Ars Poetica by invited poets
Meaning of Poetry by Invited Poets
to XX International Poetry Festival of Medellín
Ars poetica
By Amin Haddad
All the birds that lived with me
Nested in my poems
I saw it flying
And I saw it running slaughtered
Now, I ask myself
-Do we come to birds in their dreams?
It does not matter!
Let’s go back again to the story of poetry, the father of all myths
It is possible, that you and I write a poem while sitting together
Looking at the sky and earth as they touch
I will start and say;
-The sky leans on earth to fill-up with water, and then goes to her groom, the God of the Nile, to water it
And you say;
-The sky is thirsty and the earth is a water pot
And I say to you;
-The sky is a bed-sheet and the earth, a bed
And you tell me;
-The sky is a glass and the earth is a tray patterned with trees
And we keep on saying;
-The sky is a dream and the earth, a wish
-The sky is a meaning and the earth, truth
-The sky is light and the earth, a curse
And we say;
-Between you and what you lived in the past, a meeting is impossible except in dreams or the infinity of the far-away horizon
I mean, Poetry is recitation
But remember, poetry requires an audience
Of human beings with their names
And of martyrs with their blood
And of angels with their splendour
And of birds...that connect skies to earth
Because of that,
Poets are in the dreams of birds
And birds nest in their poems
What Poetry Means for Me
By Arif Khudairi
Spetial to Prometeo
Some people still view poetry as metrical writing consisting of meaning, sound, rhythm and rhyme and thus they merely focus on its form, although poetry is beyond meters, beyond rhythm, beyond rhyme. Poetry is a genuine feeling poured down in words marked with artistry and grace, a combination of painting and music made out of love for the Divine, the universe and mankind.
Poetry to me is neither an expression of the poet's personality as assumed by Wordsworth, nor an escape of it as perceived by Eliot. It is, as I see it, a process of exploring the true identity of man, a discovery of life, and a search to trace the spirit of humanity and the essence of the universe.
Poetry is power originated from uniquely combined elements, namely its sentiment, language, symbols and melody. Such power has a profound influence on people's hearts and minds. With this power, poetry inspires mankind to change themselves, their conditions and their entire world.
Poetry helps us to become less vain and more humble. It protects us from being deluded by science and technology, brings us closer to our hearts, makes us to discover the essential nature of life, and explore the message of man as an agent of God on this earth.
Poetry is a form of art, a creative production, not a wonder land that we escape to, or a luxury that we indulge in to amuse ourselves, but a tool to beautify our life and to confront the problems and difficulties that we face such as wars, violence, and disintegration. It helps us to reach God, and to reach out to others. In addition, it shows us the way to the world that we hope to live in, and leads us to beauty, goodness and truth.
We, human beings, do not live in bodies only, but we live in bodies and souls. We need poetry to nourish our souls, and cure ourselves from sorrows and pains always. Today, we need poetry in particular, and art in general, more than ever as our modern world suffers from serious social problems including poverty, materialism, selfishness, hostility and wars. That is why I believe that poetry has its place today, and it will definitely remain forever.
***
My Ars Poetica
By Niyi Osundare
Spetial to Prometeo
In the Beginning was not the Word
In the Word was the Beginning*
The universe was a toneless void before the Word was born. The Word gave birth to the Song. The Song gave birth to Poetry. Poetry endowed Life with sound and sense. Through it, the Muse of the winds gave birth to the music of Being. Poetry helps us appreciate the value of harmony; it aids our capacity for coping with chaos. It consolidates the ancient marriage of truth and beauty, form and content, thought and feeling. Coming from a Yoruba culture which stresses the mutual relationship between the beautiful and the useful, I am constantly aware of the potential power of poetry and its abiding responsibility for the creation of a better world. For me, poetry is atayerobioko (the one that reshapes the world the way a blacksmith reshapes a hoe). It is the dream from which reality ensues, the fountainhead of vision and action. It is, for me, the most eloquent antidote to silence, the life-affirming dialogue of humankind.. . . My philosophy and practice of poetry have been captured in the poem below, taken from my first collection of poems:
Poetry Is**
A lifespring
which gathers timbre
the more throats it plucks
harbinger of action
the more minds it stirs
Poetry is
the hawker’s ditty
the eloquence of the gong
the lyric of the marketplace
the luminous ray
on the grass’s morning dew
Poetry is
what the soft wind
musics to the dancing leaf
what the sole tells dusty path
what the bee hums to the alluring nectar
what rainfall croons to he lowering eaves
Poetry is
no oracle’s kernel
for a sole philosopher’s stone
Poetry
is
man
meaning
to
man
---------------
* From The Word Is an Egg, 2000.
