From The Inside Out Mag.
For Personal Healing, Spiritual Growth & Development

Why do we create art? The answer is different for everyone.  The one thing that is common among most.   The desire comes from some place deep down inside us.  Weather we are creating on a professional level or on a personal level we have a need to express ourselves.  No matter the form visual art, dance, drama, poetry, or writing.  Making art can be for fun and adventure; building bridges between ourselves and the rest of humanity; reuniting and recording fragments of thought, feeling, and memory; and saying things that they can’t express in any other way, creating art is away to let our souls speak! Each month we will be featuring a visual artist and a poet.  They will be from all walks of life and all ages and from many parts of the world.  We ask that you view and read their work and try to feel them.  Post your positive comments nourish their spirit they will check back to read what you say and others. 

 Peace & Love , ~Editor From The Inside Out Magazine

Liken to the waves of the ocean in her hometown of Savannah, GA, Brook Blander is a force of nature. At the tender age of five, she penned her first story and has since matured into an author, poetess, publisher, lecturer, and mentor. Since, she has   published five works, four collections of poetry and a writers journal (From This Day Forward (2003), Soul Spoken (2005), Lyrics of an Awakening (2007), Personal. Intimate Comforts of Reflection (2009), now that I'm here; lyrics from the mud to the sun (2010)). Truth, passion and the power of words are her weapons to proclaim love, profess healing and calm the unrests in the souls of the lost.  Her personal movement includes the restoration of the hearts and spirits of women wounded by violence. Thus, she is a compassionate philanthropist to the cause. Her proudest of all accomplishments is being a mother and partner in love.  She lives in Michigan where she continues to writes, design and manage her companies.

 

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The following is a e-mail interview with Poet Brook Blander conducting the interview through email gives the respondent a chance to consider the question, yet due to the informal nature of email, the interview doesn't lose that bit of personality and spontaneity captured face to face.

Ftisomag:   When did you begin writing poetry?

 Brook: My love affair with writing poetry began in 2003. Fiction had always been my first love, and still is, but poetry found me. I surely didn’t go out looking for it J But when we I sat to pen my first piece, “In A Way” I felt a flow that was so organic, poetry became a part of my literary life.

 Ftisomag: How would you describe your new book?

 Brook: “now that I’m here; lyrics from the mud to the sun” is my lyrical autobiography. It tells the story of my life from conception up to the point of becoming the poet that I am today. 

 Ftisomag: Who has been the biggest influence on your work?

 Brook:  I would definitely have to say it is a combination of my mother, my Love. My mother never hid the truth of who I was and how I came to be from me. She felt it was important for me to know. And in that, I never felt a shame as if it was a secret or that I was to ever live behind a secret. In my writing, this is what I vie to express, the power of the Truth…both knowing it as well as sharing it to help others with their struggles.

 Ftisomag: Is there a message in your work, if yes what would you say it is?

 Brook: There are many messages in my work. There is the message of triumph in survival and healing. There is a message of hope for a better day. There is a message of awareness and conscious living. Those are the message that I write with intention. I'm sure there are more messages that the readers themselves pull from the work based on their interpretation coupled with their life experiences. 

 Ftisomag: Do you consider yourself a certain type of poet? (i.e. women, African American etc.)

 Brook: Well. I'm a woman. I'm an activist. I'm African American. I fall into a many categories, but I don’t let them lock me into a box. Poetry, the art, just doesn’t work that way. I think even though an artist has written a certain type of work, they should never be labeled as that type of artist. Poetry is fluid.

 Ftisomag:  Which kind (of poetry) do you prefer?

 Brook:I'm a fan of poetry across the board and outside of the genres within. I do believe that every poem should released in its natural  and organically form. Then if the poet chooses, place into the poetry format they choose. It’s the poetry that happens before that placement that is most appealing to me. I do have a great appreciation for both lyrical verse and haikus. 

 Ftisomag: Did reading a poem first spark the desire to write poetry or was it an experience

 Brook: Though I read lots of poetry before I became a poet, it was definitely an experience that moved me to writing it. After a therapy session years ago, I went home and felt so full of emotion and needed to release it. At that time, I only wrote fiction and had never written poetry, nor did I have a desire to. But on this particular day, I had no interest or time to develop characters and settings, etc. I needed to get what I felt out. And I penned my first poem. 

 Ftisomag:  What is different about this book compared to your others?

 Brook: This book is my poetic autobiography. In it, I have revealed even more raw emotion about my personal life than I have in the preceding books. It is very focused and has a traveling movement from my dark conception to the brighter days of the life I live now.

 Ftisomag:  What goal do you seek through your poetry; to discover, to influence, to re-vision history?

