We got ready and showed our home.

The visitor thought: you live well.

The slum must be inside you.

Suddenly, it was the ideas. Not just the rhymes, the lilt or the alliteration. The idea that the slum is actually inside us, that a headache has many rooms and that light grows as gradually as hair, was, to say the least, new. To my ears, they brought a music and an imagery far removed from the poems I’d been reading-  opening up a fresh way of percieving the world. Brought up on poetry essentially ‘English’ in tone, emotions and structure, the syntax and the ideas of Transtromer was challengingly different.

In fact, the translation of this unique tone of voice does create problems for translators. Robin Robertson, a translator, feels that if not careful, ” the elemental sparseness of his language can often be rendered as colourless and bland. The supple rhythms of the original poems are hard to replicate and, equally, the plosive musicality of Swedish words like “domkyrkoklocklang” lose all their aural resonance when they become a “peal of cathedral bells.” 

Later, I came to know that a stroke had already left him almost speechless and had denied him the use of his right hand in the early nineties - just when I had began to discover his world. Today, looking at a video of him, quiet, frail, smiling, lost in playing a piano piece written for the left hand, it strikes me that the ticker beneath the channel was not altogether wrong. The man is indeed a ‘ transformer’. A transformer of perceptions.

For those who need a starter on Transtromer, here are a couple of links:

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2011/10/17/111017po_poem_transtromer

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16788

In Murakami’s Landscape with Flatiron, Miyake says something about our life being guided by how we are going to die. Though it contains within it the seductive morbidity of a Murakami idea, it suggests that to live, we have to work out our deaths. Perhaps not in a specific, factual manner, but at least as a larger knowing that enables us to sit back inside and live free. If not, maybe we’ll always carry the fear of not knowing when or what - and stay locked in our own waiting rooms. Poetry, however light and inconsequential it appears to be, like every authentic attempt at writing, is that patient gnawing at the outer walls of the unknown - sometimes profound, sometimes impatient, sometimes indifferent, sometimes unhurried, sometimes playful, yet always alive.

I remember reading Celan’s Deathfugue for the first time many years ago. I did not know what to do with it. Like a  funeral procession passing by my window on a monochrome evening, I watched it go by. I looked up from the book to reassure myself that everything was alright. Black Milk of daybreak. I’d never heard anything of the likes of this before. I did not even understand it fully. But understanding was the last thing on my mind. I quietly sat, listening to the dark rhythms of death sloshing around.

Later I would read about the Romanian Paul Antschel who changed his name to Paul Ancel and then into Paul Celan, an anagram of the French form of his name. The man who had to live through the horrors of the holocaust and make sense and senselessness of it in German, the language of the torturers which had become his own. The man whose parents perished in a Nazi concentration camp. The man who toiled in many camps himself before leaving for Paris after the war. The man who, one particularly ordinary day, drowned himself in the Seine leaving behind a little note that said ‘Paul departs.’

Thinking of obscurity and hermeticism, I think of Celan and his struggle with language. Trying to comprehend the bewildering enormity of torture, suffering and mass murders, he went on to create a language in which meaninglessness played as important a role as meaning itself. In the 50s, Celan broke apart conventional syntax and settled into an almost inscrutable minimalism that made him one of the most difficult poets of our time.

Coetzee, in one of his characteristically incisive essays simply titled ‘Paul Celan’ looks closely at the accusations of difficulty leveled against Celan’s poems. Coetzee shows us how some of the foremost translators of Celan like Michael Hamburger and John Felstiner had already figured out that the difficulty of Celan is an integral part of his message. “Though scholars have certainly illumined Celan’s poetry for him, Hamburger says, he is not sure he ‘understands’ in the normal sense of the word, even those poems he translated, or all of them”. Felstiner says that Celan often asks too much of the reader, yet he goes on to ask ‘what is too much, given this history?’ ” Given the enormity of anti-Semitic persecutions in the twentieth century, given the all too human need of Germans, and of the Christian West in General to escape from a monstrous historical incubus, what memory, what knowledge is too much to demand? Even if Celan’s poems were totally incomprehensible, they would nevertheless stand in our way like a tomb built by a ‘Poet , Survivor, Jew’ insisting by its looming presence that we remember, even though the words inscribed on it may seem to belong to an undecipherable tongue.”

