Concerning my poetry

“Even a nonsense-poem is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child.“
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
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And each man hears / as the twilight nears / to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"
 - Rudyard Kipling 

Approachability is not a function of obviousness. An approachable work of art may best be described as something close to an “expected surprise”. If this element of surprise is the central tenet of all art, then the key to producing good art (that also sells) lies entirely with artist’s skill to make the subject expect the surprise, and yet not be aware of her own expectations until the surprise actually arrives. This is the basic belief around which most of my poems have been written, it may also be seen as a statement of objective as far as my poetry is concerned.

The meaning of the works that follow lies somewhere within the interstices of their symbolic, real and imaginary interpretations. There is no single viewpoint that is endorsed in favor of the other when it comes to the definition of these poems. This however, does not mean that the my work cannot be enjoyed by an average modern consumer whose attention span has been hammered down by today’s media-rich environment where hip-hop music provides a quicker “release” than lines of structured verse. In fact, in certain senses these works target precisely the uninitiated, potential aficionados whose minds are yet to be cluttered with the filthy and restrictive canons of modern and classical poetry alike.

The idea is that if music has long outgrown its utility as “opium for the masses”, then its high time poetry be recognized as something more than just marijuana for the elite and be considered as a potent cultural force paving down the path for the evolution of language and intellect. An analogy with (hip-hop) music is also  relevant in a strictly imaginary context here: you don’t have to get it to enjoy it and few will argue that although the overall meaning of many of my works might remain debatable and contingent on subjectivity, the flow makes some kind of transcendent sense and so does the meter. Au contraire, if music has not outgrown its use as opium, then that’s all the more reason for new art forms to emerge from forgotten or largely-ignored realms and present themselves as alternatives.

Poetry needn’t just be a mesh of empty rhetoric and the poet’s claims to moral superiority - it may just as well be a mode of communication that is so personal and sincere that it almost touches the boundaries of inter-subjectivity within the rules of language. So that the reader might experience what the poet already has, she must be lured with rhyme, confused with rhetoric and corrupted with reiteration and alliteration , dazzled with exotic motifs such as that of lycanthropes and Ragnarök before finally being subdued with reassurances of surprise.

Surprises will keep on presenting themselves before the reader - no statement needs more reassurance than this one when talking about my collected body of work. In my modest capabilities, I achieve this task of reassurance quite efficaciously and this might be tested by reading a random stanza out of a random poem from anywhere within this blog.

Other recurring motifs throughout these poems are those of twilight, chaos, alchemy, death, recursion, tautologies etc. and these are woven into a network of emotions characteristic of the human condition like love, desire, sorrow and the like. The idea of using presentation as both the medium and the message remains at the heart of this body of work and is its calling card. There is no reason to believe that this kind of poetry is anything more than clever word-play which reeks of a synthetic syntax and a literary sublimation of a literal confusion - but one must keep in mind that it does not claim to be anything other than that anyway. Therein lies its beauty, its meaning, its core character - all of which the reader is forced to relate with for she herself is constituted by similar (if not identical) elements of being.

Finally, that this collection of poems shares a direct aesthetic bond with the music and philosophy I was exposed to while writing it, cannot be emphasized enough. Therefore, these works should communicate to the reader a feeling similar to one generated by a (hypothetical) Britney Spearsian reading of Hegel where seemingly complicated notions like that of the dialectical triad are communicated as an expression of an embarrassingly innermost honesty (“I’m not a girl / Not yet a woman…I'm in between.“). Finding out the answer to whether or not the poet has achieved a clear reflection of this innermost honesty in his verse remains solely an endeavor for the reader and the critic.

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