January 2009 sees us having had some time to ponder about some of these things, and to become a bit more articulate about our motivations and our vision. One of the biggest and most important concepts of our project, as we’ve already mentioned, is enabling people to examine & question and grow (just like the best art should), to connect to each other through the written word aka accessing the texts in our library. What we hadn’t clarified to ourselves in as much detail, however, was why we were convinced that in our Library this must be through the form of poetry, and not just any poetry, but what we’d designated as our Library’s special collection: poetry we deemed “lost & forgotten”.

Several years, 3 haircuts by people we’d just met, and four bars of soap later, we’ve finally figured out what our sub conscious had already figured out for itself.

The conceptual origin of the poetic form is the speaking of a truth.

Why do you think that people, all over the world, turn to poetry when they are experiencing the peaks and troughs that life throws at them...a birth...a death...a marriage? It’s because poetry, uniquely, has the ability to transcend the borders and boundaries we surround ourselves with as humans (often, just in order to survive) and it plugs the gaps in our languages where we are not able to speak the happiness, sadness, grief, solace or goodwill for ourselves.

After all, we’re not all just as good at playing the piano or figuring out the square root of 66564 (258 since you’re asking), are we? So, for those of us who cannot fully, truly, speak our own grief, our own elation, this is the time when we turn to poetry, to figure out for ourselves just exactly what we are feeling, and to read and speak our exultation, our depression in words so perfectly true that, well, they could be music itself, no?

Yes, that’s what the greatest poetry has the power to conjure in people. Just like its artistic bedfellow – music, it enables us as humans to go on.

For we must go on.