good poem? What poems you like most? Who is your favorite poet?
To write well, one must read great poets. There are a lot of fine poetry books out there. I like all poems both rhyme and free verse. My favorite poet is Ted Plantos.

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Poetry is a lot of things to me. Here's a list.
It's the crying of my heart to the nearest and most supportive of confidants.
It's the same thing as courtship--strutting around and making myself attractive to people in the future.

Without
(c)2000
Without a poem my
heart is an empty time capsule,
abandoned at the base of a monument,
the entrance to a maze of severed routes
to the future , severed paths of time,
broken promise, hope all scooped out and
shell cracked, A poem is a fragile
trickle of passage from now
to then.

It's word play and image play, wakeful dreams--made the same way as sleep dreams.
It's lies and pretensions. It's sales.
2. how to write a good poem? What poems you like most? Who is your favorite poet?
I don't know how to write a good poem. I don't know if I ever have written a good poem. I just write ideas down when they come to me, trying to scribble as fast as they can before they are lost. I don't have a favorite poet. Although I do like ee cummings, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and others like that. I don't study English literature much I was into sciences as a student. I'm pretty ignorant.

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I think most of these questions are answered in the poetry section of my website, www.paulhartal.com. I'll try to answer especially 2.
How to write a good poem?
I don't believe that there is a truly reliable formula for writing good poems. Education, professional training, literary skills are of course important, but talent cannot be taught. Besides, aesthetic judgment is not universal. People have the right to disagree about the poetic quality of a poem.

What poems you like most?
I prefer short and inspirational works. I also like philosophical ideas expressed in poetic form.

Who is your favourite poet?
It would be unfair to single out one poet out of so many favourites. It is much easier to come up with a favourite quotation: "And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives the airy nothing a local habitation and a name"; Theses, A Midsummer Nights Dream, by William Shakespeare. Among my admired poets are Dante, Heine, Pushkin, William Blake, Matsuo Basho, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Leah Goldberg and Irving Layton. My favourite Chinese poets include Du Fu, Li Po and Wang Wei. Unfortunately (although I try to learn Mandarin), I cannot enjoy them in their original language. My mother tongue is Hungarian. Being exposed in my youth to the emotional excitement, to the rhythm, form and music of the language through the work of such poets as Sandor Petofi, Janos Arany, Endre Ady, Attila Jozsef and Miklos Radnoti, was a remarkable formative experience. I find that history and biographical background are necessary to the understanding of a poetic oeuvre and they enhance its meaning. Petofi's poetry, for example, can be really appreciated only in the light of the "spring of nations", the revolutions of 19th century history. Both Petofi and Radnoti had a mysterious premonition of their fate. They predicted and described their own violent death. Petofi vanished in 1849 on the battle field of Segesvar and Radnoti was murdered by Nazi guards near the village Abda in the end of the Second World death. In 1946 Radnoti's body was exhumed from a mass grave by his lover, soul mate and devoted wife. Love transcends death. In the pocket of the poet's trench coat she found a notebook of his last poems. Written for her, the poet literally was talking to his beloved wife from the grave.

Writing poetry is to embark on a journey
Looking for words to weave a life story of your own,
As well as a way of doing experiments with language
To make sense of the chaotic Tower of Babel.
As you walk into words
That have awaited you to enter into them,
You re-fashion yourself in a textual form,
Being reminded of the wonder
That is inside each of us.

The way to poetry is
To shut your eyes to reality
The poet does not act but dream.
The limitation of poetry is
Your imagination only.
Beings reveal themselves
Along the way to poetry.

1. What is poetry?

Poetry was conceived around the fire tells of our ancestors.  Poetry is rooted in our common bond of language, and involves us in the discovery of how good language can taste, sound, and mean.  Poetry is the way we learn to communicate emotion, the ineffable, and our longing for something beyond our own existence. Poetry is a path that slows us, deepens our knowing, offers us a way to be without doing, see without speaking, observe what is and create what isn't. Poetry may slow us down long enough to breathe, to listen, to appreciate, to conjur, to embrace the world in all its beauty and mystery. Poetry is the word music that aids us in retaining a childlike wonder, and connects us to traditions of wisdom. Poetry has the power to stir and move us, deepen our human concern, heal our narrowness, and heighten our awareness.

(Note to self: Poetry as play: a section, or better yet, separate essay for another time)

2. What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is the essence of being human.  We are language makers.  We are poietes - the makers. When we are creating, shaping, translating the world into brush strokes on the page, we touch the mysteries of the universe. The stories, the fables, the histories and novels are all very important, and enjoy them we do - but poetry is the heart and core of every other vehicle of literature. It can reduce a thousand years of writing and conversation and life into three finely tuned lines. It can hone all the garrulous speech of humans down to one bright line, one shining image. What does poetry mean to me?  It means we have a root connection between us. We are language makers, and with skill, we may capture the essence of human experience, the wonder of natural beauty, or the harsh reality of our 21st century world in the metaphors and images of a tightly woven poem. This art form intentionally slows time without the mediation of a camera and preserves a portion of the ephemeral beauty around us. And, as with all art, poetry filters the universal through a particular perspective, ever remaining a truly human process. 

