Poetry: An echo heard through deadly noise

Yunan, Misro, Ruma sab mit gaey jahan se/Ab tak magar hai baqi nam-o-nishan hamara/Kuch baat hai ke hasti mit-ti nahi hamari/sadion raha hai dushman daur-e-zaman hamara ~ Allama Iqbal
(The civilisations of Greece, Egypt and Rome were wiped out from the world/But to this day our name and fame has survived /Surely we have some magic in our presences / Though the winds of times have been our foes for centuries)

What Iqbal wrote of India in his immortal work over a century ago remains one of the best enunciations of the ethos of our poetic spirit. We cannot give up on poetry only because we need a different public language to describe our country. Conventional public discourse is boring, too familiar and brittle: the senseless blather of pundits on various media channels, the cacophony of commerce, the drained, template-like rhetoric of political speech.

These are tough times. Extreme positions are emerging in polities around the world, with liberals and moderates pushed to the margins. Women have to struggle it out on all fronts like never before. There is a tension along several geographical frontiers. In such darkling times, when I sit tapping on the keys of my computer, I often wonder about the so-called and often questioned ‘usefulness’ of poetry. Surely there seem to be more pressing concerns than sitting, reflecting and composing verses on the current world order. Poetry has often been seen as trouble. Ever since Plato banished poets from his Republic, poets have often gone to great lengths to justify what they do and how poetry is significant.

So what is poetry and how is it relevant in our lives? To this, I will say that since we have a heart, and we are creatures of rhythm, we have naturally tuned our sorrows and joys, loves and enmities, compliances and rebellions into songs and rhythmic compositions. M.H Abrams calls a poem one of the most nuanced of the arts in expressing what is human.

Reading one of Matsuo Basho’s haiku, for instance, is almost an onomatopoeic experience: The old pond- / a frog jumps in, / sound of water

Coleman Bark’s translations of Rumi stir a very spiritual dimension of our beings: There’s no love in me without your being, / no breath without that. I once thought / I could give up this longing, then though again, / But I couldn’t continue being human

A poem essentially conveys an idea or a belief that has been honed and beautified by a certain craft that draws from the world of metaphors, similes, assonance, consonance, rhyme and rhythm. It is thus a physical form conveying abstract truth.

P B Shelley, in his A Defense of Poetry also called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In his poem, To Those Born Later, Bertolt Brecht, encapsulates the irony of writing poetry. He wrote these lines while he was in exile in Nazi Germany in 1938: What kind of times are these, when /To talk about trees is almost a crime/ Because it implies silence about so many horrors?”

Brecht is here at the heart of the irony that lies in bringing those issues to light through poetry that have been systemically suppressed by oppressive regimes. Haven’t we often felt the same rage when voices of dissent are silenced, when children suffer in a war-ravaged world or when reason is stifled at the hands of bigots and megalomaniac state heads! The singing then becomes more pronounced, more livid, more revolutionary.

Poets like Louise MacNeice have talked about the excesses of high modernism and arcane poetry in their writings. This plea for ‘impure poetry’ as it is called, is put forward by MacNeice in his poem, Snow in which he writes:  World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural. In fact the personal carries all the bearings of the political, and deals with a range of emotions from love to affection to terror to indifference in this kind of writing.

Good poetry is timeless. If it were a topical art, it would go out of fashion or fade into insignificance. It inspires us in countless ways and in the course of reading it, we form so many logical and intuitive connections. It opens us to astonishing possibilities in language. It can be called the most subtle yet the most transformative of the arts. That is the beauty of poetry. If the world is a place full of deafening noise, we can hear an echo in its dark midst…. that’s poetry. 

The author is a poet, editor and a translator