Poetry is a many-sided art. Its media being language, it communicates ideas,
feelings, impressions. It is also related to music & thus often like music become
unconcerned with the imitative description of the world. Lyrical poetry deals with
verbal music & no wonder that finest poetry in many languages is thus created.
Poetry is a heightened awareness, which comes in rare moments but often
you have to work on it, to seize that moment, in a juxtaposition of words & feelings.
That is the reason that craftsmanship in poetry is important, to transform raw material
into a finished product.
Most of us act from a narrow point of view, which I call, the programmed living. In
the struggles of life, we tend to protect our little ego against the onslaught of the world
and its collective forces. In the end it becomes our habit as just to isolate ourselves,
in a protective cocoon. This is the function of poetry to break it in order to reach out for
an energetic activity of soul.
I am the visibility of the day
I am the invisibility of the night
I am the spring sap of the leaves
And the echoes of winter’s last rites.
When I create poetry my mind wanders into multiple realms of being. In human
context it brings out pathos of emotions, lyrical love, dark tragic tales, an assemblage of
myths and the past. In that country of living souls, chosen words take on a new significance.
Tongues of insurrections
Tongues of tale strange
Tongues in thousand dialects
Tongues of the storm and rage.
Poetry is a window through which we communicate with outside world. It becomes a two
way process when the readers also extend their arms to touch you, to create an interactive
process.
One thus become a spiritually creative being but in order to be creative, the reader needs
not be a creative artist or a poet oneself but must be able to participate meaningfully in the original
process of creation. Thus taking part in that creative process, one affirms oneself and takes on
that courage of Being which in itself is a vast unexplored territory. Thus poetry is
indispensable for living a genuine life.
Otherwise:-
We have lost our being
We do not even regret
The loss of our voices or of our souls
Encrusted deeply now in spider’s web.
We are a poem that is unread
We are a thought without any hold
Longing to decipher the universe
We are a passion of singly unbold.
Excerpt
THE MOON.
The moon
Oh catch the moon
Put a noose in its nose
Bring it back to harness
The icy wilderness of the noon
Sprinkle it with flowered dew.
Catch it before it runs
To penumbra of sun hide itself
Oh run and run to recover
From suffocation of grief & bart
Stiffen its dust with tears
Or the ceremonial flood
Of the tidings of the present
The anti poetic
Peregrine of the sedged cart
The olibanum of crushed heart.
The moon
Oh catch the moon
Catch it till it runs
To the hilliard mansions
The septic pun
Where the master of hounds sleep
With his metallic face
Turned to the wall
Where under the greenish shadows
Shines the dool
The moon
Oh catch the moon
Catch it before it runs
To the penumbra of the sun.
Early Works is an exhaustive compilation of the first decade of the poems and stories of Z.B.McClure. Included are family photos, rare personal photos, photos of 1st draft manuscripts of many of his early poems. Also some biography and memoir materia
