I have marked pleasure in everyone’s face in this World Poet Congress said, Hriday Narayan Dikshit, Speaker Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly. Inaugurating the spiritual poetry session of 39th WCP at Puri on 5th October’19 Shri Dikshit said, India is itself a poetry. Rigved is the ancient poetry of the world. The source of poetry is written in Rigved. Poetry is the Super Soul. Spiritual poetry is the connection between mortal and immortal, Brahma and Param Brahma. Where is poetry, there is God. In India there are so many ancient poets and poetries. Our spiritual poetry is the guiding force to our life, he added. There is no poetry like India in any other civilization or land. The river, mountain, forest everything in India is the source of poetry. These are the image of poetry. There is similarity between Odisha and Northern India. Odisha is so beautiful in all respect like Northern India. Every state of India, Language, Culture, Tradition all are poetry, he said.
In his talk titled ‘What does Poetry Make?’, Dr. Dilip Naik,Professor, English & Foreign Language University, Hyderabad delved upon this complex question with inferences from writings of some of the greatest poets of all times. He compared the views of famous poets over the ages – Osip Mandelshtam, Adorno, Auden and others – on this question. For Mandelshtam, poetry was the bread of the soul, not only for the poet himself but for the people as a whole. “What poetry makes is not a thing or a change in the objective world. But it is an event of consciousness, and in that which is not visible, that transgresses the limits of reason, that hopes against the tyranny of facts, it is this hope that keeps us significantly alive, keeps us human, for it has been said that we do not live by bread alone. Poetry is thus a hymn to the dawn of consciousness”, Dr. Naik stated.
So what poetry makes happen is not an historical event. It gifts the possibility of a different form of life, a metahistory of experience which emanates from the intersection of time with the timeless. Poetry enables us to trust in the grace of existence, he concluded. Among others Dr. Maurus Young, President, WCP; Prof. Ernesto Kahan, First Vice President, World Academy of Art & Culture; Dr. Maria Eugenia Soberanis, General Secretary, World Academy of Arts & Culture and Eminent Writer and Poet Dr. Prasanna Kumar Patasani were present on this occasion.