Creative Spurt
By now the moon has shrunk back
to a dark comma in the sky,
and I have stopped writing.
Two weeks of rubbing pen and paper
like a cicada its front legs, and erupting
in some language I no longer use
for thinking. They say the tongue
you become a poet in is the one
which can never tell a lie.
If it leaves me now, who will miss it?
How could I live with it, without it?
from: Katerina Stoykova: The Porcupine of Mind (Broadstone Books 2012)
The author writes in English and Bulgarian. The Porcupine of Mind contains poems written in English.
Katerina Stoykova is the author of poetry books in English and Bulgarian, most recently Second Skin (ICU, 2018, Bulgarian) and the bilingual Bird on a Window Sill (Signs, 2017, English and Bulgarian). The Bulgarian edition of How God Punishes was published by ICU in 2014 and won the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Prize. Katerina is the editor and the main translator of The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry (Accents Publishing, 2014). For six years she hosted the literary radio show Accents on WRFL 88.1FM. In 2010, Katerina launched the independent literary press Accents Publishing. Katerina co-wrote the independent feature film Proud Citizen, directed by Thom Southerland, and acted in the lead role.
Photo credit: Katerina Stoykova
This blog post is part of #BulgarianLiteratureMonth.
“They say the tongue
you become a poet in is the one
which can never tell a lie.”
I always thought that conversing in a foreign language ensured plainer and straighter talk, because the habits of circumlocution and empty embellishment had yet to be acquired. It’s almost like being a child again, in its earnestness.
I never thought to apply the same logic to poetry — or to apply poetry to the same logic.
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