Dear Reader,
I stay away from poetry. It might be an effect of growing up in Kolkata, where one composes poetry on everything, from cloudy skies to yellow taxi to Gelusil. For the same reason perhaps, poetry stalks me, no matter how much I run away from it. It whispers, nay screams, inside my head at the most inopportune moments, leaving me red-faced.
A few days back, some lines from the poetry of Larkin started haunting me. Philip Larkin, as we know, was an old curmudgeon (or presented himself to the world as such) who wrote some pretty brutal verses. For instance, he described elderly people in such flattering terms: “Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines”.
One of his most lacerating poems is “This Be The Verse”, which ends with the stanza: “Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./Get out as early as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself.” Somehow the idea of misery hardening like a coast shelf caught my unconscious fancy and my mind kept repeating the lines ad infinitum. You can imagine how I felt.
It is for such reasons that I close my ears to serious poetry. What I prefer are verses by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Odgen Nash, or my eternal favourite, Edward Lear. When it comes to love poetry, nobody can match Parker when she writes: “My own dear love, he is all my world,—/And I wish I’d never met him” and “My own dear love, he is all my heart,—/ And I wish somebody’d shoot him” (“Love Song”).
In my opinion, poetry should be real, rooted, raw. Like Ogden Nash’s “Celery”: “Celery, raw/ Develops the jaw,/ But celery, stewed,/ Is more quietly chewed.”
Since Lear is my soul-poet, I find myself having silent conversations with the Dong with a luminous nose; with the Jumblies, fiercely handsome with their green heads and blue hands and indomitable courage; or with Quangle Wangle Quee, whose face you could never see. Dear Quangle Wangle makes the greatest understatement in literature when he comments on life from his perch on the Crumpetty Tree, “’And that life on the whole is far from gay!’/ Said the Quangle Wangle Quee.”
Since I revel in the absurd, I sometimes look up the poetry on Instagram. Sample the muse of Insta poetry, Rupi Kaur, at her deadliest: “you whisper/i love you/ what you mean/i don’t want you to leave.” Or, “in the end I found that the universe/I longed to connect with/lived within me.” Recently, I found the poetry of actor Arunoday Singh on Insta: “Throw no/More fuel./Fear no/More rain./Leap into/Flame,/And burn.” I am left speechless at such profound poetic outbursts.
It may be that I do not understand poetry. It is different with prose, which I can parse and appreciate. For instance, I liked Rizio Yohannan’s style of prose in her review of Jeet Thayil’s latest collection of poetry, I’ll Have It Here, but I cannot say the same of Thayil’s poetry, which is, frankly, beyond my comprehension. Do read the review here.
Before I leave, I must give you the lines that are the best antidote to the Rupi Kaurs of the world: “Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,/A medley of extemporanea;/And love is a thing that can never go wrong;/And I am Marie of Roumania” (“Comment” by Dorothy Parker).
See you again soon, when April, the cruellest month, has deepened like a coastal shelf.
Till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
Deputy Editor, Frontline
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