Poets and their poetry

[In photo: Anna Świrszczyńska]

Poetry, dance, music, the arts are the language of the soul. The deepest corners of a human being hold the potential for creation, no matter how ugly that creation might be in the eyes of others. I find this ability to create as one of the greatest gifts of being human.

Inside prisons, camps, at the barrel of a gun, at the moment of torture and death, human beings have turned again and again to music, images and poetry. So I feel called to call it for what it is, a gift from our soul, a direct language that connects us to the nothingness that we come from.

It's world 🌎 Poetry 📖 Day 🌞 today and I want to leave you with some excerpts and contexts as soul food:

1.

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:

I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Every angel is terrifying.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.

Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?"

(Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegy" as translated from German by Stephen Mitchell)

The story goes that Rilke was sitting by the Duino Castle when he had an auditory "vision" and an angel whispered into his ear. That was the seed that led him to writing Duino Elegies. These lines are from the start of the poem and set the tone for the intensity that Rilke often brings when writing about the experiences of and in life.

2.

"it's 1962 March 28th

I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train

night is falling

I never knew I liked

night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain

I don't like

comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth

can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it

I've never worked the earth

it must be my only Platonic love"

(from Nazim Hikmet's "Things I didn't know I loved" translated from Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk)

Written in the year before his death, this poem carries the sentiment of love and longing well. The title gives you an idea that you will be introduced to love that the poetic voice was unaware of but the feelings that he captures (and in our case the excellent translators capture) always leave me feeling as if I'm on the Prague-Berlin train finding out the things I didn't know I loved.

Hikmet had been jailed and in exile through many years of his life. But he retained poetry, love and passion for life as was exemplified by the life he lived and the words he wrote.

In a poem dedicated to those who might spend days in prison, he writes these lines,

"it’s not that you can’t pass

ten or fifteen years inside

and more—

you can,

as long as the jewel

on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!"

(From "Some Advice to those who will spend time in prison" as translated from Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk)

Hikmet's jewel surely never lost its luster.

3.

"The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster."

(From Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art")

This poem is quite famous by now. I remember coming upon it at Doha airport, I remember Brainpickings writing on it and I remember hearing it in the movie "In her Shoes". But these words of course come from Bishop who has known loss intimately. Such precision of language and careful constructions came from a depth of experience that may come across as brutal. Losing parents to death and insanity at a young age, feeling displaced, being abused, losing her partner to suicide… these read just as words but were the continued experiences in her life. Loneliness and loss were Bishop's lifelong companions and from that well within came decades of poetry, an appreciation for life and beauty and the solace that words provided her, and in turn, those who were moved by her poetry.

4. "Walking to your place for a love fest

I saw at a street corner

an old beggar woman.

I took her hand,

kissed her delicate cheek,

we talked, she was

the same inside as I am,

from the same kind,

I sensed this instantly

as a dog knows by scent

another dog."

(From "The same inside" by Anna Świrszczyńska)

I remember reading Anna Świrszczyńska's "Thank you, my Fate" in the anthology "Poems of Gratitude."

She grew up in poverty and had to stop her education because her family could not afford it. Instead she started working at a young age, but later managed to educate herself by working alongside. The Nazi invasion of Poland put a halt to her life plans and she joined the resistance against them as a military nurse. She published in underground publications and was arrested. Like Dostoevsky, she had an agonizing phase in her life, where she stood in front of executioners for an hour as they debated whether to summarily execute her. This incident especially is said to have become deeply ingrained in her. One can sense the fear of living normally in a place under occupation in her poem "Building the Barricade".

But the poem I chose above reflects the sentiment that often occurs in her poem: that of kindredness, warmth, love and gratitude. On reading some of her poems, I leave, marvelling at the word etchings made from deep grief, loss and fear.

To float on the sea of grief or terror and make art, take words from the air and make poetry, to take music and make it into a song, to take pain and turn it into love. Anyone who knows how to live like this is an artist, because they are making out of the material inside their inner worlds not hurt, not pain but beauty and deliverance. Even the most grotesque and horror inducing art is a gift to the world because it introduces you to a possible world without you having to live in it.

You can leave a book, a poem, a painting after encountering it. You don't inhabit the moment or emotions that created the piece. You experience your own unique emotions on encountering a piece of work. And better a changing object that has no or life changing impact than there being no object and the horrors of life happening to you without you being prepared.

The arts soothe, heal, prepare, nourish. It's the language that speaks to the soul.