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You've Been Timetabled Sep 1
HP Writers Spotlight: irinia
~
September 2025
HP Poet: irinia
Age: 47
Country: Romania


Question 1: We warmly welcome you to the HP Spotlight, irinia. Please tell us about your background?

irinia: "I live in a country with a difficult past, I have complicated memories of the XXth century. I studied foreign languages and literatures (English & German), British cultural studies, psychology and psychotherapy. I worked as a cultural journalist for some time, and as an English teacher for a decade. I love working as a psychotherapist, it is a humbling honour to get to know and be with people in a profound way. I am the mother of a spirited teenage daughter whom I am in love with. I am a highly sensitive person which is a blessing and a curse because I am often times moved by life in an intense way. I am from the Balkans so my taste in everything is rather eclectic."


Question 2: How long have you been writing poetry, and for how long have you been a member of Hello Poetry?

irinia: "I wrote my first poem as a teenager, and I’ve been writing since then discontinuously, whenever poetry came to me. There were periods of intense writing and also long periods of silence. It was difficult to see myself as a poet until relatively recent. On HP I've been since 2010 or 2011, I am not sure, I have to check my first post. This site and the community supported me to keep writing. I owe to HP the existence of my book of poetry called "Psychic retreat" published by Europe Books last year. Thank you Eliot for keeping HP running and thank you to all of you for keeping HP alive. I witnessed this community changing, growing, descending into chaos sometimes. I enjoy the diversity of styles."


Question 3: What inspires you? (In other words, how does poetry happen for you).

irinia: "I am inspired by everything that moves me, especially people, stories, the natural world, history. Poetry simply happens to me, words and images start pouring down in my mind, so I just write them down as they come. I don’t rewrite or work with conscious intention on any poem because I don’t have time to be a „serious“ writer, who has the discipline and toil of writing. At some point poetry started coming to me in English, perhaps because my readings were mostly in English. I think poetry is a way of containing or transforming my emotional processes as for me poetry happens in the presence of feelings, and I am also observing a tendency to be more reflexive or abstract as if when I write there is a witness inside. I feel more and more that I am interested in writing about politics and society too."


Question 4: What does poetry mean to you?

irinia: "It means a lot, I am afraid it is difficult to capture it into words. The poetry of other people touches me deeply, fascinates me, gives me the feeling of awe. It was my constant companion, it was a mirror, I found out about myself through resonance with other poets. Poetry captures the depth of life, our dreams, struggles, aspirations, our joy and our pain, creates alternative worlds from words. It captures the pulse of inner reality while it also mystifies it. It is a space of freedom and play for me. It is a protest. It is an attempt at destroying and recreating the world captured in normal language and used concepts. It is perhaps a measure of our humanity, vulnerability, resilience."


Question 5: Who are your favorite poets?

irinia: "I will start with William Shakespeare as I love his use of language and wit. I love Japanese haiku poetry, their ineffable simplicity is mesmerizing. There are many poets that I adore: Rumi, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Charles Bukowski, William Blake, Robert Browning, T.S. Elliot, the English and German Romantic poets, Nichita Stănescu (Romania), Ana Blandiana (Ro), Florin Iaru (Ro), Mircea Cărtărescu (Ro), Ioana Ieronim (Ro), Gellu Naum (Ro), Nora Iuga (Ro), Paul Celan, Mary Oliver, David Whythe, Anne Sexton, Tibor Zalan (Hungary), Jean-Pierre Siméon (a wonderful poet), Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ana Akhmatova, Viktor Neborak (Ukraine), Marjana Savka (Ukraine), Hrytsko Chubai (Ukraine), John O’Donohue, Rachel Bluwstein, Yehuda Amichai, Nathan Zach, Wislawa Szymborska (Poland), Mahmud Darwish (Palestine), John Donne, Friedrich Hölderlin, Reiner Maria Rilke, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tzvetaeva, Octavio Paz, Garcia Lorca, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Primo Levi."


Question 6: What other interests do you have?

irinia: "I love art in all forms, it moves me and it bemuses me, it stimulates my creativity. I love photography and taking photos, I attended courses in my youth. I am fascinated by cosmos and cosmology, I love physics. I love stand-up comedy, music, dancing, hiking on the mountains. I am interested in history, I am fascinated by the becoming of the world. I am fascinated by the individual and collective psyche, I think this is something that has left a mark on my poetry."


