Miklós Erdély:

Poetry as a Self-assembling System*

We say that poetry is able to organize itself without outside interference.

It is possible to obstruct this self-organization – and people have always been doing just that –, but after a certain interval of time poetry molds these obstructing elements along the lines of its own nature and gradually incorporates them.

Its organization is not merely formal but simultaneously formal and conceptual – hence it is called poetic.

Since the organic world is likewise a self-assembling system, it is not surprising that the poetic quality residing in the very fact of life is also able to create itself and to continually renew itself.

Objects, texts, etc., just as molecules in the “primordial soup”, in the course of their free (random) movements seek out their own “geometric loci”, taken in the poetic sense.

Humans are left with the task of on the one hand, noticing the existing poetic features, and on the other hand, by adding and projecting their conceptual stock-pile, transforming into poetry the already extant formal-esthetic beauties (pebbles, landscape, etc.)

If your room is untidy enough, or if you are obliged to keep too many objects in it; if your interests are wide-ranging enough and especially if the room is the scene of at least your periodical activities, you must have noticed that certain loci give rise to poetic nodes; expressive concatenations organize themselves without your conscious participation.

(Finally you end up not daring to touch anything, lest you disrupt these “flowers” grown by your room.)

In the exhibition hall these “piles” will confess their poetic destinations more readily than when embedded in their original environment, and often they possess a more intense and at the same time more delicate content than constructions made expressly for the purpose of exhibition.

(1973)

* Text supplement to the invitation for Miklós Erdély Memorial Day. Passivity Exercise, Newkapolcs Gallery, 1994. English translation by John Batki / courtesy of EMA (Miklós Erdély Foundation)