This working partnership of facts and imagination gives us reality, which I think is another word of poetry. I do not believe that poetry can ever be anything but truth. When poetry speaks in parables, or in metaphors or in similes, it is not to lead you away from what is real to what is unreal, but rather to lead you by the quickest path to the very core of reality. Poetry does not give us fanciful falsehood instead of truth: poetry is a shorthand for truth itself. When we depart from truth, we depart from poetry.

Poetry is the utterance of truth — deep, heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.

poetry is about truth, about revealing something of our human nature and about the world.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth! How do we use feeling? How do we use truth! However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole. If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.

THE WAY OF TRUTH

When you crave the answer to any divine question,
And are prepared to abandon yourself
To Truth and Time to know it,
You must first train yourself to distinguish
All that is untrue to get to Truth,
And to do so,
Learn to interpret every word and line
With the heart and mind of
A poet.

The language of Light
Can only be decoded by the heart,
And it has a very luminous
Mind and eye of its own.
However, if there is no truth in you,
You will not be able to see or recognize Truth,
So to you, nothing true will ever be
Known.

So learn to use your heart to recognize Truth
By dissecting it with the brightest light
As it was intended to be shone.
This is the only way,
The right way of Truth,
And the only way it
Will ever be
Shown.

Poetry, we might say, is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth.

Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible.

Poetic truth is different from scientific truth since it reveals the real in its qualitative uniqueness and not in its quantitative universality. Poetry is the language of the soul, while prose is the language of science. The former is the language of mystery, of devotion, of religion. Prose lays bare its whole meaning to the intelligence, while poetry plunges us in the mysterium tremendum of life and suggests the truths that cannot be stated.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Poetry makes us be in touch with ourselves, with our communities and with the world at large. It’s like a door we open to our inner self and to the outside and different realities; a bridge that connects us as species in a divided and constantly changing world. I try to express all that through my poetry and I am constantly looking to do it in a way I have not done it before. It is a permanent search for a better way of saying whatever I want and need to say. My poetry also evolves through reading the works of other poets, and through many other readings. It is like an endless personal revolution, an underground river, a relentless inner sea that must keep moving to avoid stagnation and repetition.

"The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think." June Jordan