The Rainbow’s End by Lena Vanelslander
The Rainbow’s end is a returning piece treating specific writers, known and lesser known, published or self-published. Each time one writer stands in the spotlight, presented to you through 4 essential aspects: biography, core questions, poetry and a piece on the work of the author.
The end of the rainbow is the place where author and reader meet, in mutual understanding, intrest, ideas and visions. Where they can find each other, both in similarities and differences, under the extravagant assembly of the colours of life and maybe find that common pot of gold, for each other to read and understand.
I hope I can fascinate you with their poetry and writing and maybe even encourage you to read their work, as The Rainbow’s End does give you a full, essential profile of both author and work, concise, to the point and dedicated to you, beloved readers. All comments and questions are welcome, conversation with the author is encouraged!
The Rainbow’s End # 1
Anarda Nashai: Graduating from the School of Life
Short Biography:
Born and raised on the south side of Washington, D.C. into a large and close-knit family in the late seventies, Anarda Nashai studied successfully at Frostburg and Bowie State Universities. Still waiting to graduate from the School of Life (who ever does this anyway?), she developed at the early age of eight a taste for poetry and serious fiction … her love affair with literature and a passion for writing began. She joined the Maryland Writer’s Association (MWA) in 2007 and persues actively her dream of becoming a published poet and author. Other interests include Italian culture, world cinema, word search puzzles and of course reading.
To the core: questions of a lifetime …
1) How would you describe yourself in your own words?
“I love being told a great story whether written or word of mouth, watching documentaries, drinking red wine, and laughing aloud at all sorts of humorous things. I am a fiction writer, a poet, and a collector of unique handbags. Outside of becoming a published author and philanthropist, my goal is to find a beautiful male chef to marry (I’ll only consider marriage for an actual cook) and to drink authentic spumante in Sicily. The only thing that I absolutely hate outright is posing for photographs…well, that and bobby socks.”
2) What is your favourite quote?
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
-Thomas Jefferson
3) Which themes drive and engage you the most?
My roots to poetry are remarkably deep. As a child poet, I remember being influenced by several themes and movements of poetry, whether it was the wayward intuition of French symbolism, or the more earthly and dare I say, brutality of confessionalism. I’ve experimented with every style since then, but have recently settled with a method of free-versed confessional poetry, with themes that are more based on philosophy and commentary than they are with raw emotion. Since I do have a vested interest in international women’s rights, and love to network with other likeminded hearts, I often write in support of independence from behavioral conformity, cultural diversity and social freedom. In my collection, School Girl: Poetry and Prose of a Pre and Post Adolescent, you will find traces of my budding idealism, which has only matured in spirit over the years, and continues to drive me today as not only an artist, but as a human being.
4) Your bio states your continuing engagement towards poetry from 2007 till now, can you make this image more concrete and explicit for us?
As a child, my poetry journals were my unofficial diaries, so it was never my intention to publish them. Having concentrated more on writing fiction after college, I came across my journals, began to share them with family, friends and colleagues, and was encouraged to publish my first collection from my old journals. I fell back into the habit of writing poetry in 2007 and have plans to publish a follow-up collection of poetry in the near future. Currently, I am promoting School Girl, my first collection of poetry, selected from my junior high and high school poetry journals. While I’m in the process of publishing my first novel, Ladybug, I am also hard at work on several other literary projects, which include erotica/paranormal romance and creative nonfiction.
5) Do you have favourite books? Who are your favourite poets and authors?
*BOOKS: “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo – the best story I’ve ever been told! – and
“Kindred” by Octavia Butler – a book that inspired me as a girl …
*AUTHORS: Truman Capote, E. Lynn Harris, Michael Cunningham, James Baldwin, Jane
Austen, Ian McEwan, Carl Weber, Augusten Burroughs, Zane, Mario Puzo, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Kimberla Lawson Roby, Philippa Gregory, Angela Winters … the list is non-
exhaustive.
*POETS: Countee Cullen, Robert Frost, Sonia Sanchez, Anne Sexton, Billy Collins, Tupac
Shakur, Arthur Rimbaud, Adebanke Fagbenle, Rita Dove, William Shakespeare, Nikki
Giovanni … Again non-exhaustive …
Poems: the growth of a poet
School Girl
now that my teachers know I’m a writer
they say I’m special
…but I’m not really
i describe things with my heart and mind
compare feelings to wind and to shadows
i see people and places, eyes and hands
and form similes and stanzas
when people open their mouths to speak
i hear it for what it is to me
i mention pleasure and pain as far and as wide
as my youth will take me
if I taste or smell something sour
i will write that down and keep it forever
that’s all
i’m not special
i’m a school girl…
just as silly and restless
as the rest of them.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 13)
Lovetown
In all the years
with nurture and serenity, it is crowned
until the ocean pulls up to Juliet’s feet again
this town has burned to the ground…
Though crazy, sad messes it has aided
but this news is murder and me makes no sound
until birds shit good luck on the devil’s hideous kingdom
this town has burned to the ground.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 13)
Street Meat
Alley ways; traffic lights
Sidewalk trash; rat bites
Terrible traits; dirty feet:
The corner store smells of street meat.
