Vasile Baghiu's "Chimerical" Blog: January 2008

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

the sufference behind the poem

It seems that today, in a comment on a poem on a poetry website, I have involuntarily said something important in terms of poetry's perception. Involuntarily, yes, as I am not that whise... “Words say what they say no matter what our intention is.” That really makes me think, as I can see in this phrase the answer which can be given to a young poet facing criticism and wrongly thinking that the sufference behind the poem is of some importance to the reader.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

this "new machanism"

They say that poetry belongs to youth. That could be true. At forty-two I am not that young any more. Maybe that is why I do not write poetry as I once did, simply by writing an entire poem on a paper sheet on a desk margin. I use to write now after long reflections and dialogs with myself, after days in which I feel that a confused feeling “wants” to get familiar with me, after a line becomes good enough to be repeated and written. I am tend to put the blame on the lack of inspiration, but I suppose I would better take into account this "new mechanism" that "tries" to make me aware of my sensitivity, of what makes me be human, that "tries" to keep me alive. I will see…

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Half an hour a day for a poem

I think that poetry can reveal what is hidden in our soul, and that this is a blessing we should enjoy more than we usually do. Half an hour a day for a good poem is what we should need in this agitated time. It keeps our sensitivity alive.

A Poem

Life

Life is neither so philosophic nor complicated
but you cannot speak about it.

My father, who knew the Soviet Gulag,
had generally good opinions of life.

I also have good thoughts
and so does my wife.

As for our children, they
avoid the subject,
and we prefer to leave them in peace like that.

I remembered life yesterday in the plane,
but immediately forgot it,
especially after a glass of red Pic Saint-Loup,
the stewardess’s smile attached.

London, the muddy Thames,
Big-Ben,
Parliament,
and all the other known buildings
below displayed their splendor
through my eyes - an Eastern European who
has lived half of his life in communism
and the other part in neo-communism.

Life makes me think of life;
death also gives me a way
to think more about it.

I am in a place where
if I could catch the most appropriate note
I would know then
to play brilliantly the score,
and be able, in consequence,
for more enjoying life.

About Me

I am a writer living in Romania, born on December 5, 1965. Since some years ago I have been writing in my native Romanian poems, prose, essays, literary critique, articles on health, social and political issues. All along this time I have published a few books in my countries, which have been well-received. Since about 2003 I have been trying to learn English by myself in the attempt to write my poems in this language too. I still make mistakes, of course, but I am determined to continue the adventure. Some of my works have already been enclosed in magazines and anthologies in the USA, the UK, New Zeeland, Canada. Other works have appeared in translation in publications in different European countries. I have traveled in Europe due to a few “writers-in-residence” grants. I work in the health promotion domain, as I have a qualification in nursing, a BS in psychology, being now enrolled in a Master's degree course in psychological and educational counselling. All these things would be little without my wife, my children, my whole family and my friends. They remind me time to time what life’s meaning really is.

just a few words on my poetical manifesto called "chimerism"

During the last years of the communism in my country, I “invented” in my poems a world with places that I had never visited before, such as Rome or Rio de Janeiro. I simply begun to “pretend” I was free to travel like a Western citizen and to write consequently. The results were many poems about the world, which could not be publish at that restricted time. That would have happened later, when I wrote and published, along the poems, a few theoretical texts that had their echo in the Romanian literary circles. As a transnational poetic theory, “chimerism” includes four elements: traveling, transfiguration, disease and science. They are mixed all together in a poetical substance which tries to expand over the cultural, historical and geographical borders. There is almost in all of my poems a character that “travels” everywhere and behaves like an universal citizen. His name is Himerus Alter, and he “borrowed” my voice pretending in some poems that he really wrote everything I have written. He sometimes "visits" the sanatorium (in which I really lived and worked once as a nurse) and reflects upon disease, science, life and his proper condition as a human being.

Vasile Baghiu's "Chimerical" Blog