Preface.

What is a Poem?

This is not a question that I necessarily seek to answer, rather a question I pose to you, dear reader.

Most know me as a musician — sure, a lyricist, guitar player, singer. But I have, until now, kept my poetry largely hidden.

I feel as if Poetry is a misunderstood art, and I find myself aligning with the likes of Walt Whitman, William Stafford...

Poems, until recently, have meant something different to me at different stages of my life.

In school, Poems were a burden: something to study, boring me, as we discussed the literary qualities of the great works.

This carried on until I began writing songs at the age of 13, I felt I was no longer writing directly in English, rather a version charged by music.

I didn’t know it, but thus began a new era with my relationship to Poetry. Lyrics — yes — I would have never called them “Poems.” But, read any lyric and consider what you have, sans music?

When I began traveling in 2014, I wrote diary entries depicting my feelings through my journey. Writing observations… One that has been on my mind lately: writing in a notebook similar to this one, at a restaurant in Prague, drinking a beer, eating a burger, and watching the Czech people, young and old alike, getting drunk late into the evening.

I might look back at those writings, some shorter, some longer, and call them “Poems.”

It wasn’t until I read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman that I came to realize that I, the musician, perhaps was a Poet as well. My heart felt so attuned to the universal themes Walt Whitman expressed — freedom, celebration of the human and mother earth, darkness, light, hate, love…
I loved that a poem need not rhyme; that a poem can linger on for tens of pages. Or be as short as two sentences.

What differentiates these “Poems” from other writings of mine is the fact that they come from a different stream. The source, my heart and soul, is the same, but it is carried along a different river.

I sit down at my desk (or lie on my belly on the floor) and write. I don’t judge. I write one line, then another. Maybe another. Maybe I pause — and end the poem. Or maybe I dive deeper, letting my subconscious direct the words.

In this book I present to you Poems that I have written during the year 2020. I do not revise the Poems (okay, on occasion to fix the embarrassing spelling mistakes); some were written here and there, in anger and in vain, in love and longing, in hope, and with courage to clear a way to my unfiltered heart.

I am still learning what a “Poem” is, and if I’ve learned one thing, it is this:

A Poem is not this
nor that
But a feeling you get
when you’ve finished reading
the final words.

Sincerely,

Arik Dov


Images by: Ella Wayfarer