Carlo C. Gomez: “We would like to thank you irinia, we really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to get to know the person behind the poet! It is our pleasure to include you in this Spotlight series!”

irinia: "Many thanks to Carlo for this series and to you all for being here!"




Thank you everyone here at HP for taking the time to read this. We hope you enjoyed coming to know irinia better. We most certainly did. It is our wish that these spotlights are helping everyone to further discover and appreciate their fellow poets. – Carlo C. Gomez

We will post Spotlight #32 in October!

~
Below are a few of irinia's most popular poems and links to each one:

where wild flowers grow:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/853775/where-wild-flowers-grow/

desire has no mercy:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/876279/desire-has-no-mercy/

we are dancers:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/4679241/we-are-dancers/

morning breath:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/4694122/morning-breath/

encounters (1): loneliness:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/4728002/encounters-1-loneliness/
#hellopoetry #spotlight #series #interview #2025 #poet #irinia
Continue reading...
irinia May 2014
"Sentimental story"
Then we met more often.
I stood at one side of the hour,
you at the other,
like two handles of an amphora.
Only the words flew between us,
back and forth.
You could almost see their swirling,
and suddenly,
I would lower a knee,
and touch my elbow to the ground
to look at the grass, bent
by the falling of some word,
as though by the paw of a lion in flight.
The words spun between us,
back and forth,
and the more I loved you, the more
they continued, this whirl almost seen,
the structure of matter, the beginnings of things.

Nichita Stanescu
Nichita Stanescu (1933-1983) is the most appreciated Romanian Modernist poet.
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irinia Mar 2015
"Unwords"
He offered me a leaf like a hand with fingers.
I offered him a hand like a leaf with teeth.
He offered me a branch like an arm.
I offered him my arm like a branch.
He tipped his trunk towards me
like a shoulder.
I tipped my shoulder to him
like a knotted trunk.
I could hear his sap quicken, beating
like blood.
He could hear my blood slacken like rising sap.
I passed through him.
He passed through me.
I remained a solitary tree.
He
a solitary man.

*Nichita Stanescu
Continue reading...
irinia Sep 2022
Poetry
Poetry is the weeping eye
it is the weeping shoulder
the weeping eye of the shoulder
it is the weeping hand
the weeping eye of the hand
it is the weeping soul
the weeping eye of the heel.
Oh, you friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is the weeping itself
the weeping of an uninvented eye
the tear of the eye
of the one who must be beautiful
of the one who must be happy.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru
#poetry #pain #beauty #happines #wonder
Continue reading...
irinia May 2023
clouds
when the silence of leaves comes to me
I dream of continents of clouds, yes, don't be surprised
I dream for Grandma too, she never saw them
not today, not tomorrow, but sometimes, who knows,
when my hands would be continents for you
I'll lend you my skin just for a moment,
just long enough to feel it lift me up and I'll
jump off it like on a trampoline back into
my own burrow - the salty, marine wonder of
blinking thoughts without orbit

poetry, this dear wasting like an unheard music,
the dissolving mint of dreaming
in Nichita's horses' mane
all day long god seems to be combing
the clouds that overflow in cascade,
always ruffled, like the shadows of thoughts
Nichita refferes to Nichita Stanescu, a Romanian poet, one of my favorites
#poetry #imagination #clouds #dreaming
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irinia Feb 2016
"The ray of lucidity"
"Like a black leukemia of stars"
my soul turns in on itself
far more lonely, far more sickly in spirit.

Above, the same desolate landscape
of your dark isolation,
and below - blacker landscapes of black!

Neither the far-off cry of love
nor the nostalgic come-hither of death
disturbs anything within me any longer.

... And only the relentless light ray of lucidity
stabs through, colder, even colder, without mercy
without doubt, without hope, without even a shiver!

Nichita Danilov
*translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cirstea
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irinia Mar 2015
"Distance"
Distance is the cog wheel
on the haunted axle of my hearing,
grinding fine the deadened mind
of that unborn god
waiting to be caught
by the earth's blue speed,
and carrying in a handled urn
the plucked heart - ours,
it's beating, it's heard, it's beating, it's heard,
a sphere in wild growth -
the roads are wet with tears,
memory frail and elastic,
a sling for stones, a gondola
drowned in childlike Venices,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