**Excerpted from my poem ‘Poetry Is’, Songs of the Marketplace, 1983, 2006.
* * *
(An ars poetica) What Is Poetry to Me?
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Spetial to Prometeo
Poetry is essential in every society, an art form that has the potential of centering a people, no matter where those people are in our world. Poetry for me has been a healing tool as I have overcome the traumas and adversities of the civil war in my own country of Liberia. I have written endlessly about my people's suffering, using poetry as a medium of centering my own grief and the grief of our nation. I believe in the ability of the images that poetry evokes to stir up the world to attention about the plight of all peoples around the world. Our world is at war all the time, and countless millions of the world’s people are forced to flee their homelands, to bury their loved ones, to starve to death, and to die of all sorts of cruelty as a result of the conflicts around us. I believe that a poet is the eye of humanity, articulating the beauty of the goodness around us as well as the pains of the people so that those who cause wars can be stopped. I have used my own poetry not only to comfort myself; I have used my poetry to help people see that yes, there was a war in my country, and that that war destroyed and is still destroying innocent lives. I believe that a poet has the power that the gun does not have and cannot give. The words a poet leaves behind can change the world for good or for bad. I want my own poetry to be an instrument of good.
***
Poetry: A Personal Perspective
By Howard A. Fergus
Spetial to Prometeo
Montserrat, October 2009
While poetry is the product of the creative imagination, it reflects the realities of culture including the ideational environment and one’s personal world-view. It traffics in emotions but emotions are buttressed by the redmeat of living. I agree with English poet, John Keats that for poets, the miseries of this world are miseries and will not let them rest. Poetry is at once spiritual and material and it is the expressed fusion, appropriately crafted, that triumphs on the page and fuels richly-earned emotion.
My existence in an island which has been a colonial crucible for 365 years, a dependency in a post-independence age with its tensions, contradictions and ironies is part of the culture out of which I write.
We have a modern constitution
And Britannia rules the waves.
From an island that has experienced cruel natural disasters with a litany of losses, from this volcanic landscape, this fragmented world, I write of the new absences - physical and spiritual. Poetry preserves culture. That is what I do when I write of vanished customs which have informed sensibilities. I also attempt to recapture an earlier period of innocence when big men bathed in sulphetted rivers in the nude – the rivers which now brim with pyroclastic flows of death. The poetic muse cannot resist this rich vortex of life.
One does not however bring to the craft a selective consciousness. A dove knocking itself out on my window pane, goats conscious of their importance hogging the road and mangoes which decorate the earth one week and stink it the next in a cycle of life in death also trigger one’s pen. Anything that moves or moves me is a potential subject for poetry on and beneath the line. I write of ordinary people too, the unsung poets among us.
I enjoy the freedom of free verse while accepting the need for discipline and crafting in the integration of theme and rhythmical patterns. And yet ‘poisoned to vein’ with the English tongue (the reference is, of course, to Walcott), one does not resist the pull of the pentameter and formal verses, the occasional sonnet included.
