Djelloul Marbrook

The list of what I can imagine a world without is long. I can imagine a world without oil, without me, and even without gender. But poetry is indispensable. Without it we can’t plumb our own understanding of anything: what is locked within us would kill us.

I think we progress towards androgyny because of an irresistible impulse to be whole. Poetry is the catalyst of this impulse.

There’s too much talk of rights and separations, tribal and ideological campfires, and not enough of the rite of passage which poetry celebrates, the passage of the human race to a consciousness from which it can look back and see its long wallow in right and wrong, in taking offense, as its adolescence.

A man who leaves a line of poetry behind or an appreciation of poetry in someone else leaves more than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett can amass in a hundred lifetimes, because to poetry we attribute a world capable of appreciating such a notion.

I think our footfall in this life is cloddish because self-importance is made of lead. The job of alchemy is not to transmute this lead to gold but to distill the self from importance.

When I think of the world without me—an exercise I commend to anyone sick with an illusion of power—I think of poetry. It will be there, surviving this place where it still matters who wrote it.