Poetry Will Serve

A street in the Old City of Plovdiv 

If you were to visit Bulgaria, one of the first things that you would probably notice is that it invites a sense of the poetic. Vitosha, the great mountain that towers above Sofia to the south, is one of those places. Climb high enough and you will see the golden dome of St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral as well as the other monuments for which downtown Sofia is so well known. Standing on top of that mountain, a man is forced to think in poetic terms about the shortness of life, the beauty of the world, and our communion with nature and each other.

Walking through the old streets of Plovdiv, I had that same poetic feeling steeling over me as I stared down at my feet and tried to not trip over the cobblestones in the Old Town. I thought about history and how this city had been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. I was the descendant of those generations and so were my colleagues and students. In this city, I felt tied to my roots in a way that is difficult to describe with words. I never felt more alive than on a March afternoon as I wandered taking picture after picture of places I loved. It was one of the few times in my life when, in the words of the great Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, “the whole word resounded with one ecstatic cry, ‘I am!’”

Hristo Botev - Bulgaria's most famous poet

I grew up with the Bulgarian culture and poetry of my ancestors in far off America. I learned the poetry of Hristo Botev and Ivan Vazov as a boy. I memorized “The Hanging of Vasil Levski” and “Hadji Dimitar” around the same time I was reading Whitman in English for the first time. Every time I read or recite those poems, I can heart my step-grandfather’s voice echoing in my ears. The man was not a poet. He was a banker, but he recited those poems like nobody else I knew with feeling, patriotism, and love.

I started writing poetry as a teenager. It was the kind of rhyming stuff that most people come up with at that age. It’s imitation Browning and Tennyson without the former’s sense of history and latter’s prosody. It could pass for Robert Frost on one of his worst days or even very young Hemingway. I remember giving it to a professor of mine in college. A wizened German woman named Ms. McAuley who gave me Ginsberg to read.

Allen Ginsberg 

I wrote poetry for years after that. I filled notebook after notebook and binder after binder with my chicken scratch. I consumed Komunyakaa and Adrienne Rich collections as if it were my birthright. I went to writing workshops, criticized the hell out of my classmates, and won the professor’s approval. I wrote about death, life, and everything in between. I was infatuated with poetry. I was madly in love with the possibility of sound.

I stopped writing poetry ten years ago. I’m not sure how it happened that the bottom dropped out. One moment, I was madly scribbling away. The next, my notebooks were gathering dust in the back of a closet together with old forms and letters and piano exam evaluations. I tried to write. I truly sat there for hours on end trying to find that single silver thread, but it never came.

One of the many books I read in Bulgaria. 

Going on my Fulbright, I found poetry again. Not only in the landscape of the country I was born in, but in the books I was reading. I ploughed through Lope de Vega, Dimcho Debelyanov, and a hundred other thin books of poetry as well as anthologies of well known authors. I taught the Shakespeare sonnets. I once managed to somehow declaim “The Raven.” I fell in love again.

Poetry is that one art that works when nothing else does. When we want to capture the mood of a moment, we can take a picture. It lasts for years, but we can also write poetry. The lyric poem is founded on that idea. It was something the ancient Greeks discovered a long time ago. The idea that we could compress a moment of time through words and preserve that image we saw before us.

Poetry preserves our memory, but it also moves. We write it because we need to express ourselves in a way that is not easily understood by those around us. We bare our souls in poetry and we allow others to empathize. You cannot read “The Raven” without pinpricks on your neck or “Song of Myself” without a feeling of inward exultation. For a few moments, we live in the poet’s world and it becomes our world. We see what he sees, we understand what he understands.

I am still a poet for I was born in a country that has given birth to them since Orpheus. While I may not write in iambic pentameter, rhyme, or use any other device, I am a poetry because I see the world as the poet does. It is a world of tremendous beauty as fragile as the leaf fall off a tree and twisting in the wind full of tragedy and joy.