***
Ars Poetica
By Ken McCullough
Spetial to Prometeo
I find my inspiration mostly in the natural world. Not that the human world isn’t part of this world, but it is not the sole focus. My philosophy has been strongly influenced by Kashmir Shaivism, American Indian practices and the words and life of St. Francis of Assisi and the Gospels, all of which emphasize the balance of the human and the non-human world. Merton, Liberation Theology and Dorothy Day have also been influences. Much of this revolves around us as family, as community, and showing respect for all living creatures. As places of inspiration, islands, the ocean, and high mountain ranges have remained central for me. I need solitary time, even misanthropic interludes, in which to ferment and foment ideas that come back to how we are doing here on Mother Earth. Silence is my ambition but now and then my voice will swing to the anger pole when so moved. I take my inspiration from singers such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, and devotional poets such as Mirabai and Kabir. Other important writers to me, in translation are (poets) Lorca, Machado, Neruda, Alberti and Jiminez and (prose writers) Donoso, Borges, Marquez and Carpentier. I’ve always loved the classical poets of China and Japan, and more recently the work of Kenji Miyazawa and the films of Kurosawa. Among the Scandinavians, Hamsun and Transtromer have had a strong impact on me as have the films of Bergmann. Early on, I learned a lot about leaps and transitions from films in general. In the English tradition I love Chaucer, Shakespeare and Blake, and the poets of World War I. Yeats, Hopkins and Dylan Thomas have always been favorites. Among American poets, Whitman and Dickinson, of course, Levertov, Snyder, Kinnell, Merwin and Ginsberg. Barry Lopez is my main man in terms of non-fiction. It is sometimes wrenching to aspire to a contemplative life while working a full-time job, raising a family, and staying involved in one’s community. But the work usually feeds one—one usually gets back more than one puts in. I have traveled a good deal in my lifetime, and the insights I’ve gained in so doing have allowed me to hear other voices and to see with other eyes. But I am now content to stay in one place and learn the lessons here at home and apply them to the larger community.
***
What Poetry means to me
Obediah Michael Smith
Spetial to Prometeo
For some reason poetry of all the arts is the weapon which I have selected to do battle with. This it turns out is the armor which suits and which fits me best - the size and the weight of it.
Though I had tried on and tried out the visual arts - I was quite involved and quite good in high school and succeeded in exams - I went on to University and pursued the Performing Arts. I have a degree in Speech and Drama, in Performance.
It is poetry though - writing it, reading aloud to an audience - which I have stuck to and which has stuck to me. There is something about the cost or lack of cost of the pens I use and a school child's notebook - something about the convenience of drawing these out, drawing upon these, anytime, anywhere and crafting swift, rough poems to polish and to perfect later which suits me.
There is also something about writing without my subject knowing who or what my pen is aimed at. With a camera it is entirely obvious. Poetry permits me to go about with those about me without a clue what is on my mind, apart from some being entirely aware when I am in the creative act, in the grips of the muses.
It turns out that poetry permits me to fashion what is mirror as well as container for the faces I wish to frame and keep, as well as what is like a cup or chalice to contain thoughts and emotions which these faces or persons evoke.
The poetic record is the record for me. It permits me to see and to show life more and more sharply. More and more am I able to capture swiftly what I wish to snatch from life and hide in poetry. What I hide in poetry though I hide to make clearer and to show now and to show later.
It is with poetry that I do battle. With poetry, or dressed in it, I am able to go about bravely and go about bare. It allows me also to live without fearing I am losing out or missing out. It allows me to live deeply and to record the minutes as they slip away or attempt to. My poems are full of the minutes I have lived, the most precious of them.
Poetry helps to thicken as well as to deepen life. It is my way of translating or transforming what would otherwise be watery life, into wine.
no longer do I write down water/
I write down wine
is one of my haiku-like poems.
Every dripping minute though has thickened and is no longer water but is instead wine or vodka, this in spite of the fact that I avoid alcoholic beverages, except wine at Holy Communion, the poetic life able to intoxicate as well.
