The gravity in observing an apple and life’s poetry

Two years ago while on a trip to Nairobi, I chanced to hear something that has stayed with me. After experiencing a terrific day at Masai Mara, replete with sighting a stunning variety of animals and the vast expanse of the African grasslands, we sat recounting the day’s events when a friend remarked, “you being a poet would greatly appreciate the vastness and beauty of this place…by now you should come up with a poem celebrating the wonderful sunsets and the incredible beauty of its riparian forests and grasslands”. Since then I have often thought of that innocuous remark that makes harrowing demands on the sensibility of a poet. As if there was a formula, a set method to come up with a good poem – all you need is a picturesque expanse, a river flowing by and a couple of compelling sunsets, and lo behold, a poem tumbles out.

The casual remark of my friend stirred all these complex thoughts and questions and took me back to a cinematic feat called Poetry that had inundated the art world some ten years ago (2010) and also won the award for best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.

Korean writer-director Lee Chang-dong directed the movie in a series of ponderous, lazy frames. The film begins by a river, where the body of a young girl washes ashore. The lead is Mija (Yun Jung-hee), a 66-year-old woman who works as a maid for a stroke-ridden older man, and then goes to her small, cramped home to take care of her brash grandson, Wook. We soon learn that the girl, Agnes, who died, attended the same school as Wook and had jumped from the bridge. Later it is revealed Wook has a part in Agnes’s death. Mija also enrols for a poetry class at the Cultural centre, but she’s struggling with the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and finds that each day more words are slipping out of her grasp. “I do have a poet’s vein,” she says, speaking into her cellphone. “I do like flowers and say odd things.” The film is a tour de force of Mija’s journey – her poetic curiosity that turns to passion and finally turns her to a poet who finds her calling by transcreating the beauty, moral outrage and empathy she feels into Agnes’ Song, her piece de resistance.

At one point, Mija asks her poetry teacher with almost comic innocence, “When does a ‘poetic inspiration’ come?” It doesn’t, he replies, you must beg for it. “Where must I go?” she persists. He says that she must wander around, seek it out, but that it’s there, right where she stands. At one point, he even holds an apple for everyone to look at, and questions if they had ever really seen apple. The importance of seeing, and seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work of art. Mija struggles for inspiration, and in a later scene out by the river, attempting to write her first poem, she stares down at a blank page while the rain marks the paper like tears. This is how the film comes together so beautifully even in a disjointed narrative, tenderly observed moments and motifs that might go unnoticed, just like life.

As she continues with her class, Mija becomes frustrated by her inability to describe the world in her little notebook, a situation a reader and a poet can well identify with. She’s also bothered by the matter of her grandson, and spends time staring at him, and visiting the scenes of his alleged crimes, trying to determine what happened. The prevailing patriarchal attitudes in the Korean society are also brought up, for instance, offering compensation to the rape victim’s mother by the parents of the culprits, or the sense of entitlement Mija’s male employer has for her. Lee weaves together these observations with the story of Mija’s stuttering attempts to write a poem by ‘seeing well’. During one of such sequences, Mija is rattled and walks out opening her little notebook in which she scribbles, “Blood ... a flower as red as blood.” At other times, Mija also wanders off to contemplate an apricot, or gaze up into a tree ‘to listen to its thought’, and take notes.

It is a beautiful experience to watch Mija transform her anguish into art and in the process, come to terms with her moral and emotional dilemmas. She finally finds her voice, leaving her first poem on the tutor’s desk before the final class. She disappears from the film, but the words of her poem – Agnes’ Song, in which she comes to inhabit the being of the dead girl – is read over the final sequence of images and the film closes with another shot of the river flowing.

Poetry can be seen as a very sensitive analysis of the mind of a poet or someone who aspires to be one, and gives us lasting insights on how we find little nuggets of poetry in everyday life, and how we need to conserve each of them as footnotes to life’s revelations, and also how life’s patterns unfold to realign themselves into more complex, more meaningful ones, ridden with questions of beauty and morality. And that it takes more than emerald grasslands and silvery ribbons of rivers to come up with a poem…least of all, sunsets.

Taseer Gujral is a poet, editor and a translator