In Persia poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung -- for one reason alone -- because it works. A right combination of image and tune plunges the audience into a [hal] (something between emotional/aesthetic mood and trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping and fits of dancing -- measurable physical responses to art.
2. Poetry is a form of language which is proper to imaginative and creative discourse; it allows man to reach beyond the confines of a merely quantitative order of things. By means of analogical and symbolic thinking, by mediating images and the play of correspondences and unusual associations, and by virtue of a language through which is transmitted the very rhythm of being, the poet clothes himself in a surreality to which the scientific mode of thought cannot aspire.
3. In the East poets are sometimes thrown in prison -- a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all. If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism and that re-connect poetry to the body. Such crimes are not crimes against bodies, but against ideas which are deadly and suffocating. Not stupid crimes of reaction but exemplary crimes, aesthetic crimes, crimes for love.