SLEEPING WITH
POETRY
Thirty years ago
I started to sleep with Poetry. Actually, it
happened some time earlier when, at the age of 10,
I had my first poem published in a children's
magazine. But that didn't count. I was then too
young for ove.
It's a shame,
but I don't remember the place or the occasion when
we met for the first time. I guess it must have
been a library. My mother asked me what I was doing
with a 2,000-year-old lady, still beautiful, but
with such a bad reputation that every man in the
world could have confessed he'd been in her arms at
least once. But I wasn't jealous at all, and even
enjoyed spotting Poetry's fingerprints on some
other man's skin. I wasn't even jealous when she
fell deeply in love with women: somebody told me
that poets are men with women's hearts. Honestly,
Poetry never promised to be faithful, any more than
I promised her that I'd never have anything to do
with her best friends Fiction, Drama, and Essay.
Seeing passion
and commitment in my eyes, my mother wondered what
secret power that older woman had to keep me away
from a decent life, even after Poetry told me she'd
never make me rich, happy and, or a first-class
citizen. Instead, she offered me insecurity. I was
OK with that. "What a bitch", my mother said,
coming back from the library, where she had tried
to learn more about the woman's background. "What a
manipulative personality &endash; she's got 100
faces. She can make people go to war, she can make
a child go to sleep, she can make you dance, she
can make you cry."
Listening to his
wife, my father heckled that Poetry was a typical
woman, except that she lacked my mother's bad
temper. I told her that if Borges, the wisest of
poets, could be trapped in Poetry's arms after she
told him "I am trying to bribe you with
uncertainty, with danger, with defeat", why not me?
I tried to escape as my father pretended not to
hear my mother screaming after me, "But he was a
blind man !"
I understood her
suspicion, since in my entire family the only
figure connected with literature was the great
Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Returning on a slow
train from Russia on his way back to Bosnia at the
beginning of the last century, my grandfather had
spent seven days chatting with Gorky. What they
talked about nobody knew. But after that, deeply
impressed with writers, my grandfather named his
first grandson "Gorky". Later on, thinking that his
name didn't suit his character (Gorky means
"bitter"), my poor cousin wanted to change it.
Closely watched
by my mother, who was planning a medical career for
me, I was in love with Poetry before anyone
discovered the fact. And people in love watch the
world through the heart, not through the eyes. If I
were a doctor, I'd notice that Poetry couldn't care
less whether my rent was unpaid. A bank clerk could
afford to tell me that counting the lines in poem
is not the same as a counting the money in a cash
register.
Gwendolyn Mac
Ewen once asked a bank for a loan, bringing along
all her published books of poetry as security. She
was told that her books were worth nothing. What a
shame for her readers. Poetry couldn't care less
when a publisher pays you by giving you some of
your own books. The mathematics seems to be :If you
give me 10 I'll make you happy by giving you back
3.
As long as I
sleep with Poetry I'll feel that everybody is
trying to convince me that she's a worthless
parasite, close enough to be recognized but always
a stranger. But how come the main events in human
life cannot pass without Poetry? For centuries the
entrance to life of a newborn baby was celebrated
with Poetry, and first love without Poetry is like
a church bell without a clapper. What would a
wedding be without a love poem, and there no
respectable person's gravestone exists without
lines of poetry carved in stone. Even great leaders
and the stupidest politicians don't miss the
opportunity to quote poetry if they want to sound
smart.
But my mother
never quit going on about my strange love, nagging
at me to give up Poetry and find a decent job. She
never stopped. Ask my father. He wanted to have
only one son and then ended up with four.
"Look at this, "
my mother said, pointing to a newspaper article
about the love for Poetry some of the world's worst
dictators had. "Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet, they
loved Poetry too and they were torturing people at
the same time !" Yes, mother, but imagine how much
Poetry helped prisoners to survive jail, and how
many of their poems live on, fingering the
dictators.
My mother's last
try came when she paid a visit to a psychiatrist to
consult him about my obsession. Was I a psycho, a
maniac or, God forbid, gay? At first she thought
that the poetry books on the shelves in the waiting
room were the equivalent of a "10 Most Wanted"
poster in a police station. Then the psychiatrist,
deadly serious, asked her if she could pass his
poetry manuscript on to me and maybe recommend it
to a publisher.
Poetry taught me
first how to tear up a page with a bad poem before
she taught me what a bad poem is. From her I
learned the art of persuasion, little driving
tricks like how to signal a left turn and then
drive right.
Without her I
wouldn't know that "Life is something that happens
when you think that nothing is happening." Without
her I'd still be thinking more about the forest
than about a tree. Thanks to her I learned to jump
up from a chair when reading some beautiful lines
in a book. But I also learned how to be sad. And
how to smile. She made me a better person.
Poetry had
nothing against my getting married and siring two
children.
She didn't ask
me to stop pipe smoking because of lung cancer or
to quit drinking beer in favour of fruit juice. She
wasn't jealous if I had pleasure with another woman
but she'd come to me when my loneliness was
unbearable.
"That's a
perfect relationship," my father said, cautiously
watching whether my mother was around.
For her part, my
mother said, "Big deal. You could learn the same
stuff as a doctor".
But when my
mother was close to her end she asked me if I would
write something nice on her gravestone. She didn't
mention Poetry. But I know that's what she meant.
Goran
Simic