***
Poetry – A Wild Horse
By Ak Welsapar
Spetial to Prometeo
Poetry is a wild horse which every poet tames in his own way, rides in his own way. The length of time he may remain in the saddle depends on his intelligence, his positive approach to this art and his skills.
In my own country, poetry for me was flowers, graceful girls, mountains and countryside. After I left my country, poetry became my country for me.
Passing through centuries, poetry always chooses the shortest way- it builds roads from heart to heart. The human beings conceives prose by reason and poetry by heart, because poetry, after all, is a creation of the heart. In this respect reason has to follow the heart and feelings.
Poetry is the most delicate and at the same time the most profound form of literature and people use other forms of poetry to sing songs.
It is believed that a large number of readers do not understand, like or read poetry. Nonsense! At my age I have never seen anyone who does not like songs or has not sung in his life. It seems to me that it is those who favour prose who spread such statistics.
There are no boundaries to real poetry. It preserves the most realistic and refined feelings in its sounds, rhythms, metaphors and its play with the most beautiful words, and over centuries, passes them from one generation to another and from one country to other places. Poetry constitutes a golden bridge between generations and centuries. If there were not such a bridge, the distance between countries, nations, languages and individuals would be much greater.
Poetry for us is like the sun which provides us with infinite light and heat, and poets, using their wings, supply human beings with fire from the sun. They are like butterflies; some of them achieve their aim and others burn their delicate wings in the fire. However, poets devote their life on earth to intensifying light. Is this not a sacred mission?
***
This is my poem about writing a poem
By Imtiaz Darkher
Spetial to Prometeo
THIS ROOM
This room is breaking out
of itself, cracking through
its own walls
in search of space, light,
empty air.
The bed is lifting out of
its nightmares.
From dark corners, chairs
are rising up to crash through clouds.
This is the time and place
to be alive:
when the daily furniture of our lives
stirs, when the improbable arrives.
Pots and pans bang together
in celebration, clang
past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices,
fly by the ceiling fan.
No-one is looking for the door.
In all this excitement
I'm wondering where
I've left my feet, and why
my hands are outside, clapping.
***
As a Poet of 21st Century
By Hadaa Sendoo
Spetial to Prometeo
As a poet of 21st century, he shouldn’t only be a nightingale with a sweet singing voice, and shouldn’t look for food only for himself but should share the food he has issued to poetry is different from the orders the last century issued to poetry yet poetry must continue to advance along the lines of the footmarks the great explorers in the last century have left.
Perhaps poetry will feel lonelier in the future on her way forward, but she will be poetry which is much richer in the spirit of humanitarianism. She will overstep time and space, culture and region, and the distance between nations and races, to have a talk or dialogue with mankind all over the world on much more and broader themes.
Poetry will always warm our wounded souls and surge the waves of thoughts in our mind. She will always treat us mankind as her own brothers and sisters. Poets will the gifted creative power always defend the personality and human nature with images in their poetry works. Starting from their reflections to the world and the harmony of the universe, poets always concern their own fates and the common fate of mankind all over the world.
True modern poetry shouldn’t erect a railing between readers and her, but should seek equality and a bridge in the relations between individual and group. Poets should have the whole world in view and shoulder heavy loads in both fishing against the war and safeguarding the peace of the world. Quoting, Seamus Heaney’s words to explain that is: What poetry does now and what she will do in the future will always add luster to poetry herself.
***
Ars Poetica
Lola Koundakjian
Spetial to Prometeo
November 3, 2009
Poetry is the fuzz on the perfectly shaped summer peach
It is the songs of the morning dove
The days when I miss the eastern beams of the sunrise
The pleasure of delayed flights
The feeling of being away from home while being there
Warm coffee and cookies
The changing of the seasons
The morning kiss
The laughter at the other end of the telephone
A reason to live
A way to breath
A sense of myself and the world around me.
