In 1988, in response to an invitation by the Italian poetry journal Poesia to define, in a few lines, "what thing poetry is," Jacques Derrida published a short piece entitled "Che cos'è la poesia?" in the journal's November issue. Few fragments from Derrida’s essay: ‘... I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dictated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast in mourning...’ ‘... apprendre par coeur... imparare a memoria. Isn’t that already it, the poem, once a token is given, the advent of an advent, at the moment in which the traversing of the road named translation remains as improbably as an accident, one which is all the same intensely dreamed of, required there where what it promises always leaves something to be desired? A grateful recognition goes out toward that very thing and precedes cognition here: your benediction before knowledge...’ ‘The poem can roll itself up in a ball, but it is still in order to turn its pointed signs toward the outside. To be sure, it can reflect language or speak poetry, but it never relates back to itself, it never moves by itself like those machines, bringers of death. Its event always interrupts or derails absolute knowledge, autotelic being in proximity to itself. This “demon of the heart” never gathers itself and gets off the track (delirium or mania), it exposes itself to chance, it would rather let itself be torn to pieces by what bears down upon it...’ ‘Thus the dream of learning by heart arises in you. Of letting your heart be traversed by the dictated dictation. In a single trait-and that's the impossible, that's the poematic experience. You did not yet know the heart, you learn it thus. From this experience and from this expression. I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean and which, in my language, I cannot easily discern from the word itself.’