This is a guest blog by contemporary writer Dániel Levente Pál, one of the most internationally recognized Hungarian poets and creative artists of his generation. For Dániel’s full bio, please see below.
There are three kinds of poetry, three kinds of poets, and three kinds of poems.
The first type is the butterfly: the poet who transforms from a caterpillar into a butterfly—whose work is filled with beauty, aesthetic harmony, and wonder at the world’s splendor. Reading this kind of poetry also makes us a little more beautiful. The reader, burdened by the worries of daily life, undergoes a small metamorphosis under the influence of a butterfly-like poem—emerging from their cocoon as something lighter, more delicate, more radiant.
The second type of poetry is the stone. When the poet writes, it is as if they pick up a stone and hurl it into a lake. Let’s call the lake, metaphorically or allegorically, Society—teeming with fish, with life. The stone makes an impact: it breaks the surface, creates ripples and reverberations above and below. The disturbance alters the waters, if only for a while, before they slowly return to stillness. The stone may sink, but its echo lingers.
Dániel Levente Pál
The third kind of poetry is the blade. This poetry addresses brutal, unforgiving truths—whether personal, political, or social. It speaks of injustice, cruelty, the machinery of oppression, of the humiliated and impoverished, of domestic violence, of human suffering in all its rawness. Here, the reader doesn’t feel caressed by the poem, but cut open by it—as if by a sharp, gleaming knife. This type of poem wounds. It slits open the reader’s conscience, peels away the cataract from the moral eye. These wounds may heal, yes; but they leave behind scars—scars that remain, that remember. The encounter with poems of this sort sharpens our vision, and even when the pain subsides, the memory of that incision stays with us, a reminder of what must never be forgotten.
In the history of world poetry, all three types of poetry—and poets—are present. And rather than fall into aesthetic or critical conflict, they approach one another with open hearts, open minds, and genuine curiosity. Be it butterfly, stone, or blade, I believe each type of poetry holds its own value, with a time and place uniquely its own.
Pál spent a decade as a performer and director at various independent theater and performing arts groups. He is currently the dramaturg/writer/librettist at the Capital Circus of Budapest and dramaturg for theatrical concerts of the Gödöllő Symphony Orchestra. https://paldaniel.wordpress.com
_____________________________________ Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
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