A presentation by Paul Mariani, Poet, followed by the Poetry Contest Award Ceremony

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It is this immortal instinct for beauty that thrusts us to regard the world and all its splendors as a reverberation, a resonance of heaven. The unquenchable thirst for all that is beyond, and which unveils life, is the most vivid proof of our immortality. It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one’s eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

~C. Baudelaiare, Art Romantique, XI: “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III,” IV

More about the Poetry Contest…

Flyer to share (PDF):

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