Poetry
As Observation: From Notes to Lyrical Creations
It is tough
writing about poetry. Our understanding about poetry is diverse
and always evolving. From ancient theories of Bhartrihari's "Sabdatattva" to Derrida's
"differance" in spoken and inscribed
language, poetry has shown possibilities that we are still
exploring. As our observations about the world around us gets
stratified, condensed and co-opted, our poetry grows like vines
over old or new structures, whether as part of our conscious
landscaping or willful neglect.
What can we do in the
name of poetry? Very simple things, almost un-esoteric and
rather commonplace until it turns into a rhythm guiding us
deeper inside our own selves and making us see the external
world as a magnanimous companion to our variegated existence.
Here's a list I once made about what we could or I could
do in the name of poetry:
Sing a song/Recite a
verse/ Chant a mantra/Do a jig/Wield a pen/Raise a
slogan/Stretch a hand/Draw a line/Demolish a wall/Ask a
question/Name an object ..
All this is
certainly poetry, because these actions arise out of
observations and commentaries on life surrounding us. Happiness,
sorrow, protests, challenges and doubts work as incentives. For
me they do as strongly as hills and dales and flowers and
moonlight.
Not going into
any erudite discussion, something elemental comes to my mind as
my own experience of poetry as observation. The short poems of
Rabindranath Tagore, said to be influenced by the Haiku style
during his stay in Japan, are memorable in their recordings of
observations and the mystical shapes they took in the poet's
mind:
Stray birds of summer come to my
window
to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn,
which have no songs,
flutter and fall there with a sigh.
**
Tagore's stray birds and yellow leaves of
autumn, the animate and the inanimate, both flutter with a
melody of resignation that the season bears. When he says:
I sit at my window this morning
where the world like a passer-by
stops for a moment,
nods to me and goes.
He has brought poetry into the realms
of his daily occupation. The cosmic scope of these words
delights us, literally, with his observation of life and its
simple pace.
** 
In the poem
below:
The light that plays, like a naked
child,
among the green leaves happily knows
not
that man can lie.
Here words and
objects the verses relate to have played with the external world
and turned shapes and meanings to reinvent another life for
themselves. The observation about "light" imagined as an animate
shape broadens the scope of such imagination in our minds.
Linguistically and otherwise, the poet's observation here has
taken a leap towards the metaphysical from being compared to a
physical human child. We look at the poem like an object under
the focus of a stage light, an observation bright and beauteous.
Anyway,
observation leading to poetic creation is perhaps well-known
from eras bygone. The Vedic people had created poetry seeking
safety for their livestock, strength to counter invaders, more
rain and food, and in awe of nature. The essence of the verses
have lived on and adapted to changing history and time.
Of late,
reading Kay Ryan, the current US poet laureate, was a great
insight into a very 'tongue-in-cheek' and angular quality one
rarely finds in poems that are also highly lyrical. Her poems -
observations about words, categories, objects and nature - open
up amazing sounds in their twists and turns, indignantly
flavorsome phrases and a fable-like prophetic capability, a
condensed recollection of quaintly impressionistic images
presented in compact little forms glittering like fine Persian
jewelry! Consider:
AMONG
ENGLISH VERBS
Among English verbs
to die
is oddest in its
eagerness to be
dead,
immodest in its
haste to be told --
a verb alchemical
in the head:
one speck of its gold
and a whole life's lead.
For me, Ryan's etching of just one
"verb" sums up her prophecy about all other verbs -- "to die is
oddest in its/eagerness to be dead" is the unpredictable element
and resplendent in poetic beauty. This is a spectrum within
which she speaks of all other actionable acts that life may
hold. And yes, that verb is alchemical. It literally and
physically is in a haste to be dead, to be over with, to be
told. At the same time it sums up a life and the material and
moral quests that accompany it.
GREEN HILLS
Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the languor
of their
rolling over.
The reader can see here how Ryan's topography, is a
continuous
changing, rolling, engulfing entity quite akin to the anatomical
flexing of human or rather, animate forms. Ryan nature, as well
as any other topography she considers, is a thoughtful,
sometimes erratic, actionable entity that competes with her own
declared sense of compactness and prophetic conclusions (fable).
In THE LIGHT OF INTERIORS, this
relationality comes
alive when she writes:
... But, in
any case, the light,
once in, bounces
toward the interior,
glancing off glassy
enamels and polishes,
softened by the scuffed
and often-handled, muffled
in carpet and toweling,
buffeted down hallways,
baffled in equally
by the scatter and order
of love and failure
to an ideal and now
sourceless texture which,
when mixed with silence,
makes of a simple
table with flowers
an island.
I'll
not point to the lovely and obvious alliterative craft at work
in this part of the poem. What strikes me is the kinetic force
of her words embodied by the description of 'light' that lights
up her topography almost meandering and running through a
clutter of objects, finally to rest upon the final poetic
imagery of a "table with flowers/an island", so Vermeer-like, a
static image throbbing with calm energy. Such is Ryan’s
observation, where notes turn into lyrical creations.
BIO:
NABINA DAS is a poet and fiction writer living two lives,
shuttling between Ithaca, NY, and Delhi, India. Her short story
"Tara Goes Home" has been selected to appear in a winning
collection of fiction by writers from India as well as around
the world (Mirage Books). Her poetry has appeared in the "urban"
poems anthology SHEHER (Frog Books), in Kritya poetry journal,
Lit Up Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Muse India and The
Cartier Street Review. Earlier this year, she was declared one
of the winners of the 2008 Book Pitch Contest at Kala Ghoda
Literary Festival in Bombay. Nabina is also a 2007 Joan Jakobson
Fiction Scholar from Wesleyan Writers'Conference, Wesleyan
University, CT., and a 2007 Julio Lobo Fiction Scholar from
Lesley Writers' Conference, Lesley College, Cambridge, Mass.
Nabina was Assistant Metro Editor with The
Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and has worked as a journalist and
mediaperson in India for about 10 years in places as diverse as
Tehelka.com, Down To Earth environmental magazine, Confederation
of Indian Industries, National Foundation for India and The
Sentinel newspaper. She has published several articles,
commentaries and essays during her tenures. An M.A. in
Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her
other interests are theater and music. She blogs at
www.fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com
