June 8, 2012
In his article “Who Needs Poets?” Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “The poet’s
trade, the writer’s trade, is a strange one…a writer needs loneliness,
and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and
also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the
universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer—to be
living a kind of double life.” As a poet in the Creative Writing
Masters of Fine Arts Program at Boston University, I have become
increasingly aware of this insatiable need for “the universe” and so,
here I go. To Argentina: to experience the sounds and movements of
tango flooding the streets and the unique music of Argentinian
Spanish; to discover the country through the works of Borges and Julio
Cortazar, but also those of contemporary Argentinian writers; to get
lost in cities I’ve only ever imagined. To Brazil: to learn Portuguese
from new friends, from poetry, and from Bossa Nova; to delve into its
European, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian blends; to explore its
brimming selvage and tangled languages, its traditions, new and old.
To imbibe little bits of universe, one corner at a time.
You can follow my travels at http://natashahakimi.wordpress.com/