In these times, obscurity seems to be as essential a tool as clarity for a writer to come to terms with life. Which brings us to the age old criticism leveled at poetry-its deliberate inaccessibility. Geoffrey Hill famously said that “public toilets have a duty to be accessible, but poetry does not.” He perhaps did push it a bit far, but it is quite obvious that if the good poems of our times are stripped of their difficulty - if they are made reader friendly - they would simply lose their relevance as poems at all. To communicate clearly, they need to sustain their obscurity. Obviously we aren’t talking about the obscurity born out of lack of knowledge, craft, experience or sensibility but about an obscurity that is painstakingly interwoven with meaning to create a tapestry of overwhelming intricacy.

Poetry somehow seems to me as a suitable  medium for seeking such uncompromising authenticity in expression. Firstly because - fortunately or unfortunately - it is one of the least commercially viable genres in contemporary art and literature. Thus safe from the dictates of accessibility and commercial concerns, the poet can afford to set out on a fanatical quest to get it right. Secondly, writing a poem, unlike making a movie or creating an art project does not require extensive technical and financial support from the outer world. If Celan had to express these in movies, we would perhaps have had some highly strung cinematographers and terribly worried producers. Thankfully, poetry is more or less an individual pursuit where the cost is often an intense investment of one’s whole self. So however successful or unsuccessful the result is, it still gives the writer the freedom to go completely berserk if he thinks it will help him make a completely different kind of sense.

Such intensity is perhaps difficult to sustain. But thankfully, poetry is not all intensity and struggle. Like Whitman, it  contains multitudes. Just as the playfulness of Ogden Nash, the distilled clarity of Ko Un and the understated irony of Brodsky perfectly validate each other, obscurity too seems to have a clear reason to exist in poetry.

Pens:
I have always had an almost fanatic fascination for pens - and an equally unfathomable talent for losing them at regular intervals. I distinctly remember a thick blue Camlin pen that I lost in primary school. It had a transparent part in the middle through which you could see the ink moving up and down as you wrote. It leaked near the grip and I used to seal it quite unsuccessfully with soap. However carefully I wrote, I would come home with interestingly inky palms to the horror of my mother. In the years ahead, I would go on to lose pens of different kinds and colours. I remember being really upset twice - when I lost a deep green Chinese made Hero Fountain and when I misplaced a new Cross ball pen. I am writing this post with a hardworking matte black regular Parker fountain (incidentally, I write all my posts longhand before I type it into the computer)  and hope to hold on to it for a long time.

Books:
Recently, I spent a bomb on a poetry book - An Anthology of Contemporary Verse. The moment I leafed through it, I knew it was worth every paise. Like a new bride, I took it along with me wherever I went. I smelled the binding, read aloud from it, put it beside my bed and kept thinking of it when I wasn’t reading it until it went missing a month ago. I ransacked the shelves and settled into a nice depression. This one, though has a happy ending. A week ago, I came upon the book hidden away among a host of other books. Yet in my long illustrious tradition of losing books, this is the only time I remember one being found.

Friends:
Nehemiah was Jewish. He was part of the small Jewish community that had lived in Cochin for hundreds of years. Seated next to each other in primary school, we used to talk, I think, about Malayalam film stories in which the superstars of the time, Prem Nazir and Jayan would effortlessly vanquish the mafia and the smugglers. He was small, pleasant and wore his hair slightly long so that they curled over his ears. I was fascinated about his traditions and the idea of having him as a friend. When he stopped coming to school, I heard that their family migrated to Israel and would not return.

The thing about friends is that they are not really lost. They disappear and appear in different guises - with lesser hair (in rare instances with longer hair), wider girths, with husbands or wives, with children - at the most unexpected places.

Except George. We were in college together and had some of the most complex, long winded discussions on everything under the sun in his cosy room upstairs while his mother kept us going with tea and biscuits. We read books aloud and fought over them. We went on long bike rides on his steel grey Yamaha reciting Keats out aloud. Just like that, we drifted away until I visited him recently. The room was the same, his mother looked the same and George looked just the same. We settled down with tea and biscuits and promptly set off on poems and books, just about where we had left off thirteen odd years ago.

