Inspiration

Friends and family have wondered about my reasons for creating this blog. Articulating my motivation has been challenging since a multitude of inspirations, uncertainties and schemes pushed me here.

While considering my motivations, the question of my profile has also remained unresolved. My current smattering of adjectives is lazy and feeble. The list is feeble largely because I have not resolved who I want you to think I am.

As you can see these are big (yet really superfluous) questions. For now, I choose an easy solution. I use the brilliant words of another - Wislawa Szymborska.

Szymborska, highest honor is the Nobel Prize in 1996, 'for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.' Beyond this and her many other prizes, most of Szymborska's life is unknown, precisely as she wishes. Szymborska believes that the details of a poet's life not required since they will not the analysis of the poetry. Interviews and personal details are refused by Szymborska on a regular basis. There is simply the poetry that requires analysis. Szymborska, the woman, happily remains unknown, in the shadows.

Below are two poems that I particularly enjoy. My desire for writing springs from one while the other provides a self description I wish I could write. Ahhh well...it is fun to dream impractical dreams if only for one moment.

Enjoy!


The Joy Of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.



Possibilities

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.