On "My" Poetry

Poetry, to me is a question of personal integrity, how I reconcile all misshapen creatures of my soul into dreams and tales.

The poet always has a penchant for the unfortunate, prophetic allusions, echoes that make for his particular self.

Word streams and images wrung from a raw subjectivity, from a mind’s bizarre cathedral of the sacred and the profane - mood the sculpted terror of his being.

Are my poems mere fitful explosions of self, and all that is harnessed to my hauling shoulders? And as I often rely on metaphorical densely compacted in word-play, to express layers of an inner turmoil; poetry becomes my echo-chamber.

This fractured syntax without stylistic economy inhabiting conflicting realms serves to reveal micro-details of the crude ventures of souls in life.

Perhaps overloaded with verbiage, explosive yet melodious at times, these poems bear no fidelity to the real but only a truth resounding in the poet’s chest.

And always, the poet remain witness, emblematic of resistance untainted by selfish claims.

What can poetry be, but a testimony.

Here, moods of ebullient joy are rhymed with pain clumsily in lumps - poetry ennobled by strife, an interplay between the personal and world-historical, narratives bristling with anxious contradictions - a victim to the contagion of rumour and fact.

A polemical meditation on the spectacles of destruction and collective stupor in the face of that destruction (of culture)

Poets, from their macabre personae flow the blood diluted with all objects of life in an exchange of tribulations and joys in an age of disconcerting machines.

But can poets be said to read events, moments, history backwards?

Is history; the past inevitable? This coherence of linear historical recollection, is a fallacy when concepts and recollections thereof are snared by minds only as fragments of chosen ideals?

It must be poets therefore, who must also immortalise the evanescent, the fleeting, while voicing an apocalyptic collapse into disremembrance of all that is held dear to memory.

Paul Zisiwe 2023