“[Poetry is] like that song that we hum in our brain,” says Qyqja. “And that is the force of poetry, showing your emotional world portraying beautiful things that have meaning.”

As the UNESCO’s World Poetry Day returns March 21 with the theme of “Poetry as a Bridge for Peace and Inclusion,” Qyqja observes how readers are returning to the poetic form, highlighting a desire to feel again.

Putting music on paper

For Qyqja, poetry’s power largely lies in its melodies. She asserts that readers of poetry must be captured within the first few verses. Poetry, she says, must “strike” its audience, a side effect of the form’s brevity.

“Prose is very forgiving, it’s a movie, whereas poetry is actually a song,” the poet adds. “To have a song, you have to keep the rhythm you have to keep the inside melody.”

Qyqja is also no stranger to the language of music. Born in 1970s Albania, the poet’s musical dreams were cut short after not being selected for the country’s music school. She still, however, attributes her love of poetry to singing Albanian songs.

“You’re singing your first songs, and not necessarily just children’s songs, but also the songs that you’re growing up [with] around your house,” the poet recalls.

Music encouraged her to analyze language at a young age. As a teenager, Qyqja turned to other forms of artistic expression before deciding to put her family’s resources into studying English. After resonating with Jack London’s Martin Eden, a novel about a young proletarian’s journey to becoming a writer, she decided to put music to paper – in the form of verses.

“I started my very first experimenting when I was about 14 years old, and then more seriously, when I was 15, and I started to write side-by-side poetry and short stories,” the poet recalls. “And then, at age 17, I immigrated to Canada and pushed all those things aside because I needed to survive here.”

The colour of words

Qyqja sees her poetry as honouring her identity and experiences of womanhood. Drawing inspiration from her daily life, including missing her home country or reading news about gender oppression, the poet transforms these intense feelings into what she calls “feminine poetry.”

“You don’t have to look far away for inspiration, it’s everywhere,” the poet adds. “You pick up your phone, they say a word, and that word strikes a chord in you, you hang up the phone, but the resonance is still with you.”

There is love in her poetry too. A poet who finds it “impossible” to ignore current events, she envisions love as the centre of her poetic musings, from which other explorations stem. Part of staying true to herself means not only recognizing this desire to speak out but also writing in the language of her culture.

“I’ve been living in Canada for 30 years, but I don’t fool myself,” she shares. “If I want to focus on expressing myself, I’m going to express myself in the language that my soul actually speaks and my soul speaks my mother’s tongue.”

After her sincere expressions, the poet translates her creations to English. Her first English collection, A Bunch of Poems Instead of Flowers, was published in 2022. For her, translation requires skilled craftsmanship beyond simply understanding languages – translators need to know the “colour” of words.

She is currently working on her second English collection with Transcendent Zero Press in Texas, titled Golden Armor. One of these poems, “Some peace…” draws on the Greek mythology of Athena arising from Zeus’ ribs, highlighting the continued plight of women in finding freedom.

Qyqja advises aspiring poets to honour their own experiences and speak from the heart.

“Talk from the heart is the one and main thing, don’t just fantasize on thin air,” she shares. “If you have not felt it deep inside, don’t bother to take up the pen and paper and write it.”

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