3. Where does your inspiration come from?      

Music, nature, getting my hands dirty in the garden, children, life, the unexpected in-breaking of the absurd, the rush of hormones that enlivens desire, the painful experiences of loss, but most of all from

. . . other authors, such as Ha Jin, Daniel Dennett, Ed Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Lewis Hyde, Philip Roth, to name just a few.  Not only other poets, but novelists, mythologists, scientists, philosophers, writers of all sorts.  Music once functioned this way for me, but not so much anymore. The in-spirit-ing, the breathing in of the cosmos, often occurs in conversation with someone else, or in the early morning solitude when no one else is awake and the house is still and my ideas rumble along the tracks like a locomotive without brakes - at times even leaving the tracks. It can be as simple a stimulus as leaves rustling in the wind, swallows dancing on the thermals above insect burgeoning Spring creeks, or the remarkably quiet evenings on our porch out beyond the traffic.

Because ideas and "inspirations" flood cyclically (though with variable quality), and because I am nearly always reading - or as I like to call it "in conversation with articulate friends among the great thinkers and writers" - there is never a shortage.  In fact, as I wrote in one of my poems in the book Ash Scattering "I try to empathize with those who have 'writer's block' - but the truth is, I often garden to be too tired to write."  Once one is aware of the seasons and cycles, as gardeners are, then one will likely be much less stressed about the writing - and the waiting that often goes along with it.  Forcing your art is not always best. There's a time to express and a time to fill the well. Giving oneself time to allow the river to flow naturally is a way the writer can align with the sun and seasons, and enjoy harmony with the natural world. Be alive - live - love life - and you'll write, or as Ferlinghetti said, "Turn off that cell phone and be here now!"

Many say, "If you're a poet, you'll write good poems. If you're not you won't."  Well, I'm not so sure about that.  The other extreme model is that we should all go through the conveyor belt factory of the schools, advancing and learning from the great masters, and eventually we will have our M.F.A.s and "be poets".  What a wonderful thing for some to have this opportunity.  Not all of us will.  Some of us must be our own teachers, and find workshops and groups to nuture us along the way. Poets need mentors, and comrades, on the creative journey. 

I believe the answer to the above question can be as simple as the three-fold kernel of wisdom others have offered: 

1) READ READ READ - listen to those who've gone before, those who are writing now, poets and writers on the World Wide Web, but most of all in books (can't tell I'm a bookseller, can you?). The tangible sense of the object in hand, the sensual experience of the pages, and how the author originally intended them to be read, is crucial. Our poets&writers group meets at the bookshop on Thursday nights.  The above lines are essentially what I tell them. Some haven't yet nurtured an appetite for reading - but the hunger is growing because they want to write good poems, plays, novels or memoirs. 

2) Listen Listen Listen - the world is speaking to you, the people around you are offering you gifts, your own internalized voices are valuable resources for writing good poems. Listen to the poets who write about poetics, and gather those CDs and DVDs of other poets reading live. Many of these are now available on Web audio. Go to an open mic event, listen to the poets and performers. Soak it up like a sponge. Poetry is ultimately a cultural culinary experience: you gather ingredients and cook them in your pot.

3) Let others hear your voice.  Take a risk. Jump in the pool.  Submit a poem.  Go to a roundtable group and share poems.  Get up your courage eventually and step to the microphone. Bare your soul, stand naked in a crowd, let your words fly on the wind.  As Whitman said, "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

It depends on what day it is.  Seriously, on certain days, I like poems that grab me up by the collar and stand me on a high precipice above the world - something on the order of Dante and Virgil - and I see the big picture, the vast panoramas, the great issues of life.  On other days, I like a quiet poem, that calms and focuses very closely, on the delicate and subtle. Like these lines from Ha Jin's "To An Ancient Chinese Poet" from the book Between Silences:

. . .

The poems on scraps of paper were gone with the breeze.

You allowed them to fall into a river

which abounded with tadpoles and apple blossoms.

. . .

Then there are other days when I want to hear the voices of people, how they have lived, how they have suffered, or have been oppressed. I want my comfortable world to be shaken and stirred, I want my whining to be stilled in the face of the real, as these lines from Ha Jin's "Because I Will Be Silenced"

Once I have the freedom to say

my tongue will lose its power.

Since my poems strive to break the walls

that cut off people's voices,

they become drills and hammers.

But I will be silenced.

The starred tie around my neck

at any moment can tighten into a cobra.

How can I speak about coffee and flowers?

6. Who is your favorite poet?

You must understand how difficult a question this is for someone who has read poets and poetry for over forty years. There are so many good poets. There are so many yet for me to discover and enjoy.

I did return to Whitman this year and re-read the "Song of Myself" - the first time I had in its entirety since I was fifteen.  It amazed me once again, especially how I can see very clearly from this distance the impact of the first great modern poet, self-publishing his Leaves of Grass, fifty or sixty years before the "modern" poetry movement sprang up in the early decades of the 20th century.

