Poetry as a Spoken Language

 

A childhood friend sent me a long email. It was almost 4 pages long and full of thoughtful lines from a man who now has time to think about life’s lessons.

“This is like writing a letter,” I replied, “you remember the days when a fountain pen used to glide on virgin paper?”

“I still have my fountain pen, but if I use it again, it will make arabesques rather than glide” was his response.

And then, a memory came back to him.

“Talking about arabesque, you remember the Lebanese poet Mikhail Naimy and his works we read in high school? He actually had written a multi-page letter to his friend that ended by something like “I am sorry to write you so long – I did not have enough time to write only one page.”

Ha! I had forgotten all about that. Perhaps that is what you and I have been pursuing all our lives – the art of distilling ourselves to our essence.”

… We were two young men all around us believed that we would dedicate our lives to the arts. As there is never a strait road around any bend, we ended up in the scientific world but always kept our secret gardens for the arts. I believe science loses its artfulness without music and poetry.

So, I thought about that line from Naimy.  The immediate analogy for science might be Ockham’s razor that states “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best.” And as a photographer, my strict adherence to Black & White film photography seems to encapsulate my outlook to simplicity in dealing with the challenge of telling a complex story.

As for poetry, the choices are infinite. First there is form of expression, or even the architecture of delivery. Japanese Haiku and Latvian Daina (along with traditional Lithuanian and Estonian poetry) come to mind. Indeed completing and sharing a thought, a feeling or a fantasy in very few lines or even words is much more difficult than writing a sonnet. The Haiku aims to express a full thought in 4 lines, and the Daina, using a repetitive meter (called trochaic), uses different syllables in a strict arrangement of succession.

Then there is the imagery, be that through musical notes, instruments and composition, or through words. While all expression is based on the author’s experience or intuition, they have to be panhuman to speak to the listening audience or reader. Personally, I have shed more tears and often skipped a heartbeat listening to string instruments than any other musical instrument. But hearing Jacqueline Du Pré play F on the D string always reminded me that the genius of the cellist is what touches us, not the composition or the cello itself, even if it was a Stradivarius.

So, in poetry as well, mastery of the language, like playing a cello, is not what touches the audience. Rather, it is the moment of intuition by the poet that leads to the discovery of a new meaning in and for a known word. Within a known feeling. In a known tragedy.

So, I played a game with the moment. I challenged myself to recall two sentences, from poems I had read more than once, where the most was said with the least words and that after each read over passing times, I had still identified with the message, imagery and intuition of the authors.

With little digging into my memory, lines from Neruda and Alda Merini popped up.

Here they are:

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

I have often written about the work of Pablo Neruda. His life and his sometimes bucolic imagery seem to immediately find a context where his poetry rests, without regret and without fanfare. Every word in this one-liner says something, almost without needing the other words to make the point. And the reader shuts his eyes, thinking about all the times he or she did not have the opportunity to say this line with such simplicity. Or to ever had the moment to say it.

Alda Merini is an Italian poet who also had a tumultuous personal life.  Mental and psychological maladies made her family, social and personal moments a struggle all reflected in her writings. She is up-to-the point, like Neruda, but somber and injured.

“Ho Bisogno di Sentimenti” is my favorite poem of hers, where an entire existence full of pain and disappointment is distilled. I need feelings, she writes, three words that encapsulate all that she had missed in life.

The first few lines of that poem set the tone:

I do not need money.

I need feelings,

words, words wisely chosen,

flowers called thoughts,

roses called presences,

dreams that inhabit the trees

 songs that make statues dance,

stars that murmur in lovers' ears.

 

And, in the last two lines, she describes her needs in the cloak of poetry:

I need poetry,

this magic that burns away the heaviness of words,

That awakens emotions and gives new colors

 

While the translation provides the guidance to a reader who does not read Italian, I think the beauty of these lines is best found in the melody of la bella lingua:

Ho bisogno di poesia,

questa magia che brucia la pesantezza delle parole,

che risveglia le emozioni e dà colori nuovi.

 

The lines from Neruda and Merini made me think about a painting by Jules-Claude Ziegler (circa 1852) of the Greek beauty Lais of Corinth now at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. It is a work on oil and canvas, but the moment it captures is ethereal, where Apelles is conversing with Lais in the shade of trees, above a water fountain.

I have always liked this painting for the genius of Ziegler, but today I wonder what Apelles was telling to Lais to make her so secretively pleased.

The garden is not of cherry trees and it does not seem to be springtime, but could Apelles be reciting the lines by Neruda?

 

… Then, I emailed those lines to my friend.

 

 

April 27, 2025

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Through a Camera’s Viewfinder

 

 

The light was timid

As it kept its promise

To shadows and shade

On narrow spaces

On faces hiding

Joy and impatience

 

 

The light was evasive

In the rush of cruel cities

Where identity

Lost its name

And became

Just a refrain

 

 

The light was never warm

But to hands cold of await

Became that promise

Dressed in quiet shadows

Like a gypsy dancer

Wearing

Red shoes

 

 

Light was an illusion

 

 

April 24, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Exordium

 

 

For a slow stroll

On a rainy night

When a fallen sparrow nest

Reminds us of times lost

 

Times that find their way

To ancient walls

To slow walks

Like waves do

 

Remembering mossy rocks

Where they end up resting

At the end of a long voyage

At low tide

 

… And you want to return

And you think that you can

To what was a prologue

That forgot to enfold

 

But on a rainy night

The fallen swallow nest

Reminds you that times

Were not lost

 

For they were graceful and lithe

 

And you keep on strolling

From side streets

To side streets

 

 

April 18, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

 

Nyx

 

The presence of love

Is the present of loving

Wrapped in a rainbow 

Of wishes we never made

And the memories

Of promises to be kept

Between the pages of a book

Where a coquelicot 

Dried its petals

In await

 

 

 

And on a full mooned night

When coyotes serenade

You find that book

Where you last left

And knew the page 

Where old petals became one

With the poem

You never wrote

 

The present of love

Had since turned the page

So you can read a new poem

 

In the same book

 

 

 

April 10, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

Of Siren Eyes, Old Women and the Sea

 

“Women in your paintings have siren eyes” a visitor to my gallery told me. “That is all one sees on their faces.”

