VERSE
Weird Kisses
To the oddballs and freaks who write
Baisers Bizarres, Alex Beaupain and Rebecca Williams
“Je suis un colis píégé
Un cheval de Troie
Un cadeau empoisonné
Pour qui m’ouvrira
Rouge est ma bouche
Quand elle sent le sang frais
Et qui la touche
S’en ressent á jamais
Baisers bizarres
Des délices aus lycée
Prise au hasard
D’une lisse odyssee
Et je glisse ma malice
Dand l’hélice d’un Ulysse
De quartier
Penélope, enfant pop
S’enveloppe dans son top Échancré
Je suis une fleur vénéneuse
Au parfum capiteux
Une amanite tueuse
Me mange qui peut
Noir est mon coeur, Son charbon Germinal
Est aux mineurs aux garçons”
Last year, when Ellemeno editor David Todd McCarty agreed to accept poetry submissions, Verse was born. This was partly thanks to fellow contributor Marc Barham for his instigation and passion for penning poems himself. “Can we submit poetry?” Marc asked, and Chief David nodded and gave us the green light.
Soon after, David, Marc and I started throwing our own caution to the wind and some serious wordplay started happening. We now have a few more poets on board, and it enlivens the Ellemeno anthology.
That simple suggestion Marc made, and the editorial encouragement from David, did more than meets the eye. The last time I had written anything close to an original poem was in 1999. Yes, that long. How time flies.
There is a reason for it (as always) with a chicken stock of disappointment thrown into a broth of neglect.
I started my serious writing at university at the encouragement of my writing professor. Instead of writing what I liked and enjoyed — features — I was challenged to write what I didn’t — you guessed it, poetry.
I thought it was boring, archaic and restrictive. I must have been utterly mad and stupid because as I seasoned into writing as a craft not just as a hobby, I discovered poetry was liberating.
The free flow of ideas and words, playing with reduction, compounds and strategic placement, got me hooked. It was a journal exercise every night before bedtime.
Weekends on campus were spent exploring a series of verses that had no specific direction, but just allowing my fingers to play hard with the 2B pencil and an eraser.
Langston Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Anne Bradstreet, Ted Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams were the cream in my first year. My senior years narrowed on the post-colonial writers such Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and it was here I gravitated towards the recluse extraordinaire Janet Frame, whose work later became my Masters thesis.
Frame, who had Schizophrenia, saw life in ways that were so remarkable that she was institutionalized.
She described falling alphabets like rain from the sky, words that got off the ground and walked, and the way nature orchestrated uncanny and surreal imagery after imagery that so mesmerized her that she noted everything down detail to detail, not a minute of her vision missed.
Her writings and interpretations were so vivid, alive and nascent to her New Zealand society that family members and doctors agreed that she needed a lobotomy.
Right before her scheduled lobotomy, Frame received news her writing had won a national literary prize. Now praised for her creativity, doctors canceled the operation and looked at her condition differently. Perhaps they had been wrong.
Today, Janet Frame’s body of work is considered as purposeful, if not critical, as Freud’s dream interpretation analyses at the turning corner of the 19th century.
Her writing presents a gateway to understanding the workings of creative geniuses to psychologists. Was she writing her psychosis? Was she describing her mental decline which cannot be captured using medical science at the time? Was she simply a marvelous misunderstood human being who was passionate in writing? Was she led into madness for her writing or did her writing save her from further mental decline?
Frame insisted that what she described — fantastic and magical as they may be — are what she literally saw.
Doctors and the simple, good folks of the New Zealand community soon realized that perhaps, the language of our minds are meant to be different, not to be judged and dismissed for being odd and unfamiliar.
Perhaps, Frame was seeing the magic of what we ordinary folks lacked the ability to see and appreciate.
Perhaps, Frame spoke a new language we needed to learn.
Perhaps, her falling alphabets and speaking petals of the ordinary blooms meant she saw a vortex of new meaning.
Perhaps, Frame’s mind was light years ahead of what we are willing to allow ourselves to understand.
Janet Frame was so remarkable as a literary figure that she inspired me to write a thesis on magical realism. Through Frame, I learned to see magic through the weaving of ordinary words and its potent ability to become extraordinary.
Words, not just writers, have personalities and they come alive in more ways than one. Remove a punctuation, reposition a word in a sentence, emotions can be manipulated, an orchestra of meaning begins along its engagement of syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology.
And like Frame, I believed that writing is what can save our soul and heal us from the tragedies of the world.
Well, it definitely saved her life.
If one is to travel to New Zealand, aside from the set of Lord of the Rings, consider it a pilgrimage to two geniuses of the country you must seek: Janet Frame and Taika Waititi.
There are many more such as Jane Champion and Peter Jackson but to assert the context of eccentricities and breaking the rules of creative conventions, begin your exploration with these two. They will inspire you and change your writing tongue. Frame did that to mine, and I can never forget that journey.
Leaving college, I lost an entire box of poems I wrote from my juvenile, innocent heart. Works I was meaning to publish. I was upset with myself that I thought I’d give it a rest. That rest became two decades. Make that a cautionary tale!
Verse jump started me into a section of my mind I had almost forgotten. Like any rusty musical instrument, I need to call for a tuning. Also, I need to practice and sharpen my 2B pencil again. This time, there’s Google Drive. I will remind myself what Ken Follette said,
“A mistake is a mistake. Another mistake is normal. Only the same mistake twice makes you a fool.”
Below are the poems I submitted to Verse. I also would like to dedicate the song “Baisers Bizarres” to all my poetry comrades on Verse, Ellemeno.
Baisers Bizarres is translated as weird kisses; the lyrics reflect how the oddities of another can be understood by another equally odd, who could see beyond that and translate as beauty and wonder. And to quote Janet Frame using the framework of magical realism, “All things ordinary are nothing short of extraordinary. You need to see its magic.”
That, I think, describes who we are on Ellemeno. A hat tip to you Chief David.
Salud to Verse, and more.
My poetry:
