Interestingly, there is also a tendency of getting rid of Life counselling books: I Ching, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Decision-Making by Christopher Markert The Emotional Energy Factor by Mira Kirshenbaum
Isn't the poet, in his/her peculiar primacy, a rebel of circumstances? Doesn't the higher nature, that greater calling, allow some room for choice?
A poet isn't just a translator of artistic words. He is a sword but, sometimes, he is not afraid to become a little kitten left out in the cold. So, here is fear and pain.
As always, I come to you today with a problem: a crisis of thought, the long-term utility of embracing one’s passion on the one hand and the gnawing need for financial independence on the other. We have discussed both extensively enough to allow for a nuanced understanding.
We have had a drought for two years. I do not know about anywhere else, but southern Zimbabwe has held long patches of brown in December. Patches of brown where there should be maize fields. Patches of brown where the cattle should have been grazing. Patches of brown where entire rivers flowed not too long ago. Patches of brown where there should have been life.
Most importantly, I hate poetry for teaching me how to love. Poetry made a lover out of me. Before poetry, I didn’t know that the gaze from my lover’s eyes could loosen my joints. I didn’t know that a single touch of his hands could melt me like candle wax. . .
I still sit in absolute darkness. A voice. A soulful voice which becomes a place of shelter, a resort: A voice to heal the wounds of darkness and to chase the ghosts. The three artists speak out images of the past, sitting on the floor when light slowly guides us out of the darkness, their voices put the memories in place.
Thus, it is surmisable that whoever will contemplate the past eternity during which the world was not in existence and the future eternity during which it will not exist, will see that it is like a journey, in which the stages represented by years, the leagues by months, the miles by days and the steps by moments.
I still sit in absolute darkness. A voice. A soulful voice which becomes a place of shelter, a resort: A voice to heal the wounds of darkness and to chase the ghosts. The three artists speak out images of the past, sitting on the floor when light slowly guides us out of the darkness, their voices put the memories in place.
Hence, while the historian's mind is riddled with events, the poet's is bursting with colour, having memory as its minefield. However, there is no fixity to verse. Not in its fidelity to what was or its facility for what will follow. Both past and future are the canvass upon which imagination subsists. Along the way, it rids itself of all ethical sympathies.