ktravula – a travelogue!

On Poetry as Science

One piece of prose floating from the fading memory I have from reading Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay occasionally come back to haunt me in my still moments. It asks amidst a whole lot of other questions what the purpose of words are beyond their ability to convey meanings. In one recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson compares the inconsequentiality of our presence on this planet to that of a billion (and some) bacteria living in the walls of our intestines whose number is equal to almost three times the number of all human life that ever existed and died. Like those bacteria, he suggests, who live without the mental capability of understanding the dimension of their inconsequentiality when compared to six billion other intestines walking the earth (with the multibillion units of bacteria they carry in them), we may not possess the mental flexibility to understand our insignificance (along with our equally possible random relevance as evidenced by our current existence).

Milosz asks as if to himself what makes it so that words, in their utmost insignificance beyond immediate use, lends themselves to entendres, rhyme and poetry. Did there exist on some magical plane a predestination for the word “apple” to become the symbol of ultimate taboo, pleasure and sin? In which realm of serendipity did “gain” and “pain” acquire the paradox of their rhyming complementarity. Sure computers may not write poems now (and I have no doubt that this is false), but the lexical matrix of today’s world endows us with a gazillion ways of expressing thoughts in inventive ways. The order in which I have written the last couple of sentences in this post (with almost a 100% certainty) is an order in which these words have never ever been arranged and never will anymore by anyone else. There is something to that. The process of writing poetry, for me, taps into the science of this randomness. The art resides in the chance of success – that moment when meaning, form, and words meet at the tip of the writer’s hands. See below:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

from W.B. Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

This concise beauty, and an underlying deceptive simplicity that wows, has always defined for me one of writing’s unreachable bars; the place where science, art and meaning collide with the earnest needs of the present.

On Poetry as Science was published on December 9th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Art, Observations, Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Occupation Blues

Open window peers into a blue evening through tiny louvre slits,

removed, it seems, from floods around the Nile and the Hudson,

Mississippi, Missouri and Victoria and other throbbing tributaries.

 

Open veins of revolt, serrated slivers of soul across the landscape

as far as eyes could see: a finger in the pupil of the surly present.

“Occupy this,” morning calls, blue with equal promises of dawn.

 

Occupation Blues was published on November 20th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Poetry Reading…

Hanging out with writers and poets at a cafe downtown last night…

The open-mic poetry reading was sponsored by the English Language and Literature Association. Poets and readers include Jason Braun, David Rawson, Geoff Schmidt and others. Earlier in the day was a similar event at the school library featuring Eugene B. Redmond, the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis.

I read four unpublished poems.

Poetry Reading… was published on November 18th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the adventures, Art, Fun category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

Across from me, Dawning.

Waking up to the soft silence of fall, there is a magic unspoken. Trees bob light heads in the kindness of the wind. Yellow leaves blow around a once lonely place. The ground lay spread on a terrace of rust. Through the solid glass where the traveller looks out into the backyard, the season floats in the air like a dream of a faraway land. The snap, crackle of dry broken stems could only break the silences. They rarely shake the shape of the morning out of the serene lure of its affection. Morning breaks into the rote of rust. It brings with it silence, crackles of dry slivers of life across the dawning day.

Across from me, Dawning. was published on November 14th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Halfway to Sixty

Seeking time comes often to a rote around edges of reason, my friend,

when tomorrow moves away from reach into the lengths of a near past.

It is not just the distance of time and space, or memory, but what portends

In-between the fast changing chords of our once rhyming flat bombasts.

Look at it here: movements, shapes, forms, people, hope, desires, and lusts,

And pleasing exuberance circling within one spot of deferred dreams.

So we wonder restlessly where all the time went. We trade masks that must

Hold fears within claypots of growth. We howl our tears into the stream.

We don’t own then, it seems, balms that soothe with scents of silent mimesis,

Else we would sway with wine bags in reclined poses, seconds spent to please,

Which held us then when time favoured the pockets of our scant playfulnesses.

We would not wonder where they went, days spent sprawled in the shades of ease.

It could be only relief that mischief remains, and love’s comfort in the end,

To sew a new tapestry, and to daily, patiently mend. It was never ours to rend.

___________________________

Being too lazy to write a new pre-birthday poem, this will have to do it for the last day of my twenties.

Edited, from Dec 2009.

Halfway to Sixty was published on September 21st, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Literature, Poetry, Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.