Diamond Cutters: Visionary Poets in America, Britain & Oceania

DIAMOND CUTTERS

Why is poetry important, even essential, for us now—And what part does it have to play in the wider culture of our time ?

Answering this question is what has given rise to this anthology at this time.

Poetry has always held both the stories and the consciousness of the tribe, reaching deep into what we know as the Oral Tradition—and as Julian Jaynes suggests in his extraordinary book The Origins of the Bicameral Mind about language and prophecy, for longer than prose. Poetry and music both speak to the same part of the brain, which actually (as recent neuroscientific research has indicated) is a different part of the brain that prose speaks to. It is the lyrical, of course, and also the imaginal. It is the imagination, which gives rises to vision, which is central and a stake here. As the saying goes-

‘Without a vision, the people perish’

May you find its secret song, its light and fire, in these pages. Fulcrum of diamond, balancing between each thing and thing, space each thing must evince, we cannot track you, but infer you, since you are the means by which all things are seen, pouring now, overbrimming, into this measuring this, this, on your weightlessness.