***
Poetry Is Painting with Words
By Althea Romeo-Mark
Spetial to Prometeo
When I was a teenager, I sketched in black and white and painted in water colors. My painting class was one of my favorite extra-curricular school activities. The culmination of that period, age fifteen or so, was winning a prize, during our pre-carnival season, for a water color painting of a Moko Jumbi. The Moko Jumbi is our traditional dancer on stilts that has its origin in the West African “country devil.”
Upon entering university, I acknowledged the calling to write which had lain dormant in me. My seventh grade school teacher had praised an essay I had written about my dog and had encouraged me to enter the essay in a writing competition. But I was painfully shy and resisted all entreaties. However, at the University of the Virgin Islands, an English Professor discovered my gift for writing and nurtured it. This time I did not resist because I learned that poetry is simply painting with words.
I paint pictures with words, see my poems as paintings. Each word, like the stroke of a brush on canvas, shapes a picture that speaks to the eyes. The visual imagery is predominant, but coming from the Caribbean, where speaking is musical, where speaking is rhythm and sound, words also tease the ears. So my poems are filled with, not only words I have painted on paper, but also the sound of the Islands’ voices, the sounds of our daily lives, the sound of sea and wind; that in turn, awaken hopefully all our senses.
I have lived in the USA, Liberia, (West Africa), England and now live in Switzerland. I paint my impressions and interpretation of the lives of ordinary people and the cultures in which they live. The two paintings/poems below represent two diverse places and cultures. Each new experience makes me a better interpreter of impressions and a better painter of words.
***
Ars Poetica
By Quito Nicolaas
Spetial to Prometeo
Poetry means to me a theatrical play with words, where by combining, playing a new message arises. Like I express in one of my poems: Words can take all sort of forms, they can bend – even assume geometrical forms. But words also have meanings, feelings and a structure. It’s a game of leading and distraction of the reader to a new beginning. In my poems the use of a certain language is very important. I use different languages, such as Papiamento, English and Dutch. Each of these three languages have their own emotions, feelings, sound and voice, which I express in my poems.
With the choice of words one can construct a building and design the interior of a poem. In that case a poem is to be compared to a house with a solid foundation, walls, windows and its doors. You can take the reader on a tour and let her feel at home by answering her questions and leaving enough space for her own interpretations. But on the other hand as a poet I’m very tight with words. Most of the time I write verses of six to eight syllable.
My poems should reflect the necessary images and associations. These associations may be memories and experiences. The title of a poem already give a first indication, where the poet wants to seduce the reader to. It can also be a vision, a statement, a global idea you want to proclaim to the public. It does not really have to be a state of mind, maybe in the past but nowadays not anymore. A poem might well deal with a period in our history or if you like your personal history. In that case I don’t refer to the great events in our history. But complex situations can also be dealt with in a simple manner by using metaphors. It is always to the public or reader to determine whether they can identify themselves with the poem.
It may eventually include so much that the reader even know where it ends. Or it does not contain anything relevant, but still it has a certain depth according the nature and culture of the poet. These are once again the words, that creates certain images and emotions, which translates a part of our daily life. It’s a like a song with a particular message which one like to listen to, but forgets that the melody is equally important. As a poet you also make some improvements in your writing, in the use of symbols and other kind of techniques. Form the recognizable to the intangible environment in which your poem is taken place. But then we must make a distinction between poetry to be recited and those which is meant only to be read and analyze. You don’t want your public to be bored with your poems, that contains much more if it is read. Poetry is still alive and is just like a photograph, that establishes a part of history.
* * *
The Poem is to Live
Gemino H. Abad
Spetial to Prometeo
March, 2010
The poem isn’t written in any language but is rather wrought from it. One’s sense for language is the basic poetic sense, whatever language one has mastered. And the poem’s inmost seal is the poet’s country. For one’s country is what one’s imagination owes its allegiance to.
