Tuesday, February 5, 2013
open letter to Sofiya
Dear Sofiya,
I've been thinking a great deal about poetry for quite a long time. Mostly I'm perplexed by what I read here and there. I don't know why those poems are being written. I don't want anyone to tell me about their life or about life in general. Life is already there, in front of everyone.
What I like about your poems is how the lines are like spoken spells. They constitute an act of indirect conjuring. In the openness of your lyrics, the more-than-life peeps through. The mystic unsayable that Wittgenstein alluded to or pointed toward is given space to breathe.
I would like to think that a few of my own efforts also allow something of the metaphysical (for lack of a better word) to shyly appear between the lines.
Whatever it is that is beyond the quotidian and the pathetic of experience lives in the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer and a very few others. It has a quality akin to waking dream and to the suggestions of ambivalent music. It creates haunting atmospheres of reading. It chants (like Brodsky) with images subtly conveying the spirits of things behind phenomenal and ordinary appearance. As if the soul of time and the ghost of space commingle just beneath the script. Metaphor as real magic -- a transforming into presence.
I don't want to read poems that rehash experience, that are hung up on mere situation or nostalgia. I prefer poems composed with aesthetic elements reaching into the uncanny and tremulous moods of being.
All my best,
Tim
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My dear friend Tim:
ReplyDeleteLet me tell you a tale, perhaps a fairy tale that I hope belongs not only to me. Once upon a time there was born a girl with the bouquet of beautiful rainbow shadows clanged in her little feast and a deem premonition of her task to find the things to which these shadows belong . This was her only heritage, and for many years she was looking for a home, where to find these things until right before the final curtain on the stage of her life was about to fall she found…well …not a house, a land or a man, but a garden where yet her shadows are to be planted into the little hearts of beautiful flowers for which much work yet to be done. But this is the story of her destiny. And what about .. her poetry? It ‘s still walking on the swinging rainbow net of uncertain shadows, looking for the direction, for a guiding light in an open streams of turbulent light projected into the dusk by the dancing stars on the invisible skies. Sometimes her poetry lands to rest in the beautiful worlds filled with incarnated thoughts and textured experiences, the rich worlds like you poetry , my friend Tim. There she learns to walk in profound meditations and not to miss a turn or a corner of Time incarnated in time.
Today I want to dedicate to you one of my first attempts to write poetry in your native tongue. You may also consider it as my credo.
the poet music
To Tim
София Юзефпольская-Цилосани
before you slide up to the very heaven
along the trembling scared string of violin
before you weep out the sweetness of cello
and taste the aroma of longing
before you dance and sparkle in the springs
consisting of the tiny drops released by flute,
and swim in grand-piano's roar of waterfalls
or being magnetized reflect its moons in silence
before the orchestra has started to unleash
the oceans upon the concert hall
and even
before you hear bits of ancient drums
that circulate the blood of your desire
live
sink in the mud of day
in the messy resolutions
sloppy performances
and stupor
of feeling deed and thought
have a cup of bitter coffee
in the morning, count money
cry over broken dish
eat a cold dinner, go shopping
exhaust yourself by worries
over nothing --
and realize and feel and touch
your soul at night and how cracked
how textured it has become
how ready
you plough it ... then ... the wind..
will come
2 Апрель 2010 г.
© Copyright: София Юзефпольская-Цилосани, 2011
Sofiya,
ReplyDeleteI like the story of the girl who sowed the world with auras of poems and the ghost-colors of metaphor. And I'm honored by the dedication of your credo poem. I remember this poem of how inspiration subtly leaks through cracks opened by the friction and wounds of daily experience. How music gains its resonance by being so other to the ordinary.
Tim