Poems:
When it comes to losing poems, you really don’t know whether you have lost a poem or not. When I have an idea for a poem, mostly while travelling, I promptly start working on it on my mind. Invariably I get a phone call or have to get off some place, and I lose track of the thought. Later, after having lost the thread, I wonder whether what I had lost was a poem at all - and in most cases, I cannot tell. Going by the odds, the chances are that I have lost many poems. On the other hand, I believe that if a poem is desperate enough, it will get itself written.

The poems that are truly lost are the ones I have completed and misplaced. Recently, I came upon an old notebook and realized that many of the poems were quite trivial and lacked intensity. That, in a sense, set me at ease - except for one poem that keeps nagging me. I remember writing it in college and cannot, for the life of me remember it except that it was about an ant with breasts wading through a sea of dust at 2 am in the morning.

On second thoughts, I think I am glad that some poems remain lost forever.

I started telling him how one of our earlier clients had perhaps stumbled upon something dangerously true about advertising. This client, a very down to earth retailer once told us that he’d realized that he could not advertise at that point as sales was low . He was actually saying that he’d advertise when sales picks up and he has enough money to advertise. Though he liked the idea of advertising - exotic shoots, gorgeous models, glamorous sets and photographers - like a new car or a house, he’d wait until he could afford it. Advertising did not seriously feature anywhere in his plan to increase sales.

Now that is a notion that will make any advertising guru shiver in his handmade Italian soft leather boots. Just like that, this retailer had turned every pretense of importance of the advertising industry upside down. Yet advertising is perfectly capable of dealing with such threats. At even the slightest hint of a doubt, I am sure advertising think tanks would rush in and reassure the people (through brilliant graphs and chart packed, well-laid out presentations) how advertising makes the world go round. Long haired, jean clad and appropriately rebellious, they’d charm cute television anchors into smiling at their brilliant commercials. Thus convinced of the need for advertising to interrupt our movies, our conversations and our lives, we’ll go back to our pizza-stained couches and switch on our flat screen televisions.

In contrast, poetry at least seems to satisfy a real need of a group of people somewhere in the world who actually go out, search for and buy a book of poems. However small that group is, it still means that poetry, which is often accused of being an elitist indulgence actually addresses a real human need while advertising with its claims of importance bolstered by complex research still has to interrupt our lives, cajole and coax us to buy into its claims.

Thus assuring each other all over again that writing poetry is not a strange aberration but a relevant reality, we stashed the poems back into our secret pouches, looked around to make sure that no one had noticed us and set off into our respective advertising careers.

Sometimes I think that language is not quite unlike wheels. For ages, we have looked at language as the most effective way to communicate. Yet language, as all of us know, fails us consistently. Each word in every language has acquired so many nuances, overtones and subtleties that today, using it for a specific purpose without connoting anything else takes immense linguistic and syntactic skills. Add to that the fact that each reader paints her personal shades and angles into words until they arrive at our doorsteps dragging their cumbersome baggage like  tourists trudging into remote villages with their curiously large, practically useless backpacks.

It is indeed fascinating how poets have over the years, tricked the English language into communicating complex emotions . Some of them, like Gerald Manley Hopkins would begin by upsetting conventional syntax to wake people up to unfamiliar realities.

Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.
- The Wreck of Deutschland

Later poets would make Hopkins’s attempts at subverting language look tame. T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, e e cummings and Paul Celan among others went on to use language in strangely unique ways - drawing out precisely defined provinces of meaning. It seems they would slice, polish and craft language until unintended shards of meanings would no longer ricochet off the surface of their words. Many of the avant garde poets too would get into such experiments - though some would perhaps remembered for their experiments rather than for their poems. However, they remind us of the constant struggle of the poet - like a mariner in the heart of the typhoon, constantly innovating, changing directions and shifting bearings - barely managing to stay afloat in a raging ocean of meanings.