 Brook: My goal in poetry is to bring awareness to the secrets that are buried deep within the people’s lives. There are so many people that are being eaten away by the secrets and pains that they carry. Those same secrets hinder relationships, growth, and inner peace. Through my poetry, I vie to inspire people to bring voice to what they’ve been holding so that they can deal with it, face the fears that have kept them silent for so long and begin to live a whole and complete life.

 Ftisomag:  Would you say that life-experience is more important than any sort of theory, or familiarity with any sort of poetic genre when it comes to writing poetry?

 Brook: It is my belief that life-experience and the soul’s reaction to it all is the true source of poetry. To write with the guidelines of a particular poetic genre in mind is learned. What makes the essence of the work is the ‘life’ transmitted into that structure from the poet to the poem.

 Ftisomag:  Is poetry a redemptive force?

 Brook: Indeed, it is. Poetry can truly save the world. That’s not just some line that you can find on a t-shirt. The power of poetry can encourage, heal, inspire, call to action, and empower one person or one nation. If we get enough poets to use poetry as their activism, we truly can save the world.

 

  

I Am

“Lyrics of an Awakening”

By Brook Blander

 

I am

        Generations of a hope manifesting

        Near decades of yesterday’s tears

        Dissolving in today’s sweet tea to be sipped into

             the sunrise of tomorrow

I am

Locks of intertwined reason and respect

Holding a candle to the memory of the death of my

    past ignorance

Never to be forgotten, only to be forgiven

I am

 Chemically balanced no longer by prescr

            substance

But by the marriage of faith in the Divine and love

     of self

For unto the union, I bow

I am

          The one daring to be different, not motivated by

                   fad, but motivated by hunger to be my own

                   woman, my own queen, honoring my temple,

                   kissing the back of my own hand, before asking

                   the world to love me as I am.

I am

          The taut embrace of a desire around my people to

                awaken

From an unconscious sleep that is dictated by the

    Largest weapon of mass destruction

Identified as  …a mind that does not think

I am

Inhabitant of an earth that is dissolving beneath

     my soiled feet

As I collect the grains for my own voracity and

    plant them for my daughter’s daughters and

    their daughters

I pray a prayer of forgiveness to the Divine

And beg to reap a crop that treats the soil as the

    soul

Respecting what is put in and taken out and

    honoring it for its purpose.

 I am

Heir to ignorance of self love and the

       differentiation between discipline and abuse

I carry the markings of slave reaction to a massah’s

      action entrenched six generations deep,

      smoothing our scars away with the almighty

      cocoa butter

Traveling through  HIStory in search of my

HERstory

And truth amongst the stores

And in between the lines

I am

Striving to be the answer to the

Question” what if the schools didn’t

teach history?”

I represent one that searches for my won truths

and understandings beyond the media and their

version

Of where the road began so that the path I journey is one that

 is guided by the Divine.

I am

Justification of lust and madness down the steel

barrel of power in a society wrapped in the

bloody cloth of secrets

I am unwanted midnight caresses of memories

haunting

And pleading not be forgotten, but remembered

daily

In the point of my nose and the brown of my eyes

and the honey-dusted cocoa of my skin

I am

My foremothers’s dreams and aspiration.

I am the hope beatean out of them

But kept and planted in the grounds of the their future.

I am

The unsigned agreement of the West Indies free

with sweet Georgia property

I am the here and now overlooked and under

looked by the eye of shame.

I am tomorrow’s Black history in her rawest form

 and I demanded that my story be told.

 

I am

Second chakra dominant influenced by my

creativity and my sensuality

Soothed by the blue water, energized by fired

orange and healed by the black onyx

I am

Double influenced by the throat and beginning

gateway to higher dimensions

Governed by truth and communication

As I know that THAT it is MY freedom

That I am passing on the MY daughters

And my daughter’s daughters

In Love and Peace.

  

I am then.

I am now.

I am what was

Manifesting what I will be.

I am. 

 

 

for more information on Brook Blander

 www.brookblander.com

By A.D. Foster

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Comments(2):

1. I am

   Simply BEAUTIFUL! I thoughtful journey or pleasure and painful awakenings. I will read this over and over and squeeze every drop of widom I can from it. Heir to ignorance of self love and the differentiation between discipline and abuse I carry the markings of slave reaction to a massah’s action entrenched six generations deep, smoothing our scars away with the almighty cocoa butter This line speaks to me and scratches that itch in my brain trying to verbalize a thought and wondering if anyone else get's it! Thank you for this expression of love and passion.

   Tuesday, December 14, 2010 Terence

2. Beautiful Words

   Great poem! I wonder if this was the poem you wrote when you had to get somethings off your chest because.....it definetly tells a story. I can feel the struggle in this poem and smile at its victory! Your work definetly inspired me to dig deep inside myself while reading it. I love the wisdom portrayed!

   Sunday, December 26, 2010 Micala