| Introduction:
"Why do I feel I am absent?".
This terrifying feeling brought tears to my eyes
when I was 9 years old. We were in a bus : my
parents , my five brothers and three sisters with
some of my nieces and cousins, leaving for one
of our beautiful northern cities for summer vacation.
Everybody was so happy , sunny and real .I was
not sad of course , only I couldn't feel my self
; as if I was a shadow ,a ghost and out of the
circle of time and place, like a hypothetic point.
Even when I closed my eyes, I saw a strange place,
where I had never seen before.
"Why do crowded places highlight my selflessness
?"
At that age I didn't know the cure for this disease
is "poetry". I needed time to discover
that the only way to relieve this feeling of strangeness
and absence is writing.
In an interview with Rati Saxena ,in answer to
one of my questions about the reason why she writes
,I received an amazing answer ,clarifying the
selflessness of a poet:
"Every minute I loose my self and
every minute poetry tries to bring back me to
my self.
Writing, is in fact the possibility of appearing
. My true self can't come true but in the process
of creating. And what is creation but rebuilding
the world by our imaginations ? And is imagination
anything but the power of incarnation or ability
of entering to the "self " of others:
from living creatures to lifeless things? In this
sense , each poem is a persona poem because a
poet "has no identity – he is continually
in for – and filling some other Body-",according
to Keats.
"Priceless" doesn't mean valueless.
It means extremely valuable. Selfless of a poet
has a contrasting meaning too. Various selves
co-exist in a poet. Marina Tsvetaeva was loyal
to her husband until the last moment of her life
but her other selves wrote many love poems to
the men she never met .
Edward Hirsch says: "Every poem is a scene
of language" .And on this scene, from love
and madness to death and life nothing is real
for this actor or actress: poet.
Sylvia Plath goes beyond death in her poem: "Edge".
She wrote it one week before her suicide. According
to Edward Hirsch:" The curtain has at last
come down. The play is over , the essential biography
of the writer completed ,the great work done.
Eternal rest to the maker .But the lyric left
behind proposes a legacy beyond death, an immortality
".
Peri, an unknown poet goes beyond madness in "letters
from madhouse". The bed of a heartbroken
woman in a madhouse is a good scene for the poet
to write about social and political pains .When
the curtain falls, the waves of an immortal ocean
is survived ; as vivid as life and love.
Let us ask poets to say about persona poems
or the roles they have played on the scene of
language.
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