The Art of Destroying the Mystery of a Poem

Is there a mystery, a magic, something intangible behind a poem? There is if you believe there is. For the longest time I did not want to analyze poetry. I was frustrated in university when I had to deconstruct a poem. I felt like I was disrespecting the poet and what he or she was trying to do. I felt like one of the evil characters in one of my favourite novels: Necroscope. He reads his victims thoughts by touching their innards. But they have to be dead in order for him to do it. I felt like that. By analysing a poem, it was a sign of destroying it. Although I wrote several essays and did research on poems, I never really liked doing it. A poem, I thought (and kind of still do) is to be read and enjoyed. That's it! However, the poem belongs to the person who reads it. If the person believes the poem to be something completely different than what the poet intended so be it. I feel very strongly about this notion.

In the last while I have rediscovered writing. I have always known it be a difficult process and as Stephen King notes, and I’m paraphrasing, there is no getting around it. You have to do it! I have also discovered that I have to rip and tear into poetry or any writing for that matter in order to understand the art. In order for me to learn and progress I have to open up the writing piece and peer into its inner workings. I liken it to opening an automatic watch. In order to have an understanding to how the watch really works you have to open it and tear apart its mechanism. However, that’s the easy part. The difficult part is to put it back together and make it work again. And that’s what I have to do. In order to go forward I have to practice the art of destroying this myth that there is some mystery behind a piece of writing like a poem. I have to do it in order to write the poems I need to write.

An interesting poem...

I was looking through my old writings and I found this poem that I wrote in August 2004....

where butterflies weep

in silence
the rain weeps
silent tears
fallen
from ageing wings
of lost angels--
the horizon falls
into an undying
abyss
obliterated by the crescent
moon
hung off
in the distance--
there are no words
to explain
the mourning
heavens
in deep desolation
concentrating
on
burgeoning
bodies
lightened without
any recollection
of mind or spirit--
life continues
without a spell
to rejuvenate
or compel--
bashful and playful,
with words
unsettling
too, in the transient
bodies of wingless
butterflies
who have fallen
from a nectarous
cloud
to be left alone
contemplating
the truth
of death's
secret
mourning.

Another poem...

I wrote this one over two years ago on February 17, 2009....

open world

doors, revealed, opened and torn
the flesh from timeless
clocks,
rusting pieces, memories melt
precious death, open a lone
pomagrandate open in the burning
light, exposed, tears like rain
evapourate, bedless whispers
drop, drops of rain
fall, against the window,
open, torn shut, years are minutes
in the hands of invisible hands,
landscape barren, sun poised,
arise, quiet dawn, melting sun,
trickling down, down, melting sun,
encased, trapped, caged tiger
sleeping a primorial death,
alone on forgotten plains,
censored reality, we fade
under a forgotten light,
hollowness, sickness sinks,
sweat runs, rivers run dry,
emotions stall, night sprawls
a light dims, in agony we fade,
relentless tears push flesh into furrows
escape, dreams of agony
lingers fears and doubts that wander
wonder

the creation of a poem...

I wrote this a few months ago. It's a section from an unfinished essay on poetry. It's about the process of creating a poem...Check it out! Do you agree with me or don't? Let me know!

Poetry, in my humble opinion, is an explosion of thought, ideas, and images in a short space (being 1-2 pages.) It is emotional and the foundation is the sub-consciousness being exposed by the writing process. The writing is fast, furious, and spontaneous. To be poetry, the piece must not be altered or edited in any way. The ‘organic altering’ as I call it, comes from the development of the writer through the years of writing poetry. The writer trains himself by writing many poems thus not needing the process of editing. Therefore each poem becomes a step in the overall development of creating the ‘perfect poem.’ This poem varies from writer to writer; for me, it is when the writer creates a poem that utilizes all his senses and the refinement of interpreting subconscious thoughts, dreams, experience, and knowledge into a compact symphony that explodes with originality, beauty, individuality, and the self-containment of history, culture, language, music, sociology, archaeology etc.

