Nature is not good or bad, not ugly or beautiful, not weak or strong. Nature is, and nature is sometimes hard to understand.
This is where poetry comes in. “What can be explained is not poetry”, wrote the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats in a note to his son.
However, poetry can explain the world. Usually it doesn’t use the tools of rationality, but empathy, intuitition, associativity, musicality and more.
Cassandra Arnold, a writer and painter, collected works from more than 80 international poets that “weave the miracles of nature into words”. Among them are Gerald Jatzek’s three poems based on the actor–network theory (ANT). Wikipedia’s defines the ANT as a “theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships.”
But fear not, my readers. They are nonetheless as poetic as it can get.
Cassandra Arnold (ed.): Alchemy and Miracles – Nature woven into words, Gilbert and Hall Press, Calgary, Canada 2023
Poems online
Two more of Gerald’s poems were published on the website of David O’Nan’s US-based magazine Fevers of the Mind.
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