INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEW WITH FELLA CEDERBAUM
More Other Such Matters is a collection of spiritually searching poems that circle around identity, love, mortality, truth, and the persistence of the thinking mind that asks what remains when the thinking mind finally grows quiet. Do you see thinking as a barrier to truth, or a doorway that must be passed through?
I see it neither as a barrier, nor as a doorway. The mistake we make is that we get attached to our thoughts and mistake them for truth and then identify ourselves via those thoughts. Truth reveals itself when thoughts are left behind. In that sense we can use thoughts until they exhaust themselves and in the exhaustion, in that dead end, we might discover a glimpse of truth.
Many poems read like questions rather than declarations. Why is inquiry more important than certainty for you?
The origin of my poems lies in the questions that have posed themselves around everything, ever since I was young. When I started writing those questions I usually found that the things I thought I knew revealed themselves to be mere outer layers of deeper truths, which in turn, at some later point, would probably get turned on their head by more questions.
Declarations, while giving the impression of safety, a ground to stand on, are mostly self-defeating, rigid and therefore not really compatible with life. Life itself is constant change, a constant adventure of discovery. Once you draw the circumference of certainty around things, around your mind, it turns rigid and eventually gets suffocated inside dead concepts. If you dig deeply enough and with inner honesty, you will find that certainty does not really exist.
Are the more intimate poems, like those centered on love and loss, harder to write than the philosophical ones?
Not at all. I don’t set out to write poems of a certain category. All my poems start out with a kind of urgency of something wanting to be explored or said, or maybe even screamed out. I just follow their lead and sit down to write them down. They usually emerge fully formed, even though I often don’t have the slightest clue where they are taking me. Sometimes a poem about loss, for example, turns philosophical in the process of diving into the loss itself rather than avoiding it, by merely describing it from the outside.
You asked about a doorway before. The doorway is the very process of not avoiding anything that wants to show up, of digging into the deepest places I can reach, whether jubilant or terrifying.
I wonder whether purely philosophical poems that do not spring from love, loss, longing, happiness, loneliness, grief or fear can even spring from a pen. That would be more like a disembodied, scientific dissertation … or something like that.
What do you hope a reader feels—not just thinks—after spending time with this book?
I would hope for them to experience some of what I experienced when I wrote them. Would love for the readers to go inside themselves and allow themselves to ask their own questions or maybe recognize some of the landing spots I discovered in the process of writing. I would love for them to feel inspired to go on their own journey of exploration of what lies under the surface of their own being and burst out in wonder when they discover the sweetness that lives inside them.