My Facebook friend, poet Clelia Albano, whose other work I have written about, has recently written a poem inspired by the work of poet Stefan Markovski, whose work, Promised Land, can be found here (and which has also been raved about by Albano in the comments).
Here is the text (again, I’m putting it in italics to distinguish it from my own writing):
Inspired by Stefan Markovski
And the poet descends down
into the chthonic realm
to meet his
Eurydice – inspiration –
and as he finds the words by extracting them
from the magmatic earth
surrounded by shadows,
like a miner he breathes dust.
Chewed and kneaded with
his divine saliva,
Orpheus brings them back to light
after he had madly turned his
head back for looking at the source
of what he creates, and he
embeds them in his chant and caresses them
with his fingers as he would caress
his beloved whose lament “heu”
feeds his blood.
And now, for my analysis.
In her tribute to Markovski, she compares his search for poetic inspiration to Orpheus in his search to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld. Albano is imagining Orpheus’ lover to be his Muse, just as Markovski is, in turn, Albano’s male Muse.
The search for poetic inspiration is a painful one: it doesn’t just come to the writer as a fluke. The writer must work hard at his or her craft, and in the process of doing this work, then the ideas come. The Muse helps those who help themselves.
Apart from the pain Orpheus feels in his desperate yearning to get his Eurydice back–understood here as symbolic of the poet’s painful search to retrieve inspiration–we see in Albano’s poem a comparison of the poet to a miner: “he finds the words by extracting them/from the magmatic earth/surrounded by shadows,/like a miner he breathes dust.”
One “descends down/into the chthonic realm.” On first glance, the word down seems superfluous, but when one considers the additional meaning for down, that is, ‘sad,’ we can see its use as justified. Also, “chthonic” adds to the dark sense of dread of being in the Underworld (“magmatic earth/surrounded by shadows”), since searching for inspiration can be a kind of Hell for a poet.
There is a vivid sense of the unpleasantness of the endeavour to find inspiration in how Albano says “like a miner he breathes dust./Chewed and kneaded with his divine saliva.” The use of the word dust, by the way, is also noted in her review of Markovski’s book of poems (link above). In it, she says, “his poems are populated by angels, wings, the Moon and the Sun, rain, wind, dust, ashes, powder, war and peace.” (My emphasis) So we see here how she was inspired by his writing to the point of using his imagery in her own poem, using it to express the discomfort of extracting that very inspiration. (I love, by the way, the melodious assonance in “divine saliva.”)
The poet “brings…back to light” his (or her) sources of inspiration, though in his madness he looks back at his Muse, Eurydice, dooming her to return to Hell. The pain in never getting that coveted inspiration back is the cross the poet must always bear.
He caresses those pieces of inspiration as an expression of the love he feels for them. That caressing is meant to soothe the pain of his doomed love, whose heu “feeds his blood.” This Latin expression of lament is an allusion to Book IV of Virgil‘s Georgics (line 498), in which Eurydice tells Orpheus of how his mad looking back at her has doomed her, and their love.
I’m sure all writers out there (me included, of course) can relate to Albano’s painful search for the right words to express one’s inner feelings. The excess of pain that Markovski has felt in producing his fine poetry is something she has noted and appreciated…and fortunately for us, her readers, been inspired by.
Infinite Ocean 