Where the mind dissolves our experience of the world into ideas, the poem seeks the light of the living experience itself, and once wrought, is already a marvel of interpretation. After the poem interpretation is redundant.
Writing the poem is being present. The present is a gift, and it is opened only by living and by imagination. For what is most real is what is most imagined. In the living, which is our only point of contact with any reality, one feels and sees and knows, and that insight is what exacts the poem.
That insight is a luminance of thought that no idea expresses, a radiance of feeling that no thought catches. Precisely, the poem’s making is quest for meaning – not a fixed meaning, as in any lexicon, but the singular meaningfulness of a lifetime or a moment that has been lived.
That meaningfulness is the poem’s subject, and is the very form that the poem’s language takes. It was when the language was found that the subject was discovered. Until the subject was found, it lay buried in the poet’s experience.
The poem’s meaningfulness is its moral dimension and what raises it to a universal plane. That plane isn’t the realm of eternal verities but only the site of everlasting questioning.
But that meaningfulness, that insight, requires a language inventive and fresh. Words have their meanings not so much from their differential play as from lives lived. In poetry, meanings are values of the imagination; they impart the very sensation and rhythm of living. This is why the poem is to live.
***
What does Poetry Mean to Me?
By Vladimir Marku
Spetial to Prometeo
Some people say it is a sculpture and the poet a sculptor, chiseling his block of marble to perfection. Some other people say it’s a jigsawpuzzle you have to match on your own. It is likened to a rosy baby freshly born, it is an adventure, it is a blessing fruit from God’s garden. In Roman times and again during the Renaissance, poems were characterized as speaking pictures, and painting as silent poetry. (Robert DiYanni – Literature 1986). One thing is crystal clear: It’s not just words.
A poem is everything people claim it is and everything else people have yet to say. Inside we are pure nature, pure beauty, pure harmony which we intellectually try so hard to corrupt on our outside world…, but there’s this, tuning in, when your conscious mind and subconscious mind have opened doors to each other. Conscious mind writes using its hand as urged and instructed by the subconscious mind … There’s a poem with the sweetest tune you can get from the finest strings of our soul which can only be played by fingers blessed by God. It’s, let me put it like this, striptease of the soul …if you refine the soul, you have a poem…you distil your feelings.
Then choosing the right words, metaphors, expressions, rhythm etc is nothing but matching vibrations coming from the subconscious mind with the right substance. It’s hot … I leave it aside to cool, both of us, and after that we taste it by reading and then we can repair it.
There is no honest, constructive criticism. I don’t believe in it very much. It’s conformism… unless it comes from a non-poet. You cannot expect sincere criticism from a fellow poet, it’s difficult. Only people with the right frequency of soul vibrations would like certain poetry…
Extreme metaphorisation with the excuse of writing for the elite who either don’t read poetry or are busy with their own pragmatism is the syndrome of today. Excessive metaphorisation makes a poem absurd.
When I am tuned in, turned on, heightened or enlightened to let a poem out, my fingers tremble. I know I am writing the melody played inside me by divine entities using physical means. It’s important to stop wherever you are and write the first impulse that comes from your subconscious mind, or keep a dictaphone with you. Then, you can use this embryo to grow a poem never written before. A poem is a being you divinely get pregnant with and you want to labour in seclusion of self. Yes, be alone ... When labouring a poem you feel you want to be jealously in private.
Here I want to cite Paulo Coelho who, in the foreword of the poetry book “Poems from the desert” by Mohammed Bin Rashid al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of UAE and ruler of Dubai, writes: “Writing is an act of courage. But it’s worth taking risk…”
Are we the poem or is the poem us? Sounds like a riddle!
***
Ars poetica
By Erling Kittelsen
Spetial to Prometeo
Poetry is for me a way of receiving the world and my last poetry collection has the title “The Receiver”. Opposing performance and production, poetry has something to do with the unifying aspect or something which can unite different levels and layers in man and society. Maybe it has to do with a kind of popular view, the view of people, which disappears with too strong ideological or economical directions.
