Why Am I Doing Poetry Reviews?

This is hard but I will get it over. Nobody can do poetry reviews. Period!

Poetry is not a concept to be put in a jar, given shape, defined. Poetry is a bird in flight, captured by a hunter, a poet, given a name and put back in flight. Reviewing poetry is an attempt to recapture that bird.

When I write poetry, I write in darkness. I put off the lights, because poetry is a presence that visits me. When I write, I don’t edit. I don’t see with my eyes what I write – I don’t need to. I feel what I am writing. Reviewing poetry is putting the light on.

When words burn on my finger-tips and smell on my breath, when I feel the cold of alphabets blow; in ordered, almost spiritual self-arrangement one after the other into my room, reviewing poetry is like blanketing myself from this cold.

Writing a poem has its aura. When it is here, I stop everything, I grab a pen, a sheet, my laptop, I write. Because it does not stay. It comes, like a baptism and in the short expanse of time that it dwells, that poem must be written. When it leaves, it is useless to add a single word to the poem it left me. Reviewing a poem after this is a denouncement of my baptism, a betrayal of faith.

Why do I do poetry reviews? Why do I try to catch the spirit that visited men many years gone, many thousand miles away, whispered secrets into their ears, and try to make it whisper those secrets in mine? Reviewing poetry is eavesdropping on the conversation of saints and angels; a desecration of the temple.

 Nobody should review poetry. There is no glory in trying to explain faith. There are no words fit to explain poetry that came to men in a trance. Trying to transcend this trance is calling the bluff of God.

Why am I doing poetry reviews? I cannot understand and I beg all your pardons, forgive me. Forgive me for ruining the eternal scriptures with my diluted heathenism.

I cannot comprehend what I am doing here and I plead your indulgences – when you say your prayers, mention my forgiveness.

If the government cared, they would have arrested me. Nobody should do poetry reviews.