My Dear Readers,
The purpose of this post is two-fold.
- To share with you some thoughts on poetry.
- To briefly give you more information about my upcoming poetry collection Woman: Splendor and Sorrow, Vita Brevis Press, release date July 31. 2021, and share with you one of my favorite poems included in this collection.
In an interview with New York Glamor Magazine, I stated: “Poetry is the magnificence which reflects upon the landscape of our souls.” My intent was neither to offer an exhaustive definition of poetry, nor to dive into the more complex realm of conceptualization, and try to explain of what poetry is composed. How arrogant of me that would have been. For those who did not get the news yet, arrogance is not sexy. It is not a precondition for talent and/or high intelligence.
However, back to my tentative definition of poetry. It suffices to say that, if one pays close attention to my words, the most obvious conclusion is that poetry is “out there” waiting to be recognized, and to reflect itself upon the landscape of our souls. Once recognized, the reflection happens only in the measure to which our souls can create a mirror image, albeit highly distorted and with the degree of distortion predicated on our sensibility.
As Nigel McLoughlin wrote: “Recognition depends not on linguistic criteria or on conscious thought, but on what is physically felt. It does not demand structure or form. It is beyond that.” [McLoughlin, Nigel F ORCID: 0000-0002-0382-6831 (2013) Writing Poetry. In: A Companion to Creative Writing. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 40-55]
Poetry is indeed beyond structure and form and, if I may, is “out there.” All of us are poets when that which we gather with our sense starts having an emotional and physical impact on us.
[draft – Thoughts on Poetry will continue in an interview with me conducted by Brian Geiger, the editor of Vita Brevis Poetry Magazine.]
Woman is a collection of 63 love poems and 25 pieces of poetic prose. I talked in another post about the feminist and philosophical trends in my poetic prose. However, the main theme of my book is love.
Therefore, in this post I would like to quickly turn to my love poems. Out of the 63 love poems included in Woman, “The Biblical Sense Of To Know” is my favorite. The poem was first published by Spillwords Press under one of my pen names: Gabriela M on March 10, 2020. Below is the original text of the poem as published by Spillwords. In Woman, the text was slightly modified.
the biblical sense of to know
born in a summer that never existed
nailed to the cross of your poems
I’m losing my mind inside the blue night
I reach you in dreams you do not understand
It hurts when I’m there
It hurts when I’m not
I ask for the help gravediggers can grant
I wrote I love you on a note that I locked
It wasn’t a snake, it was an iguana
the night the tango nuevo played its guitar
on fifteen decades I counted my prayers
my fingers were naked
my fingers were gloved
Why do I like this poem so much? Because in the moments I wrote it reality deeply reflected in the mirrors of my souls. I was hurting.
I do not believe poets know only that which comes “by observation of themselves.” The observation of ourselves is only one of the preconditions of poetry. The multiple faces of reality is perhaps another one.
my fingers were naked
my fingers were gloved
Those are simply two instances of the same thing.
I will talk to you more soon.
Thank you for reading.
Love to everyone.
@Gabriela Marie Milton
