Good evening pub patrons old and new. Hedgewitch (Joy Ann Jones) here, wiping down the bar and filling up the espresso machine for another evening of open topic poetry sharing.

First of all I’d like to welcome our two newest team members, both of them regulars here where everybody knows your name, and you probably will know their names.

Mary, of In the Corner of My Eye blog , and Fred Rutherford, of Poetical Psyche, are joining our Saturday Poetics team, where each weekend we offer a themed prompt to lure out the muse. A warm and sudsy pub welcome to you both.

~*~

Next weekend brings Labor Day, the last holiday and official wrap-up of summer in the US,  and if you’ve lived in those parts of the country (or elsewhere) which have endured another spate of record heat and drought this year, I know like me you are not minding all too much. It’s not fall yet, but the promise of autumn seems to tease us from around the nearest corner, and offer us something better to anticipate.

The very real but difficult to express level of delight this caused me made me stop for a moment to think about the nature of amorphous concepts like anticipation, hope, despair and so forth, and how, like so much of poetry, they express something enormous that is neither physically measurable nor concrete, that only exists in the mind and spirit.

We have science for facts and process, philosophy, metaphysics and religion for the questions of existence, but for defining and expressing our own most elusive internal constructs of emotion, we only have art, poetry and music.

That’s the coded message behind the most analytic and dry poem as well as the most saccharine pop song, conveyed with varying degrees of skill and effectiveness: that we have only these tools to try to communicate a vast reservoir of fluid intangibles we all experience but have difficulty defining or expressing any other way.

So I thought I’d dig up a few quotes dealing with this elusive place for us to ponder as we read and share together in the inner language tonight:

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. ~Khalil Gibran

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. ~T.S. Eliot

And I’ll close with a poet who never fails to gobsmack me with the way he could express that ‘inexpressible’ Goethe referrences, simply, so anyone could access it:

 Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. ~Carl Sandburg

So without further ado, all, let’s open the door, dive into that reservoir, and see what we can find. If you’re new to the pub and the linking process, here’s the drill:

• Link in the poem you’d like to share–old or new, on any topic,  (1 per blog, please)– by clicking on the Mr.Linky button just below.
• This opens a new screen where you’ll enter your information, and where you also choose links to read. Once you have pasted your poem’s blog url and entered your name, simply click submit.
• Don’t forget to let your readers know where you’re linking up and encourage them to participate by including a link to dVerse in your blog post.
• Visit as many other poems as you like, commenting  as you see fit. Remember that this is how we connect with those who can support and encourage us, and for whom we provide the same vital benefits.
• Spread the word. Feel free to tweet and share on the social media of your choice.
• Finally, enjoy! Remember, we are here for each other. Thanks to all of you, and enjoy tonight’s Open Link poetry-thon.