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Travails of a budding Poet - A Fiction
Chapter One

Towards the twilight of my University days, i had been swooning, of course along with my alter ego, mostly within the succour of his apartment, which I still remember in very fond memories, about all things Aubrey Graham, Joe Cole and Bruce Marshall Mathers and other marvels of the exciting world we had just teleported into - the world of words. Friends would occasionally meet us at it, amidst our stubbornly themeless conversations.



He, of course, had a better grasp of the scribing thingy. His sharp writing prowess and optimism had been my rudders into aerial covens of prosaic and poetic mastery. I would scrawl pieces for days, only for me to eventually delete them - they were never good enough, I believed, A notion he usually opposes.

After lots of practice, contemplation and positive Vibes. I summoned the courage to stop deleting my works. I finally decided to share a poem - Now - with a few acquaintances, to test the waters, for a start. Amateurish as it was, it was a poem I had given my best, it was good enough, I concluded. I finally decided to share it with some old classmates from college. An act I was soon to regret, thanks to the following remarks.



"Do you know how to write? are you even sure you wrote this?"

My eyes could not feast on such worded thorns, not for long, I immediately smirked them away, but I was too late, for they had waltzed, through my skin perhaps, into the crusts of my timid soul, burrowing in them, sharp hurtful holes.


I would never post poems again, maybe he was right, I was not a writer, I was never any good after all, maybe this is not my thing, maybe I don't have what it takes, maybe this is a good time to stop, maybe I should get out of my head, maybe I should just let go, maybe I should just QUIT. all these and more, I whispered beneath the rubbles of his pelted words.

To be continued....

Synopsis :

Travails of Budding Poet tells the story of a poet who was mocked after sharing a poem he wrote.

Please drop your comments about the first chapter.

Travails of a Budding Poet - A Poetic Fiction.

Chapter 2

Although, my bardish proclivities were then, overt, I had fallen hopelessly in love with the mild charms and witty vibes of poetry, even as a naive teenager. The creative chaos she sets loose in my head, were enough excuse to sail away from the banks of reality.

I have always regarded oral communication to be largely tedious and banal. My expressions tend to be more accurate, articulated, less awkward and less dramatic when they stream from my pen and not my Jaws. It always seems like I say the wrong things at the right time, or the right ones at the wrong time. I was never an orator. But my writing proclivities were promising to make up for that.

I knew I would struggle to make any significant impact on any society with my tattered oratory, and thus, wholeheartedly embraced the noble prospects of morphing the society's reflection of itself, unraveling the hidden beauties of the universe hidden in plain sight, and bridging educational, social and nepotistic barriers of our world through positive and enlightening poetry.

These were the dreams i had been steadily nurturing, before the horse's back on which they were about to ride got broken by the vicious comments of my first critic. In the flood of self-doubt and negativity his comments had sent my way, I drowned. I wallowed. I gave up and I Quit.

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I drowned in the positivity of remembering that the criticisms were worthless opinions of a doubt caster, and that an impediment to action only calls for further action. I wallowed in the vibes that suggested obstacles to be the way to triumph. I gave up on doubting my spark, my creativity, my difference, my ability and my passion. I Quit writing for others and started to write for myself, I quit mongering for accolades and I Quit getting knocked off my pedestal by mine or other's doubt.


I felt, albeit ironically, a deep sense of gratitude and debt in fact, to my first critic, for aligning my expectations with the correct perspectives of creative survival so early on my poetic journey.

To be Continued....

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Travails of a Budding Poet - A Fiction

CHapter 3

Tens of twilights have been trapped in the dirty scarfs of the lady night, since my proverbial horse's back was mended. It was gradually healing and bravely steadying its foot, ready again to saddle me, through my travailing "poescapades".

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Thanks to my newly found redemptive vigour, crocheting poetic lines became more liberating, rewarding and fulfilling. It simply became about doing what I loved to do and enjoying it, rather than doing it for accolades. The simple notion of conceiving a muse, penning it and closing its final verse was a priceless thrill.

Fuelled by a stubborn desire to excel in the bardish art, I became exclusively indulged with poeia, incessantly conceiving mind pleasing muses, and trading them with the best narratives and dictions my mind could negotiate, at random will.

My knack for rhythm and rhyme patterns were flourishing, to my surprise, and so too were my resourcefulness with words, along with a deft poetic touch. I was quickly becoming midas, anything I touched became gold or better still - poetry. They were of the smoldering magic, lent to me by nature, which were getting kindled.

I would stitch an entire poem with linear rhythm patterns or rhyme schemes with little effort. I never really operated with muse. All I just needed to do was pick up my pen and poetry would just gush, right through its tip. It was that easy.