Editing should be confined to prose pieces. Editing in affect takes away from the true and organic process of writing a poem. The reason I do not like editing poems is because it alters the original piece. If the writer does not like the piece but finds the images or some lines agreeable allow these items to seep into his consciousness—they will reform in ones mind and come out reinforced by other developed ideas in the next time (whether it be in a day or years.)

More poetry.....

Hello...

I've been away for over a year, but I have decided I will be a bit more consistent! I still write poetry, but it's usually far and in between. I write in spurts and write a bunch of poems in these spurts. I wrote this one in English and used the Google feature which lets me translate it into another language. Check it out in both English and German. Enjoy!

the eternal dream beyond eternity

the death of my burning youth
comes down
towards the cliffs of time
I hold my skull full of poetry and sin
and there is nothing
only a bleeding thought
of a dream lost in the hopes
of a discarded fetus--
let us hope and pray,
rely on the gears of faith
that our souls can rebound
and be redeemed--
beyond the dawn of time
our eternal dreams and nightmares
scream and entwine--
everything is beyond our comprehension
we are lost to our mortal sins
and the book of life is opened
to us
and in the garden we walk
and live


der ewige Traum jenseits Ewigkeit

dem Tod meiner brennenden Jugend
kommt
auf die Klippen der Zeit
Ich halte meinen Schädel voller Poesie und Sünde
und es ist nichts
nur eine Blutung gedacht
ein Traum verloren, in der Hoffnung
von einem weggeworfenen Fötus -
Lasst uns hoffen und beten,
vertrauen auf die Zahnräder des Glaubens
dass unsere Seelen können Rebound
und eingelöst werden -
über den Anbeginn der Zeit
unsere ewige Träume und Albträume
schreien und umschlingen -
alles jenseits unseres Verständnisses
wir unsere Todsünden verloren
und das Buch des Lebens geöffnet
uns
und in den Garten gehen wir
und leben

An old one, but a good one!

I wrote this one years ago as a sort of intro page for an essay on Modernity and Expressionist art. I wrote it around 2003. Hope you enjoy reading it!

the conscious abyss

the rumble of light penetrates the glow of death
in the moonlight heat the years turn into brazen
tears,
perpetual allegations tear into the warmth
of premature wombs,
my mother the death of light, colours of black
that tingle from the trampled orchids of our decaying
desires,
emotions ripped onto an endless pathway
stretched against our icy corpses
as flesh decays in our mind's eye—
the stir of red, death in black runs
down the bare back of an isolated eclipse,
while white walls with ivory life runs dry with thick blood
as crystal raindrops turn into abandoned
rooms deep within the cavity
of a growing machine—
let death run its course,
a rotting fetus conscious of its doomed
existence, my life now an infected
wound, my eyes open shut, slits drawn out and exposed
to my morbid fascination with blood
and rusted memories—
this is my ecstasy, a fallen angel
crucified, whipped to its knees
by the crush of a coming blitzkrieg,
a plague within the soul of eternal passion,
the mouth of shame has opened wide
to a voidless galaxy of endless possibilities
into the perversion
we call life.

Poetry is everywhere!

Poetry is one of the ultimate forms of expression. I enjoy writing poems because I get to be creative, spontaneous, and mysterious. I also have a chance to forage through my deepest thoughts, my dreams and nightmares and my sub-consciousness. In one sense poetry is a stew of words, and feelings; it is a reflection of our physical worlds, the facades we put up, our fears and triumphs, our desires, fantasies, and tragedies.

However, poetry is not restricted to a sonnet or a love poem or a bunch of rhyming couplets; poetry is everything around us: it is music, lyrics, it is the humming of a car engine, it is a cook that chops up vegetables in a kitchen; it’s a wrongly convicted person trying to clear his name; it is a single mother trying to make ends meet; it’s a janitor cleaning out bathroom stalls; it’s an entrepreneur making a new business; it’s a bear eating a salmon; it’s a fight between two men vying for the attention of an uninterested woman. Poetry is all around us.

Poetry is what we do and how we express ourselves. Writing a poem is one facet of poetry. Poetry should not be restricted to the act of writing but should be released like a butterfly and be allowed to be interpreted in the way an ‘artist’ (all of us) sees fit!