In an autobiography which I call the Novel of life, titled: Standing Recollections I mix biographical material with interpretations of myth. It is written from today (2007) and backwards in life, and still has a sense of continuous story even though the causation is dissolved.
***
About poetry
By Vasyl Makhno
Spetial to Prometeo
May 1, 2005
The liminal linguistic and cultural situation in which I find myself makes this kind of antagonism or internal ‘struggle’ simply inevitable. That’s why this higher obligation begins with scribbling words. A poet is not obligated to anyone. He or she has an obligation, to put it in terms of the ‘elevated’ style, only to his/her language, because language, according to Heidegger, is the dwelling of Being. So the poet’s obligation to Being is to be aware of it or to verbalize it, providing his/her angle of understanding during a momentary possession of it.
At first I thought that the need for writing was the need for, as you put it, “drinking/breathing/smoking”. But today it seems to be more of a record or an arrangement of sensations and visions caused by various intellectual ‘irritants’.
Thus today I cannot say that writing poems is an unusual human endeavor. To a certain extent, I share the probably not very popular idea that poetry is a kind of craft, like anything else. In the West, the conviction inherent in the Slavic world – that poetry comes from God – is inexistent or almost inexistent.
It is true that I have authored a considerable number of poems about poetry and poets; there these ideas function in various combinations and patterns because art is probably the only occupation on Earth that, conventionally speaking, does not make sense. That’s why for me these inevitable questions crossed over to the category of experiencing loneliness and the worthlessness of everything, to comprehending the sense of being damaged, of the sheer otherness of those who partake in this occupation.
***
What poetry means to me. This is not the answer
(failure / attempt)
By Jenny Tunedal
Spetial to Prometeo
”I read, therefore I write”. The truth is simple, even if it doesn´t necessarily make sense. For me, the writing of poetry is very much an extension, or variation, of the ongoing process of reading. The reading of: poetry, newspapers, prose, drama; realities in and outside of literature. Reading: first and last and always.
Literature – and especially poetry – is a kind of philosophy of life, death and language, just as philosophy is a kind of literature (especially a poetry).
I think of poetry as a complex, possibly pointless, but very precious philosophy. A way of thinking within language that works very hard to keep the thoughts, ideas, even senses in motion, in doubt, in fluxus. A train of many thoughts and sensations that never quite reaches a stanstill, an end, a closure. And thereby reaches areas situated closer to what I would call ”the truth” about human life on this planet. Atruth that fully acknowledges the fact that there is no such thing as The Truth, only a multitude of truths, beauties, beholders, viewpoints, perspectives, beings, ideologies, emotions. There was never such a thing as an overview, only attempts at totalitarianism.
There is, however, life and death. There are atrocities. There is a need to speak out against oppression. The notion of many truths is a luxury.
There are so many things that I don´t understand. The writing of poetry is a way of working with this non-understanding of things, people, phrases, socialities, societies, diseases, disasters. It is a way of thinking about the grammar of the world: politically as well as poetically.
The poetries that inspire me the most are those that ask questions rather than provides answers. Those that allow the world to be as complicated and difficult and delightful and dreadful as it is, without trying to clarify or simplify. There is no justice in this world. And we are all dying, you know. There is no comfort. I need to read uncomfortable texts.
These words are too vague to satisfy even me. There are no excuses, only reasons: I am working intensely with a manuscript right now. I am, so to speak, on the inside of my writing, and not quite able to take one step back and really think hard about what I am doing. I am just doing.
But there is no such thing as just doing, outside of Nike slogans. And writing this I am perhaps only refusing. Avoiding. Speaking with my lips closed. Keeping secrets from myself. Doing the very opposite of what poetry means to me.
The Defiant of Poetry my Term
By Quamruzzaman