Crippled cats; burning tires
Pregnant children, professional liars
Neighborhood block parties, a Motown beat:
My history smells of street meat.
Christmas lights, ginger bread
The straightening comb, my nappy head
Those evil winters, that blazing summer heat:
I welcome the stilled aroma….
A smell of street meat.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 14)
Ink in My Pen
Crimson of spontaneous
Tidal flowing outward across
To Aare
Seeing me, no eyes but ears
My brain…
Holding my red pen
Of red ink
My red smoke
Hands set a fire!
© Anarda Nashai (written at 14)
A Tribute to the Cold
A mere gasp with afflictions
Full of harrowing flows of susceptibility
Walking intrepidly through these psyched roads
I do not write love songs.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 15)
Words (A Dedication)
you are what i leave out
when letting off public steam from smooth trains
you are what stays in the back of my throat
when asked to “tell” what this life is like
you are what i use to explain
what my mouth can or will not speak or retain
you are what sleeps in my sky with the moon
(my nightlight while searching, sleeping in the dark)
you are why my dreams are wonderful and wild
you pick the light from the sun and hold it at a short mile
you are what sweeps my states of confusion
and temporary sadness to smog
you are what i need to keep tucked in my pockets
when the devil sneaks up as my shallow
you are what helps me pick up the very stubborn stones in my way
so that i will eventually get by and play
you are the motivation and satisfaction
that will hopefully, one day, allow me
to stand and shake loose my armor—
to let go a long, overdue sigh.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 15)
Trust
A cure vs. a plague
Vague of decent description
This cure
With no casualty of evil
Its armor lives in rusting seas
With cleaver sharks to protect
My life from there after waving to going ships
Watching stars engulfed by murderous skies
Of greed and of power and of other musty things
…and here, my life in the balance hung
Devoured by the later mentioned earlier
Run finally from brute and havoc’s dust
With my fate instills a dangerous mistrust
And so, Fair Naïveté, from you I go
Through my genetic map I hence with my right
To never kneel, cry or kiss you goodbye
And would rather burn in hell if I must.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 16)
If You Were Ignorant and I Was a Teacher
who is to say
that ignorance doesn’t have a reason?
ignorance
lives and breathes
to figure “reason” out
it lives freely
(does not pay taxes or need shelter from weather)
but where do you send it
when you say “go home!”
and he resides in YOU?
for where is the comfort
in thinking this concept through:
the fact that ignorance is sharing a roof with you!
who is to say
that ignorance doesn’t have a reason?
for its because of ignorance
my quest is for knowledge
(the popular turtle that it is…)
it’s purpose
is to give life plenty of examples
of tragedy and hope…
of flimsy paper, or melting plastic
(both completely unreliable, but are our only choices)
for if ignorance where a tree
and I were the soil
how many raindrops would the sky save
so that its seeds wouldn’t grow or spoil
for we are all trinkets
in this tree’s closet
and we choose everyday
which kind of trinkets we will be:
of costume or of dynasty (?)
of peace or of travesty (?)
would we choose calmly or hostilely (?)
…and if you look closely at your history, see
we trinkets are held down by ignorance
and not gravity…
who is to say
that ignorance doesn’t have a solution?
we read our books, ponder, then report
with our ignorance masked by so-called “intelligence”
…the mache derived from ignorant sources
…for if ignorance were a tunnel
and your conscience a train…
besides yourself and the road chosen
your derailment has no one else to blame…
for having a head on your shoulders
and being “smart” are not at all the same:
it’s HUNGRY ignorance
and it’s leech on our minds
that has no shame.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 16)
When a Teenage Poet Writes of a Lover’s Love
When our war takes a spotlight
…and when our feelings take their part
Under the light we feel vulnerable and exposed
And we wait for apologies from the invading audience
…as they witness the corruption of our vacant hearts
No standing ovations are allowed when we finish
And where are the stems of roses
And wide air kisses?
