Silence Spoken Here

SAMUEL JOHN HAZO is an author of books, including poetry, fiction, essays and plays, and the founder and director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is also McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University, where he taught for forty-three years. His Son Samuel Hazo is an accomplished American composer.

If architecture exists to create space, the author reminds us, poetry exists to create silence. Not mere quietude. Not solitude. Rather it is a silence within and by the experience of the poem itself. It inevitably exceeds the poem since, though the poem can create it, it cannot contain it. Within this silence the imagination and the feelings are renewed, and because of that renewal they live momentarily with a will and momentum of their own. In such a silence we are returned to ourselves, and we discover in ourselves the self that is common to us all. This silence is in essence our indispensable oxygen--the oxygen of our souls. If we try to communicate its presence to others, we do it best by not speaking at all, by letting the eyes convey it in that international language that is understood by all without translation. This silence is not the mere absence of words; it is rather what the words evoke, what their sound and heft and feel make palpable. It exists most completely between the lines of a poem or in the pauses between words.