An Inhabited Planet in the Poetic Spiritual Orbit

On FATIME KULLI’S book “The Shoes of Fog”

By PILO ZYBA

There are streams and brooks that fill the rivers and vanish into the deep sea of culture, but there are also wellsprings of song that create a river of creativity that withstands the test of time. It waters the fields of feeling and thought, of love and hate, of that part of life which is unseen but expressed, which is untouched but read. You see and feel such a river when you read the work of the writer, poet, and publicist Fatime Kulli.

It has become our habit that when we take into our hands books that express the intimate world in their pages, we withdraw somewhere aside, in intimacy, unbutton the beautiful shirt of thoughts, and savor the beauties of expression, imagery, or fantasy. This is what happens with the poet F. Kulli. With the stones of letters and the blocks of verses,

and the buildings of poems, she is raising a new, modern architecture with strong foundations. An architecture with large windows to see the light, to catch the whims of colors and the scents of the flowers that make the human soul bloom.

Her newest book, “The Shoes of Fog,” opens with the cycle “My Roots.” She sings with pathos to her origins, her love, her blood, and her genesis. In it, the verse is a calling, a searching, or a deep-echoing sound, a Bell to be heard by the deafened centuries that have passed, the ones we live in, and the ones to come. This cycle is her passport of identity, with which she rightfully boasts in the great ranks of literature. Her roots are the key to opening the 20 doors of her poetic houses called books. They open the great door of her poetic cosmos. What stands out here is a poetry that is at times a cry and at times melancholic, which curves, dips, or rises according to the emotional weight and the delicate feeling that runs through the author at the moment of giving birth to her children, her poems. If you read the poems “The Stone of the Guest Room,” “Drink the Colostrum of My Breasts,” “Your Gray Hairs,” etc., this is easily understood. Here is how she puts it:

Come, oh highland boy

Drink the colostrum of my breasts!

They are breasts of pain,

Breasts nourished with the love of Arta.

“Drink the colostrum of my breasts”

It is the breast of Rozafa left outside the walled-in stones, for the newborn child to drink, to drink history, life, to walk the path of not being lost as a nation, as a history, as a human being. The legend of the “Bridge of Arta” is the continuation of her historical legend, of Rozafa. Of the legend that forges the bond of blood and national identity.

Then, in the book in question, another door opens, which has hung on its shoulders the simple title:

“The Battle Between Me and Reality.” A door that leads you into a world different from the first, yet still difficult to cultivate and somewhat unknown in the depth of its play and variety with the word and its content.

All those who enter the welcoming house of Kulli’s poetry say: “Her poetry is fragile and lyrically erotic to the bone, intimate down to the deepest cells of human sensitivity.” I ask the question: where is the surprise, where is the unclarity, where is the unbelievable? In these difficult times, nothing has more value than feeling. Fatime has discovered the only success. Buildings are torn down and new ones are built, systems are replaced, cosmonauts went to Mars, to the Moon, and what did they bring back? Nothing!

Continents were discovered, comets were named, America was discovered, but was the great continent of the human world discovered? So Fatime became a cosmonaut of the great world of the spirit, of the human being, of that being which never dies. This is what Fatime Kulli does. The poet! The thirst, her thirst to find even the very last spring in the planet and the deepest forest of feeling, and to make it public.

But what are the features of this poetic river, the volume of its flow, its crystallization, its manner, form, colors, fluidity, message, extent, or perspective? All these I mentioned are springs that fill her riverbed. That river which makes you love it when you sail within it, hate it when it slams you forcefully through the caves of thought and seems to tire you out. It soothes you and makes you savor the murmur of the currents, of the fish metaphors swimming in the river of creation, striking with their tails the moon’s kisses on the virgin surface of the water, photographing the greenery of the trees and the banks. Now every sound, a bird drinking water in her river, even a stone thrown onto its surface that creates the ripples of thought and the quiver of feeling, turns into a verse, an impression, a thought.

Fatime Kulli is a poet and a photographer, a painter and a psychologist, and a singer of feeling, whether it is rough or fragile. I know, someone will say, slow down, come back down to earth! I come down, but her art does not let me. It has a feeling of flight, morning visions, fires that burn to quench the amorous thirst of the feeling of love. Yes, I will sit at the round table of discussion to be convinced of what I said and of other things I will say. Not because I want to talk, for in our time much is said but little remains, but to be convinced that at our poetic table, poetry is not bread and meat to fill the stomach, nor stones to build villas of glory or to paint them. The poet in question does not seek to do these things, and this is the main success of her pen and her thought.