“I cannot hear their song without seeing their eyes” I replied.

… I was thinking about that conversation this morning, and I thought about the poem by Canadian poet Margaret Atwood titled “Siren Song” inspired by the Greek mythology of the voyages of Odysseus, but addressing the experiences of all humans through their travel through life.

The lines from that poem that remain in those after their first reading of Atwood’s almost spiritual analysis of a facet in human interactions are:

This is the one song everyone

would like to learn: the song

that is irresistible:

 

the song that forces men

to leap overboard in squadrons

even though they see the beached skulls

 

the song nobody knows

because anyone who has heard it

is dead, and the others can't remember.

 

 

I stopped to think about the last two lines, as mythology and my life experience crossed the space where time had taken respite and made room to remembrance.

Do I paint siren eyes to remember or to forget?

 

Perhaps the answer is in the lines of Pablo Neruda’s of “The Old Women of the Ocean”:

They sit down alone on the shore
Without moving their eyes or their hands
Without changing the clouds or the silence

… Now they have the ocean
The cold and burning emptiness
The solitude full of flames.

 

PS/ The photo atop the page is from the 1979 with a Minolta Mark II camera that used 110 film.

The photo of the fisherman’s wife selling sardines on the beach is from Nazaré, Portugal., taken with a Nikon F2.

March 22, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

The River Can Not Go Back – Khalil Gibran

 

 

It is snowing in the desert, favorite few short days of the year when my dog and I take the first walk of the morning in snow untouched by human feet, although there will be many imprints from the passage of rabbits and coyotes. But more than the desert snow, I inhale deep the new scents juniper trees and various bushes let escape with the moisture. And I follow the patchouli and sandalwood invitation like a young man would follow after the New Year’s dance.

Then, and often inspired by the aquatic transformation of the desert, upon return, I pick up a book. And my dog sleeps at the bottom of my couch.

 I have often written ⁽¹⁾ about how the desert changes under snow and rain. I find it wonderful that a vast and at first look uneventful space has been home to so many sensations, a way of life to so many cultures, and an invitations for our inner rivers to find their way.

 

This morning, I thought of a poem by Khalil Gibran titled “The River Cannot Go Back”. It is not written in the usual Gibranesque style, but the philosophy found in “The Prophet” is there.

 

Here is the poem:

 

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

 

The message is philosophical, didactic, and inspirational with a touch of fatalism. Yet, as I reread this poem at various stages of my life, the meaning seems to change when I ponder about the relationship of rivers and seas as a metaphor. I have lived in more than a desert around the globe; I was born on the shores of the bluest sea, and have fly casted for trout in many rivers and streams. In every instance, I have found a philosophy of existence and an identity that has influenced my personal outlook to an order of harmony associated with the journey through the environments and moments, rather than their transformation into a destination.

Interestingly, while rivers do not originate from bodies of seas, the concept of a river flowing into the sea always seemed to suggest a return of sort, of becoming one with the sea, or even changing its identity by becoming the sea itself.

And that realisation brought back a few lines from Joachim Du Bellay, a 16^th century French Renaissance poet and the sonnet XXX1 published in 1558 which is still taught in schools although it was written in Middle French and titled “Heureux qui comme Ulysse”.

This is one of the poems I had learned in secondary school. I could recall only the first stanza, perhaps because it had influenced me most – the finding of what matters most after learning from any long voyage.

Here is the first stanza:

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!

(Happy he who like Ulysses has returned successful from his travels,
or like he who sought the Golden Fleece,
Then returned, wise to the world
Live amongst his family to the end of his days!)

 

When I first learned the lines of this poem, “Parents” meant what it would mean to a young reader – mother, father, family. But today, re-reading Gibran and counting the years since I was in secondary school, I wondered if the sea was the parent to the river. After all, the long voyage of days often makes us become our parents ⁽²⁾.

But, when our inner rivers get re-routed through of voyage of days, do we become what we always were? Do we find ourselves after trying to be what we were expected to be? Even when the river flows into the sea, can its waters still keep their “riverness” even if the dream of every sea has always been in those rivers’ riverbed?

I believe that every sea and ocean harbor the dream of, at least once, experiencing what rivers and stream feel in spring when the snow melts on the mountains and rushes down to fill those lesser bodies of water with the joy of rejuvenation and promise.

… It is snowing outside. The bird feeder, lonesome and cold, awaits for spring to welcome birds of all feather and their song.

And my dog patiently snores next to my couch.

 

March 8, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

 

(1)   https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2021/03/saint-exupery-shakespeare-and-armenian.html

 (2)   https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2024/01/jamais-vu-when-familiar-becomes-unknown.html

(3)   https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2013/11/boussole.html

Of Balconies and Bridges

 

 

Under an unmoon sky

When the nightingale

Forgot the last word

Of its song

 

I tried to inspire my pen

And write the unspoken

Word as a song

 

And yet

When one forgets 

How to end a song

Under an unmoon sky

 

It is because

Of a name, short as a word

Lonely as a night blooming

Jasmine

 

That folds its

Petals

At

Sunrise

 

 

March 1, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025