There are some of the notable poets I keep coming back to again and again:  Nikki Giovanni, Jane Hirshfield, Margaret Atwood, Peter Meinke, Federico Garcia Lorca, John Ashberry, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Tony Hoagland, Stanley Kunitz, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, W. S. Merwin, David Kirby, Dante Alighieri, Emily Dickinson . . .

and the list goes on and on.  My favorite this week is Ha Jin.

What is poetry? What does it mean to you? Where do your inspirations come from

Literary tradition describes poetry as an artistic form that conveys meaning through the aesthetic and evocative qualities of language.  Poetry pleases, moves, and elevates by word choice and word form, the interaction of style, pattern, sound, image and idea. Great poetry expresses heightened thought, intensified emotion, concentrated observation and soaring imagination. The towering construct of the poetic diction rises  as a memorable experience wrapped and ornamented in such artistic devices as simile, metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia and melody.

I read somewhere that poetry is the frame of life. I think it is rather the other way around: Life is the frame of poetry. Let me go even further: Life is identical with poetry. In my vision it certainly extends beyond language.

The word poetry derives from the Greek poesis, which means making and creating. We live in a creative universe. Nature runs on metaphors. It is all full of symbols. From flowers and human anatomy rendered in Fibonacci sequences (made famous in Dan Brown's mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code) to the double helix of the DNA, that endows with a genetic code all living cells to replicate, nature reveals its mathematical organization and metaphors. 

The sun is a giant nuclear reactor that converts hydrogen into helium by means of a proton-proton fusion chain reaction, producing cleaner energy than the human fission nuclear plants on earth. The universe is an an undecipherable computer of an imaginably colossal cosmos. Through infinite cycles the stars burn throughout its vast space, explode, collapse and rise from their ashes like the legendary phoenix. The universe breathes. It is a living organism. 

And the world is a totally pristine verse. It manifests itself not only in the music of the rainbow, the infidelity of the pen or the shadow of onomatopoeia, but in the very identity of reality and poetry. An airplane is a flying poem, the triumph of human imagination and daring defying gravity. The wonder and magic of television involves the incomprehensible fact that we carry all the broadcasted programs within ourselves. They actually go and cross through our body. In the future we might be able to watch these electromagnetic waves as programs without an actual TV set.

 Another parallel marvel concerns the astonishing digitization of the human experience. The resulting cyberspace is an enormous ocean of uncanny consciousness interacting with the mysterious wisdom of the seemingly unconscious machine. The origins of the mathematical binary code allowing the computer to operate are attributed to the philosopher Leibniz. According to legend, in the invention of the binary system Leibniz was inspired by the Taoist I Ching: The idea that all things arise from the interaction of opposing qualities of Ying and Yang, light and dark, good and bad, female and male, the dichotomy of this or that. In navigating through the ocean of cyberspace we move between elementary bits and the infinitely complex world of a mysteriously alien form of intelligence.

 If you still wonder about the evidence for claiming that the universe is a poet let me say only this:  The belief that we are different and separate from our physical environment is an illusion. We are in every respect an integral part of nature. When humans write poetry it is cosmic consciousness in action: The universe writes its poems.

In our compartmentalized culture we separate sharply between disciplines. Accordingly, in the first glance, poetry has nothing to do, for example, with mathematics, physics, biology, or geography. Contemporary scholars stress and highlight the specificities of poetry. They segregate it from music, film, dance, architecture, painting, or even from the novel. Poetry of course is not the only genre which is kept separated from other disciplines. Among other reasons, this seems to be an enduring legacy of Aristotle's credo that one thing cannot be another. Now, Aristotle is one of my favorite philosophers, however, I have a book shelf that humbly contradicts him. For, apart from being the wonderful host of an array of interesting tomes, I also can use the book shelf as an aquarium board, or as a table, or as a chair, as well as other things.

 I maintain that all forms of human creativity are poetry. The arts and sciences are semiotic systems, symbolic constructs through which humanity investigates, explores and structures reality. In my view mathematics is a highly imaginative language of abstract metaphors whose protagonists are integers, fractions, fractals, triangles, circles, as well as other invented things. Mind you, numbers-- including zeroes-- usually don't grow on trees. Even the basic concepts of physics, such as space, time, matter and atom are abstract metaphors, imaginative interpretations of the world.

So I believe in the identity of life and poetry. Inspirations in my writing come from a variety of sources. I see the world as a mysterious place, full of magic and wonder. Life is a precious gift, in spite of all its hardships and tragedies. I find inspiration in the excitement and the sorrow of existence, the beauty and ugliness of the world, in grand events and in trivial things. Politics, history, art, science and philosophy can also serve as subject matter for my verse. Some aspects in my oeuvre are influenced by ironic traits and humorous moods. Yet the central focus of my work concerns the realm of relations and emotions, particularly the genre of love poetry. So for my part, the heart of poetry is the poetry of the heart.   

Poets' Voices: