This is going to be a long one. Brace yourselves.

I have been thinking a lot about things this week. About love, life, education, art, music and things.

I’ve been thinking about this blog and things. About whether I want it to provide entertainment and things to people, or whether I want it to make ME happy, or both. Both? That’s hard. Most blogs focus on ONE thing, not THINGS, like this Whispery Wind, blowing all over the place, whispering nothing.
I look at my stats and I can see that whenever I post a fun fashion post like Kitenge Kulture or a sarcastic Twitter post my views soar into the sky and beyond. About more personal things; not so much, and that’s fine. Some days I have the inspiration to write a post that I know many will like, other days, I just want to focus on me. Is that so bad? Whispery Wind is not about me writing to get a thousand views on my page every day. That does give me an ego boost once in a while, but that’s not the point. And when I start to lose my individuality because I am writing for views, and not about what I feel and what this blog was about to begin with, then I start to lose the plot. 

I have been thinking about love and things. And what a wonderful inexplainable feeling it is to be loved, and what an intense emotion it is to feel, this love. To feel your heart fill up with warmth and joy. To look into the distant horizon as the sun vanishes behind it, see all the different swirly hues and tones and know that the big guy who created all that, created me and loves me as His own. How my heart does one million little cartwheels when my mother sends me a picture of herself, or when I skype my friend in Canberra or New York, or when I’m in the embrace of someone I love, or when my 6 year old cousin writes me a letter, or my friend gives me pretty little gifts. LOVE.

I have been thinking about things. What the point of me living is. About growing up, my future career, having my own family and my own things.

I’m still talking about me thinking about things… The other day a lovely friend of mine (with whom I share a lot in common, such as a great appreciation of the arts), posted this on facebook:

When did poetry become so fashionable?

Is rudimentary linguistic ability and a capacity to feel the only jurisdiction to aclaim oneself as a poet? Methnks not.

A lot of mediocre “poetry” filling up my newsfeed.

And I began to think… What more do you need apart from linguistic ability and a capacity to feel to write a poem? It does not make you an ‘acclaimed poet’ but I think it’s all one needs to ‘write a poem’. I don’t like the word rudimentary. Simple maybe. Not rudimentary. But we tend to frown upon simplicity, understandably so. We like complex things, 3-5 levels deep, that stimulate our brains as we think hard about them, that have infinitely many interpretations, because ‘that is what makes a poem superior’. SIMPLICITY is not synonymous with MEDIOCRITY. What is mediocre poetry anyway? What are the standards by which poetry is rated? What are you looking for in a poem that would make you give one a 9 and another a 3? I disagreed with that facebook status. “I think there is no such thing as mediocre poetry”, I said. “Especially in the post modern world we are living in, anything goes.” She argued that saying ‘anything goes’, is like glorifying a tone-deaf singer or a rhythm-less dancer. I still disagreed. That analogy does not hold here. I say that the ‘tone-deaf singer’ analogy would only be relevant if we were talking about a poem with poor English grammar for example. In that case, it is mediocre, because there is right and wrong in grammar; as there is right and wrong in hitting a note in music.  There are rules in music and language, not poetry. Poetry, being an expression of the ‘poet’, cannot be mediocre. There are rules in classifying a sonnet as such; but poetry, as an art form, has no rules.

“…everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence “-Margaret Atwood.

Yes, writing one poem or two does not make one a “POET”. That said, the one poem written by some random bloke is still a piece of poetry and beautiful in its own right.  We may not like the stylistic devices employed, or the theme or the structure of the poem, but that does not make it substandard, because there ARE NO standards in poetry, only PREFERENCES. But then again, OPINIONS. I think jazz is a finer form of music than hip-hop, that does not make it true. My point: We have taken our own opinions and preferences to be the truth. Jazz is NOT better than hip-hop. Each of them is beautiful in different ways, I just like jazz more; and that does not make Hip-Hop mediocre. And now this is turning into an essay, I told you I have been doing a lot of thinking.

I have been thinking about things.