Many thanks to poet Caius Dobrescu for inviting me to participate in the „my writing process” blog tour. You can see his own response here.
1. What am I working on?
For now, I call it Nada Surf. It’s a journey into a world of weaknesses and inertia. Surfing through something as boring as inertia can easily deserve a title like Nada Surf.
I stated somewhere in an interview that this was going to be a big step forward towards a poetry lacking both poetical persona and events. Now I’m not that sure anymore. I think the big step became a little step in the process. And one of the reasons why I think so is that the second part of my project is still visibly rooted in the auto-fictional poetry of the 2000 generation.
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I like to think about myself as a person/ artist who has the ability to see unusual and/or somehow hidden details of the reality. I usually use these details to build images. And I think that the layers of images that my poems contain establish their strength. I’m lucky to be born in the Age of the Image. In this age you can bet all the talent you’ve got on producing powerful images, hoping that nobody will observe that you lack a set of principles, that you didn’t develop a philosophy of your own yet. Well, let’s say my situation is not that hopeless, but I really admire those artists who can build their work on a strong personal belief. I can’t really say that I have my own world-view, but I believe that the details I’m putting together in my work are able to offer a larger picture.
3. Why do I write what I do?
There is this very popular cliché in art: I create because I suck at the art of living. It often happens to me to feel that I miss something, that my presence is actually blurring reality. I write because I feel the urge to clarify. If I am able to clarify, this better version of myself (a self that understands), expressed in words, will have some kind of effect on my life. Maybe this is the reason why some people say I am more of a diarist. My books of poetry are about different periods of my life. When a period comes to an end, I can expect the same thing for the creation period linked to it, even if most of the times I don’t even have a clue about where does something begin and where it ends.
4. How does your writing process work?
Sometimes it means giving flesh and context to an image or a feeling from a dream. Other times it is digging into something disturbing (for me). But almost every time, the “ground zero” of my writing is some kind of sense of loss, followed by the urge to seek refuge in the pleasure of writing. I have the feeling that there is a breach in the laws of reality, followed by the systematic deconstruction of this intuition. So, the act of writing is this constant need of equilibrium and the constant need of feeling alive.
Cutia Neagră 