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Zaran on Zaran
What is the definition of poetry?
I don’t know. I just write it.
When I was about six years old, I came up with this
idea....
I had this big, red ball, the kind you use for
playground games, 4-square, kickball.
I loved it.
I used to go around the house bouncing it off the
floor, the walls, to my parents delight.
One afternoon as I was dribbling it up and down the
hallway, I started stringing together these lines, almost like a
song without the actual singing.
They all rhymed of course. Stuff like: I was
walking down the hall, bouncing my ball. I came upon a door in the
middle of the floor.
Genius really.
As I continued back and forth, back and forth, I came
up with more lines.
Whether it was the rhythm of my steps, the ease in
which I was able to walk and dribble and talk at the same time, I’m
not sure.
Before long I had about twenty lines, this perfectly
metered poem. You could have set a metronome to it.
Each time I came to one end of the hall, I’d turn and
head back the other direction. At one point I turned to see my
mother standing there. She was holding a pen and notebook. She
asked me, “What’s that you’re saying?”
I told her I’d just made it up.
She asked me to recite it again which I did so she
could write it down.
I still have that poem, aptly titled, Hallway.
That must have been my first real encounter with
poetry. The art of language structured in such a way that it could
be considered original.
Poetry did not become confusing to me until I started
school where I was told, like most of us, to read and memorize
certain poems. Shakespeare, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lord Byron.
As an adult, things changed, but as an eight or nine year old
hearing lines like “Eternal spirit of the chainless Mind!” it
seemed that poets were of another world.
It wasn’t until I was about fourteen years old. My
mother bought me a collection of poetry from an antique store. A
Book of Living Poems, it was called.
Through it, I discovered James Whitcomb Riley and his
poem, He’s Just- Away.
A selection goes:
I can not say, and I will not say
That he is dead, he is just away!
With a cheery smile and a wave of the hand,
He has wandered into an unknown land,
And left us dreaming how very fair
It needs must be, since he lingers there.
And you, O you, who the wildest yearn
For the old-time step and the glad return-
I also discovered poetry written by people I’d never
heard of, women and men.
Like Margaret Larkin’s Goodby To My Mother, a poem
that won first prize from the Kansas Author’s Club when it first
appeared in 1921 in the Kansas City Star.
Let not your heart be altogether lonely
Now that the last reluctant words are said,
I take away my face and voice, but leave you
my heart, instead.
Our separate lives will only make love dearer,
And beautiful as distant mountains are,
When all the little hills erase each other
and leave no scar.
For every westward-blowing wind is my wind,
Dawning I send you, when my sun is high,
And all God’s lovely stars are ours together
Good by! Good by!
From the beginning, poetry for me, has been about
caring, a form of deep love.
I learned through people like Sylvia Plath, Anne
Sexton, Rimbaud, Hilda Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Bob
Dylan, Margaret Atwood, and Muriel Rukeyser that poetry was about
telling the truth. As if the entire world were an audience and in
order to show them what it feels like to know about this or what it
tastes like or looks like, you must use words most are incapable of
saying, not because they can’t but because they are afraid to.
Poetry has no fear and it’s authors are not afraid. They do not
hide behind masks or tuck certain aspects into back closets.
These are the poems of spirits crying out, lovesick
fools, compassionate realists, the dark and determined able to
convince us that love is madness and that madness is love. And that
an orange sitting in the middle of the table could perhaps be a sun,
a moon, a skull.
In a letter to William Smith Williams, Charlotte
Bronte once wrote: I am neither a man nor a woman, but an author.
As a woman who writes in perhaps less of an age but
still primarily considered a man’s world, what can I say? What can
I tell of myself or my surroundings?
Passion, pride, sexuality, the real issues that
affect women today. Our relationships with our mothers, with our
fathers, our children and our lovers.
Women are free to talk about childbirth and being a
mother, but they are also free to talk about sports and politics,
while many serve as part of this nation at war.
So what defines a female poet? It is not solely her
identity so much as her quest for wholeness. Her drive. As she
writes about what concerns her.
Love, peace, war, politics, poverty, freedom,
violence, racism, sex, nature, God and mysticism.
Several years ago I discovered Fernando Pessoa.
While visiting one of my favorite bookstores, I approached the
poetry section, which by the way, has expanded considerably over the
past two or three years. What once was two or three bookshelves is
now half an aisle. As I was rounding the last aisle of literature I
noticed the spine of a book. It’s title read The Book of Disquiet.
Through this book, I learned about Pessoa, his life, his four
heteronyms, one of which, Bernando Soares who he gives the credit to
for authoring it.
For nearly a year my own writing turned to that of
the sad-hearted man, sitting alone high up in his lonely house in
the lonely night. His deserted streets, his considerable pain in
finding little to no logic in life and all aspects of life
everything being considered: loss, courage, faith, dreams,
friends, happiness, the act of being, physicality, mental health,
bodily health, affectivity, affection, the game of living, nobility
of soul.
To turn around a moment later with my discovery of
the mystics. The great love songs of the Persian poets, spinning in
ecstacy. Their poems have a great healing aspect.
Something perhaps I needed at that time in my life.
This is a time of an almost unending influx of
poetry. The internet especially. What once perhaps might have been
deemed, an outlet for bad poetry, now is an entire resource chock
full of information.
Through the internet and its slew of online journals,
I have come to discover some of my favorite modern poets, some with
books, some whom have yet to see their work in print. Complete
unknowns in the academic world. And yet, capable of constructing
poetry worthy of their recognition.
Which takes me to the bulk of my own work.
The first poem I ever submitted, back in 1999, before
I owned a computer, was to a small literary magazine called The
Writer’s Gazette. It was accepted, much to my surprise. About a
year later, I bought a computer and over the course of several more
years, discovered not only online journals, but print journals with
an online presence. The entire world opened up to me.
Sites with innovative approaches to poetry,
performance art, and digital work where a poet could incorporate
graphics, spoken word and even video to his or her art.
Indie is born.
And it is through this indie-attitude that I have
evolved and claimed a small spot of my own. Able now to reach
people in every corner of the world.
My output is part of a circle, a curriculum of
lessons taught by the virtual unknown.
There are countless others releasing poetry, breaking
ground, turning to the internet as an avenue out of town. Finding
their way into print and into the minds of those ready to receive.
So, what is the definition of poetry?
After thirty years, I still don’t know. Perhaps
there is no definition.
I want to end with two poems I’ve loved for many
years. The first is from a book of Modern African Verse. The poets
name is Charles Nokan residing along the Ivory Coast.
My Head is Immense
My head is immense
I have a toad’s eyes
A horn stands on the nape of my neck
But a magical music surges
from me.
What tree exhales such rare
perfume?
Dark beauty, how can you spring
from a toad’s wallow? How can you
flow from lonely ugliness?
You who look on, you think
that the voice of my instrument
buys my freedom, that I am fluidity, thought
which flies.
No, there is nothing in me
but a pool of sadness.
The second now is a poem written by Anne Sexton,
titled Housewife.
Some women marry houses.
It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That’s the main thing.
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