David Fekete

DEVI AND SHINING WORDS, Part 1: Poetry as an Aberrant Enterprise.

Ensconced pretty good at Remedy 124 Street but I’m writing without my glasses. I won’t see misspellings.

Right when I was fixing to write about poetry as an aberrant enterprise, my Sikh cab driver told me about “shining words.” The word for “shining” is “Devi” and that is what Hindus call Goddesses. For the very first time ever, I learned of the connection between Devi and Diwali. We’re pretty close to Diwali, if we’re not actually in it.

It’s a Festival of Light; it’s the Cosmic War of Light over Darkness. Those themes are in Christmas and Chanukah. In the darkest day of the year, we pray for Light to ultimately win. 

My driver told me of a Vice Prime Minister of India whose words shined so brightly that Queen Elizabeth listened when he spoke. His words shone so brightly that they attracted people’s attention. It was all I could do to keep quiet and listen. He spoke slowly. But that wasn’t it. I am a teacher and a Shayari-Poet. I’m in the business of generating and expressing words. It’s my bread and butter. Without words, you wouldn’t have a poem. Without a whole lot of words, I wouldn’t have a dissertation or a book.

But it can be an occupational hazard for us to tend to do all the talking, or to dominate the discourse in a conversation. You want us to, when you are reading our literature, or when you are in our class. But not in a social setting. We have to be shape-shifters.

So I reined myself in and listened to this soft-spoken, slow speaking elder Sikh, because I knew he had something I wanted to know, maybe needed to hear.

POETRY AS AN ABERRANT ENTERPRISE

The trouble with poetry is it’s writing. Writing is a form of saying. So to write, you have to say something. Probably, my readers, right about now, are going, “Duh–uh, of course.”

But think about it. A poet is always walking around everywhere trying to think up things to say. I call that a pretty aberrant way to go about your life.

This is going to wrap up Part 1. I have some teasers about Part 2, and Parts beyond.

1) When you’re thinking up things to say, there’s always the question, “What do I want to say.” When I see Bill on Whyte Avenue, my script is written for me: “Hi, Bill.” Not with Poetry. Do I want to say something about art and the creative process, itself? Writing about playing scales is like that: 

SOMETIMES IT COMES DOWN TO SCALES. 

Do I want to say something about life? Narrowing that, maybe about life when you’re broke ass? Running with that, maybe finding heartfelt glory in living when you’re broke ass? If that theme works, maybe Hemingway living broke ass in Paris as an early writer, saving up his money for an annual ski trip with his wife Hadley to Schruns would he a good way to get at that idea. In fact, it becomes

SCHRUNS AND ALL IT MEANS, 

which is a published poem in AWAKENINGS REVIEW. But before it is published, Sky Custer reads it in JT’s Bar and Grill at 1 am, they make a fist and goes, “YES!” takes a pic of my face with the poem next to it, asks me to dance, but I’m too shy, and through Sky Custer’s chain of connections, I meet Professor Blair Stonechild, at Indigenous University and author of “LOSS OF INDIGENOUS EDEN and the Fall of Spirituality,” and that book transformed my life! So thanks for liking my poem, Sky Custer, and sorry about the dance. 

2) It is true that Robert Frost said, “Poetry begins in a pang.” And Wordsworth calls poetry, “The still, sad music of humanity.” That’s fine and all except for any of those things to be a poem, it needs words. If it stayed a pang, and a pang only, it would not be a poem–it would be a hug. If it stayed the still, sad music of humanity, it would be an instrumental–maybe a symphony or ALL BLUES by Miles Davis. A poem qua poem (sorry) needs words. Words are all artificial and made up to mean this or that. There are no naturally-occurring words.
That’s what makes poetry an aberrant undertaking: we are forever thinking up things to say, and we gotta say them in words someone wants to read.

Just today, though, I heard shining words.

ENIGMATIC DR DAVE ENTERPRISES, PRELUDED