Skin: select poems - Paperback

by Natasa Sardžoska (Author), Hülya N. Yılmaz (Editor), Hani Arbid (Photographer)

There is a space within me. A space which is homeless. Borderless. A space which is mute. A cellular space. A conflicted space. It overwhelms me. It obsesses me. It disturbs me. It disrupts me. A space that I cannot hear, but I can feel it. The cells are impregnated with memory that I cannot tell. I write poetry to tell. I write to give meaning to those spasmodic voids. I write to interconnect those spaces in my mind. The process is subtle. I cut off the detail, the microscopic fragment, the zero level of the knowing, and I float. I shift in-between words. I reveal the subliminal drift. The tectonic motion of the word. The chamber character of my poetry reflects that space with which I have communicated in a distinguished fashion. But that space has no words. I had no words when experiencing that space. That space is absorbing spatial memory which is speechless. I give mouth and tongue to that space within my verses and that is the distorted, the bewildered, the unprecedented, the allusive experience. The poems I create become agents of traces that I have accumulated with my sense and sensations. A hotel room, an airport gate, a lobby, a train station, a deserted port, a marine bay, ground control, border crossing, empty restaurants, an old-school bar, crowded streets, massive cities. A silenced space of corporal and sentimental memory. There is nothing else I can do when I face the white page. I want to see myself inside. I want to tell the world to the world. I want to see. The white page is a mirror. I cannot lie. I cannot hide. I walk on the cadmium textile. I would not be able to write if I was not honest and sincere in my relation to that whiteness, to what I write. I write to calm my nerves. My mood shifts. My despairs . . . My desires . . . I write to fill in the abysses. I write to suffocate my abysses above which I levitate. I defy gravity. I write to save myself from choking. From burning out. From drowning. Writing poetry gives direction to my nervous contortion. In extreme conditions, I often feel the urgent need to write as if there would be some emotional Hiroshima in my inner room if I did not write.What else can a poet do when (left) alone? What else when anything else falls apart? Which space can the poet dwell in? Yet, I never defined myself as poet, for a poet consists only in the very action of writing. Only in that moment do we give sense to that side of our existence. Outside that moment I execute other everyday dimensions or other dimensions of my ontological being. In the process of poetry-making, I am cutting off the reality to produce another sensational reality. I translate the language. This language can be sometimes obsessive, exuberant, exaggerated or exhilarated, but at other times, it can be mute or even aphasic.