It happens this way ...

By popular request, here is the original interview in English with Irma Kurti. If anyone speaks either language, let me know how she did!

 Your poems have appeared in more than 150 journals throughout North America, Australia and the UK and you have also published five poetry collections. Do you think poetry is a great means to convey a message to the people?

I don’t write to convey messages. If readers find one in my work, that’s lovely. I write to see if I can capture the world — inside and out, past and present–in language and images that are new and fresh and give me joy. Perhaps that is the message: I want to share the blast of joy I experience when I’m writing and the simmering hope that someone will read my poems!

You are passionate about writing and photography. Any preference between the two? Do they complement each other?

I spend more time writing than photographing, but each activity has one thing in common: the call to pay attention. I feel I am more present to the world when I have a camera in my hand. Likewise, as I go through a day and experience my inner and outer worlds, I try to be aware of the sights, sounds, smells, touches that make this day unique. These details may find their way into a poem.

You are a poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation and you read a lot of poems every day. What is the impact of a beautiful poem on you?

 When a poem makes me jump out of my chair or pump my fist in the air shouting “Yes! Yes! Yes!”, I know something special has happened. The language, form, and subject matter have drawn me in and shown me things I haven’t seen or heard before. When a poet can take a truth — even a difficult one — and create something beautiful out of it, I’m engaged and delighted.

We have been through a difficult period due to the pandemic. How did this affect your work as an author and editor?

Truthfully, the pandemic didn’t affect my writing or editing that much at all. Since both are solitary activities, I had more time to spend on them. Perhaps one of the best things that came out of this time was Zoom poetry readings. I attended more readings virtually during the pandemic than I had in person during the previous five years. To be able to read with or listen to poets from around the world was a gift. I hope this virtual option will remain available to us going forward.

May you share any advice for the poets, for those who want to dedicate themselves to writing?

I’d like to share three thoughts for aspiring poets:

1. Read, read, read – but not only good contemporary poets. Read the recent masters who have stood the test of time like Frost, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, Bishop, Williams, and Eliot. We are standing on their shoulders and they provide us with themes and techniques we may want borrow and expand.
2. Network, network, network. Go to readings, take a class, join – or create – a critique group. However, recruit people into your group who are knowledgeable about the craft of poetry. You want to spend time with poets who are already good writers and know what good writing is. Although it may be fun to hang out with those who will applaud everything you write, that may not be the best use of your time.
3. This may sound counter-intuitive, but poets should challenge themselves to write about what they do not know. Science, art, music, cosmology, world religions, etc. offer images and ideas that will enrich anyone’s work. I remember reading articles that claim the sun rings like a bell, that North America moves closer to Japan by three inches each year, and that there’s a species of frog that listens with its mouth. Each of those images delighted me and worked their way into poems. I couldn’t make them up!

What is your routine for writing?

I am totally undisciplined, so routines vary. One thing I have latched on to: Before I start a  new poem, I re-read a few recent ones to see if they need any tweaks (They usually do!) That often jumpstarts working on a new piece.

Also I keep lots of files. One is filled with the “Word of the Day” from Dictionary.com. I’ve had fun filling my poems with the extraordinary vocabulary I find there. I have a file  brimming with quotations on any topic I come across in my reading or watching TV (Yes, I do!). I have files filled with phrases or lines that pop into my head and I don’t want to lose them. Many have found there way into my poems.

If you are blocked, what do you do?

For years, whenever I hit a fallow period, I thought I’d never write again. These times could last for weeks or months – and that was discouraging. However, once I realized there was a rhythm to my writing life, I was able to ease in and out of these blank-page times with less angst. What I substituted for writing was gardening, photography, and all kinds of crafts.

See, I believe we create or we die, and one type of creativity leads to another to another to another. Of course, when you’re not writing, you’re reading and observing. You’re amassing those files of new words, quotations, snippets of conversation you’ve overhead: all gems that may sparkle when the time and energy to write returns – and it will.

 

 

 

It happens this way …

Twenty years ago today, I settled in the front row of a hotel conference room after delivering a management training presentation to 300 people in Orlando, Florida. I had just taken a few deep breaths when the back doors burst open and hotel personnel rushed in to tell us about the attacks on the World Trade Center. In those first surreal moments, people rushed from the room, scrambled to call home, book flights (the airports were already closed), and grab rental cars that would drive them all around the country.

For the next three days I was hunkered down in a darkened hotel room doing the worse thing I could do: watch the continuous stream of news about the horrors unfolding in real time. I flew home four days after the attack.

A month later I was in NYC, standing in front of another audience. I had already taken the subway down to ground zero, talked to as many policemen, -women, and citizens I could find, and heard stories of tragedies and miracles that haunted me for years.

Then, last September 11, 2020, I almost forgot to commemorate the day because we were preparing to evacuate from near-by fires. Ultimately, we were blessed not to have to leave our home. Now in the year that brings us to another September 11, fires, floods, deaths, upheavals around the world remind us again and again that, on any given day, we have not here a lasting city.

Here’s a poem I wrote that unites last September with the original event. It will appear in The Poeming Pigeon: From Pandemic to Protest which will be released on October 15, 2021. For information, go to https://thepoetrybox.com/taking-pre-orders-tpp-pandemic-protest.

 

Fires This Time

Oregon, September 11, 2020

While I check out evacuation routes and pray

our packed cars are precaution not necessity,

thousands have lost all there is to lose except

each other and maybe a treasure or two: a dog,

a cat, livestock raced to fairgrounds, a teen’s diary.

 

They don’t see what we­­––the hunkered-down-in-place––

see: miles of ash heaps, contorted cars and trucks,

war-weary firefighters who breathe the unbreathable.

 

Meanwhile, my mother lies in a NJ nursing home.

She can’t remember if she ate her lunch or how

to answer her phone. I watch her mind slip

into the smoke that wipes out our Douglas firs.

 

Today she doesn’t know her air is clean

or that nineteen years ago, she breathed the ash

of 3000 souls drifting by in another blackened sky.