In fact, I was beginning to see someone I could refer to as a marinated poet anytime I looked in the mirror. It was indeed a swooning experience, an indeed joyous road on my poetic Voyage, at least for the while it lasted, for it soon received a staggering blow, right through the ribs.

To be continued....

Chapter 4


Thanks to my newly found redemptive vigour, crocheting poetic lines became more liberating, rewarding and fulfilling. It simply became about doing what I loved to do and enjoying it, rather than doing it for accolades. The simple notion of conceiving a muse, penning it and closing its final verse was a priceless thrill.


The joyous hamlet I had arrived, on my unfolding trip turned out to be quite illusory. It was filled with reassuring cheers and a budding reputation amongst my acquaintances and peers alike. "Wow! You wrote this! That's amazing" they would marvel. I knew my poetic prowess was not exactly soaring with the eagles, but I was cozily sheltered in the belief, structured on brittle grains of ego, that it was only a cloud or two behind them, but little did I know; for spectacular, was my ignorance.


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Equally spectacular, were the storms that whirled it away, randomly breezing ego deflating shrapnels on my face, through the sharp cracks of the first few lines of the poem I was reading.


It was on one of my dovish weekends strolls, that I bumped into a rotting document, browned with dusts and footsteps, lying wastefully at the mercy of the random evening breeze. I picked it up for a quick skim as my curiosity usually compels me to. It was a decaying fragment of a poet's anthology, half torn, I was only able to see a name and an interrupted poem. It read:

_________________________________________

The Word

- Pablo Neruda

The word was born

in the blood,

it grew in the dark body, pulsing,

and took flight with the lips and mouth


Farther away and nearer,

still, still it came

from dead fathers and from wandering races,

from territories that had become stone,

that had tired of their poor tribes,

because when... [torn away]

_________________________________________

As much as I loved poetry, my romance with poetry was not induced by conventional poetry, fundamentally, it was inspired by other creative energies - lyrics, paintings, and deep prosaic images.

As far as I was concerned, poetry was all about rhyming ambiguous words within vessels of my thoughts and putting them into verses.

I especially have an affinity for the lyrics of Bruce Marshall Mathers, around which my sense of creativity and writing style generally revolved until I met Neruda in his rotting piece.

There I was, reading something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, starkly distant from what I have grown to regard as poetry, the words seemed like incantations, deliberately knitted by aliens from other galaxies to fever my soul. Albeit written in English, my perplexity would be no different had they been written in Valerian. Arrested were my illusions, by genies of neruda's magical awe, trapped to rot in cells of his tingling aura, still very much outliving him.

In them I received the cold revelation, that my poetic prowess was still rooted in the muds, faraway from mother earth's high planes, right where the eagles leap into the clouds of poetic mastery. A point I illusory thought I was approaching. Huh. Ridiculous.

Travails of a Budding Poet - A Fiction



Chapter 5

As soon as I came to terms with the realities of my poetic ignorance, I immediately began to negotiate my way out of its confines. I was determined to break loose of Neruda's bewitchment. How could I write like this? Is it even possible?!. I wondered.

But writing like Neruda was not the urgent crisis, understanding a single line of his poem that I had just read was. It was ripping my soul out of its rigging. All my cognitive life, I had never read a text in English and not made sense of it until now, my dissent for ambiguity is the reason I'm obsessed with the use of English and handy dictionaries. Yet, here i was, seeing words I actually recognize in clauses but unable to make substance of them.
What I learnt was vivid - Ignorance is not the biggest enemy of knowledge; the illusion of knowledge is. I had never researched poetry, nor read a poem, nor met a poet nor attended a poetry class, but still managed to believe I knew enough, managed to be infuriated that my poem was criticized, and managed to even refer to my works - as poetry.

It was now time to learn the things I thought I knew.

I quickly researched Neruda, read more of his works and biography. My early lessons in correct poetry began in his "Twenty love poems and a song of despair".

It was In those priceless sonnets that I truly met poetry. In them I learnt, that she was fire, burning on ice, that she was truth in its Sunday clothes, that she was a parallel ray of reflections, that she lived in the branches of the night and rides on shawls of fairies. That she creeps into fireflies, dews, scents and virgin ladybugs. It was thanks to Neruda that I learnt that she sometimes;write herself.

At the end of the paperback edition of the book were recommended reads, from other Chilean and non Chilean poets. My thirst for poetic material increased, along with my curiosity and In a short while I had met the "others".

Wordsworth in his posthumously uncompleted 66,000+ line poem - "the Prelude", Li Po in his famous Japanese haiku anthology, Rumi in his "Book of Love", Linda Goodmans in "Gooberz" and Imamus-shatibii in his classical "Matnush-Shaatibiyyah".

With each passing book, came brutal blows, bloodying my ignorant nose, and forcing it to perceive what poetry truly scents like - Petrichor.

To be continued....