*Nichita Stanescu
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irinia Sep 2022
Distance
Distance is the cog wheel
on the haunted axle of my hearing,
grinding fine the deadened mind
of that unborn god
waiting to be caught
by the earth's blue speed,
and carrying in a handled urn
the plucked heart - ours,
it's beating, it's heard, it's beating, it's heard,
a sphere in wild growth -
the roads are wet with tears,
memory frail and elastic,
a sling for stones, a gondola
drowned in childlike Venice's,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru
#god #imagination #wonder #love
Continue reading...
irinia Oct 2016
"Dusk"
I must confess to you that the death problem
made us sweat:
Our old school teacher,
Miss Barnovski,
whom we used to call the Duchess,
set us two enigmas — you and I.
She wrote on the blackboard — it was a splendid autumn
afternoon —
the radical of you plus the radical of I
is zero, and got out of the classroom
leaving us alone with our queerest thoughts.

Nichita Danilov, from *It might take me years
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irinia Nov 2016
"Season"
This sacred sadness of the clouds
painted on the window pane.
This end of a century
splashed all over the walls!
The evening flowing down streets like heavy water...

...Who opened these windows in our foreheads,
who built these
secondary doors in our chests?
I walk inside me as if in a diseased season.
I hear mother’s voice from beyond the dark wall:
Why are you here,
why have you come back?
Go, out with you while there is still time.

I hear my elder brother’s voice as if muffled by water:
Get out of this light as soon as you can
and leave me alone
to breathe in my own shadow...

Whose faces are preserved here,
in this putrid evening light?
What season are a thousand
cut-off heads waiting for?
Whose arms will be sown in the field,
whose teeth will grow in the grass?

I walk across myself as if I were some strange season.
With Yorick’s skull in my hands, I wonder:
If I have reaped
where and what was it I reaped?
And if I harvest, when, whom am I harvesting?

**Nichita Danilov
Continue reading...
irinia Aug 2015
"The Things"
Things distance themselves from one another
in a desperate halo
your loneliness is an echo,
rolled between my ribs.

The table is going round
The walls are bleeding
blood is pouring from the chair
where I sit back;
piles of clothes
like some famished birds
are collapsing from
a perpetually cold sky.

Nichita Danilov, from  *It Might Take me Years
Continue reading...
Maria Mitea Jan 2021
She
Is not interested in observing
She is doesn’t want to be liked,
She's too young to play ”your way my way”
She doesn't care, she is cool
She sleeps at six o'clock
She dreams when you talk to her
She makes love only at night
She carries the time in her hair
She's great, she's Brilliant! she's out there,
Do you want to see her?
Find her if you can, if not
Love another, if you can

She doesn't have time to close her eyes on you,
Or touch your froggy skin,
She walks alone with the wolves
She kisses with the devils
She swims with the sharks

She is a Night Cat,
Xena, Nichita, Joan Darc,
Swiss Cheese on a white tablecloth
breathing through her own holes
next to a glass of wine
and a hand full of white grapes

She
Doesn’t care
#being
Continue reading...
irinia Sep 11
The Ascension of Words
Thus, like the skin
of a shorn ewe, the day rises.

It is difficult to skin the self from a stone.
It is difficult to skin memory from a Greek.

But why should we talk about these!
After all,
light too has a skin,
light too can be skinned...
So
light too is guilty of being.

A gust of fresh air
comes with the millennium.
We are beautiful;
why should we not be beautiful?

We eat one another
only from hunger,
from adoration,
from structure,
from love.
It doesn't matter.
We are what we are,
that is, beautiful.

I carry my ever still blood
in my heart.
I carry my ever salt tear
in my eye.

I carry the angel in the middle of heaven.

by Nichita Stanescu
#poetry #nichita #stanescu
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irinia Sep 2022
Season's end
I was so very aware
that the afternoon was dying in the domes,
and all around me sounds froze,
turned to winding pillars.

I was so very aware
that the undulant drift of scents
was collapsing into darkness,
and it seemed I had never tasted
the cold.

Suddenly
I awoke so far away
and strange,
wandering behind my face
as though I had hidden my feelings
in the senseless relief of the moon.

I was so very aware
that
I did not recognize you, and perhaps
you come, always,
every hour, every second,
moving through my vigil - then -
as through the spectre of a triumphal arch.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru
Continue reading...
irinia Sep 2022
Sign 12
Little by little she became a word,
bundles of soul on the wind,
a dolphin in the clutches of my eyebrows,
a stone provoking rings in water,
a star inside my knee,
a sky inside my shoulder,
and I inside I.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru
one of the most wonderful poets in my view, Nichita Stanescu
Continue reading...

— The End —