On the cover of her latest book, “The Shoes of Fog,” the author has hung a pair of shoes. Comical in appearance. But really, just think about it! We all know Fatime! Rightfully, she does not need shoes. In the meadows of her art, among the flowers, she walks barefoot so as not to trample the flowers of feelings. She steps lightly, so as not to damage the colors and ruin the scents. Then her poetry strips down to what it truly is, beautiful, fragile, splashed by the variety of colors of the sun of love and the silver face of the moon’s sensation, female. To be as close as possible to feeling, to love, to the spirit, she does not need shoes but angelic wings, and she puts them on. From the moment she turns into an angel, she does not live with reality

but with feeling, impressions, touches. The flights seem a bit exaggerated in proportion, but we must understand the moment the author speaks; when she lives in the spiritual volcano of creation, she cannot pretend,

stop and choose words and figures, for angels are feeling and innocence themselves. They do not think about impressions, nor about the frames that people have created for their feelings.

In another moment, Fatime takes dozens of shots with her poetic camera. She takes them just as her camera, her eye, sees them, and as her spiritual camera of a poet reads them. Gathered together, these flashes, these poetic snapshots, make up an exhibition where a person entering the exhibition of feeling

created by Fatime finds themselves expressed in mosaic, in morality. Here I can mention “Like the Candle,”

“Adolescent,” “The Testament of Waiting,” “Under the Tongue of Passion,” “With the Milk of the Eye,” etc. I think this poetic exhibition could have been a book on its own, distinct in its manner, form, and thought. In this cycle,

a particular feature stands out. She seems to choose neither the verse nor the theme. She draws the poem from a snapshot

that emerges from the sky of her world, bringing it to us as a moment of sensation drawn from the world of inspiration. She is as clear as light; she does not scatter herself in guesswork, nor in versification, nor does she fall into moralizing. Here is an instance:

The door of my soul, I know

Has never been closed to you

Just a little, push it just a little

You will rest in a mountain of longing...

The poem “Push It Just a Little”

This poem says it all. Is it an erotic poem? I could even say no. Here is why I say no! This poem seems to me to be dedicated to my parents, to my children, who waited until the break of dawn when I returned from exile. Was the door of their soul not the gate of a longing for them? So many of them seem like erotic poems, but their scope, purpose, and morality are hidden somewhere deep; they must be sought out to be understood and savored.

The construction of Kulli’s poetry depends on the weight and force of her impressions. Swallowed up by inspiration, she chooses the form of its layout, the imagery, deciding whether to make it visual or a core theme. These happen naturally, but we get the impression that the author fights and struggles in her creation until it is born, only to be impregnated again with a new motif.

In the long, unrhymed classical poems, the thought flows freely and murmuringly, intertwined with dense imagery, with a closing like a title that stays in your memory even after you have closed the book. For those who know a little about music and its tempos, the verse creates a broken, non-monotonous rhythm and an escalating harmony which, although it brings you down to the final step, leaves you unaware that the poem has ended. In the midst of losing yourself, you understand yourself, the event, and its immortalization upon the sound of feelings, which increases your desire for artistic experience. This can be seen in the poems: “I Have a Heart,” “Your Hands,” “Solar Orgasm,” “In a Troubled Castle,” etc.

If we notice carefully, the word dream is repeated in 60% of her poems. It makes you think that in the vocabulary and architecture of her song there is a lack of lexicology (of expression, of the written word), but then you realize that this word, always introduced in the same tonality, is a long refrain that makes you understand the particularity and identity of her sound, voice, and song.

Another feature of Kulli’s pen is prose poetry, as we are used to calling it. This is a form and manner that I have encountered a lot in the Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos while translating his multidimensional

work. Here you are struck by another style, free and musical, a deep and careful observation of landscapes, movements, and impressions. The poet’s talent brings what she takes from the screen of the eye onto paper, elevated into art. It feels as if you have climbed onto a grand piano and, while walking across it, you play a symphony that awakens your desire with harmonious sounds. I see this kind of poetry taking root in other poets too, though this is not the place to mention names, but I think Kulli has achieved it better in color, in form, and most importantly in the weight of the thought it carries and conveys to the reader.

In short, I think Kulli’s poetry has raised a unique tower in the great poetic city. The vast world of human feeling, seen from the perspective and exploration of her eye and talent, deserves to be respected.

A cycle translated into English is also attached to the book. And this is a feature and a necessity for the times we live in. Foreign languages have become part of our lives, windows to see and savor further. Fatime has utilized this too in the interest of her art.

I do not know Kulli personally, but I know her art. It speaks to me, soothes me, and inspires me, why hide it. This makes me look at its unique aspects, analyze it, and bring it before you so we can savor it together. Kulli’s poetry is bright, a small, distinct planet in the artistic universe. I think we must speak of its light before others laugh at our silence and naivety.