But still, when we warriors come home
To see that these civilians are still there
We sure don’t care about plays and such
Instead we watch the losing end of the war
In homage of heroes who never existed to start
Guns, Cannons, berets…those stupid stage plays
We sit and eat and play in the mud pits
And wait for the gun smoke to clear.
© Anarda Nashai (written at 17)
Uninvited
Ten year old pig tails
Clear, jelly sandals
From the classroom
Through the school gate
Friends
Fallen play yard fences
Candy store
Stepping on cracks in the sidewalk…
Then…
Young brown masculine hands
White leather covered feet
From a vacant alley way
Reaching out and pulling back
Hands
Breast
Backside
Caluses on my crying mouth
Releasing at the sound of something coming
Next…
Gravel
Piss
Terror
Confusion
A life replaced with the scales of shame
And then…
Silence.
(c) Anarda Nashai (written at 14)
School Girl: Poetry and Prose of a Pre and Prose Adolescent
Needing, Wanting…and Settling
What they want
is a dent in their mattress
for a steady keel while they are sleeping
they want to struggle
to figure out what’s in the corner
or on the surface of the other
to be able to sniff past
the Listerine and to the
marijuana laced breath of the other
they will settle
for foreign hands on their bodies
for other impressions to interpret
their wet or dry dreams
they want to pose with another
whose eye color is a better match
for their own up-do hair styles…
they will need a human heart
to explain to them their own hearts.
What do I want?
I want to live where I only need
turtle necks…and red wine
and straight lines
I will need to walk with bare hills
and not fret too much
about the snow or water beneath them
and If love so happens
to find me in route
I want to look at him
and feel affection completely
I will not be satisfied to delude
any more or less than this
for the well-planted waves
of my great imagination
…because I no longer bleed
or need to weave stairs of anecdotes
for backyard grills or Christmas dinners
I’ll pass on short, tiara-crowned fantasies
and illuminated, but still hidden promises
I will only settle to look back at love
and feel from it what I feel.
(c) Anarda Nashai (November 2008)
Strawberry Quotation Number 23
“Romantic Feelings
are the chemical equal
of drinking cracked goblets
of full-bodied merlot.”
(c) Anarda Nashai (October 2008)
Strawberry Quotation Number 23 (part 2)
“If it is written somewhere
it will save me somehow…
it will hand me my sword and shield;
my steaming green tea and wide neck pillow;
the wild and crazy and curly fly-aways that go from me…
It is written, embodied and loved
and has done me these irrevocable favors
it has done so till now
…and it shall till forever.”
(c) Anarda Nashai (June 2009)
The Covetable Spring
From May springs
the most cunning rights
of them there forever
we look down and see
but ought not touch
what shield keeps us
in tack of humane loop
yet circling all possibilities parallel–
Gardens of damned things mingling together
conversations of long appointed humility
history of these delicacies
slashed and flaming
my own pride jailed to each bulb here
where they lay in abundance
my blanket stretched for them all…
The most ill-pardoned roots
them their raised forever:
The tough-broken sprout of sin.
(c) Anarda Nashai (December 2008)
Notes For a Hunter
Kindness is a corpulent loner
a shiny, beguiled and wistful being
who won’t refuse a darker corner
in lieu of it’s disadvantaged alternative
…denied of simple consort
…displaced by momentary weakness:
it is the bud of life’s fusion–
it is the “waiver-er” of such particles alike.
2008 (c) Anarda Nashai
A word from the author herself
School Girl: Poetry and Prose of a Pre and Post Adolescent
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/school-girl-poetry-of-a-pre-and-post-adolescent/4351882
From the mind of a child through the heart of a young woman…
Written in thirteen-year-old dramatic monologue or in searing confessionalism at seventeen, School Girl is a most dazzling and unexpected collection of not quite “children’s” poetry. Anarda Nashai shares her uninhibited and thought-provoking voice as a young poet who has used her writing as a companion, a confidant that she’s come to rely on with each step taken toward womanhood. The collection contains mature content and may not be suitable for readers under the age of 13.
The Unconventional Poetess…
I came across some old poetry that I wrote as a girl and teenager. Looking back on all of them now, I can hardly believe that I did this … and yet, I remember feeling the urge to pull those words out of nowhere and constructing them to comment of all sorts of things every single day of my pre and post adolescent life. And thus “School Girl: Poetry and Prose of a Pre and Post Adolescent” was born. Everything was a motivation to me. Things that I heard and watched…loved and sweated over. Things that I needed to let others know, others that I felt I had no right to “say”.
Please don’t hesitate to comment or drop me a line at: anardanashai@yahoo.com
-Anarda Nashai