Recently, reading through Language For a New Century (Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond), I was delighted to find that the struggle continues unabated. Whether it be the triangular paragraphs of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,

There’s a mountain in my mind,
I must be true to it.
There’s a mountain in
My mind and I
Must read it
Line by
Line

the stereoscopic patterns of Monica Youn,

3
A piece of cellophane
stretched taut across
her back: dragonflies were
spawning

3
An inch thick sheet of
iron; the moment
you deduce the blowtorch
behind it.

or an entire poem that consists of three blank pages with just three minuscule asterisks in each page (Notations on the Prospects for Peace, Ricardo M. De Ungria) where the footnotes that explain the asterisks become the core of the poem - are indications of how the experiences of these poets forcibly change the very appearance of language itself - making it spacious enough to accommodate experiences that are even more unexpected.

Like trains that run on magnetic levitation which could replace wheels, we havent yet found an alternative for language. Until then, we will carry the curse of Babel within us. Yet the best part of being a poet is also embedded in this struggle. Isn’t there great joy in subverting the common to connote the uncommon, in  using familiar pathways to get to unfamiliar realms and in speaking gibberish to make deeper sense?

Though not a perfect parallel, the recent terror attacks in Mumbai do raise questions of a similar vein. How could anyone sit around and write poetry when fellow human beings are being massacred? What’s the point of art in such times? What is the point of such a discussion at all, when everything’s burning?

Sartre’s question is set amidst the World War II. Terror in its modern sense, wasn’t invented yet. So Gomez’s grouse is against the so called nobility of war that glorifies the killing of the ‘enemy’. Terrorism as we know it today changes the game altogether - it does not need to masquerade as legitimate as the ‘just wars’ and crusades did. It does not need a well-defined, sufficiently accepted enemy at all. The more innocents dead, the better. The more children mutilated, the more PR generated. “You take all the moral high ground you want”, they seem to say, “we’ll take the Kalashnikovs”.

This leaves us with no room to negotiate, no space to talk, and no way out. Paranoia becomes the norm.  We scan faces as thoroughly as a flatbed scanner. We tap phones and log into each other’s mail accounts. We teach our children not to speak to, look at, smile, touch or even blink until they adhere to these rules even at home. We send them to self-defense classes until they look like little ninja warriors. We teach them to keep safe distances until they even stay away from us. We look at each others bags suspiciously. When people talk to us, we clam up like, well clams. Some of us even beep when we pass by strangers. To our kids, we pass on the legacy of this ominous ticking in the back of our heads so that they can carry on like Geiger counters all through their lives.

The likes of Hitler and Nero are often cited as examples to prove that the love of art is in no way indicative of the goodness of the person. Yet the fact remains that such art lovers used art as an instrument of aesthetic pleasure and just that. Paintings, poems or plays that asked uncomfortable questions often disappeared like detractors in their regimes. So obviously, Sartre was not talking about art that merely entertained.

Which brings us back to the beginning. True art, poetry or literature does make us break out in boils when faced with mindless carnage and hatred. Like a pain we cannot actually place, it nags us in sharp jabs when we least expect it. Like a frustrated diner trying to draw the attention of the waiter, it gesticulates wildly. Like a stubborn kid, it tugs relentlessly on our cloaks of indifference.

So what if we exposed a whole generation to true art instead of mere entertainment? Would they grow up with minds that reject violence and hatred? Would the human race even exist long enough for us to find out? Or would you get tired of these of questions that I am typing in? And would you think I am hopelessly trapped in this paragraph and have to keep on writing one question after another? If so, how do I ever get out of this post?

poetry can be cured without even a whimper.

If tugged at when the soil is still moist

banyan saplings can be uprooted in silence.

If slept over when the dawn is still hours away,

dreams can be forgotten like ripples on a mountain lake.

© shelton pinheiro

Having said that, it is not surprising that the need for something as subtle as poetry remains baffling to us. My cable guy offers me 129 channels. I get breaking news, global, national and regional, live sports and stock market updates. When celebrity couples break up, I get to know about it even before the couples themselves do. I get essential information; Obama’s great grandfather’s neighbour’s first name and the waiting list for the latest Hermes Birkin bag. Digital clarity. Surround sound. 24X7. I have a mobile phone with 26 games. Strategy, arcade and simulations for those times when I am not talking to any of my 534 contacts. Plus 4 FM channels round the clock with traffic updates on the go. In the car. On foot. In the autorickshaw. On the way to work, billboards tell me about the new karaoke mobile phones, studio apartments, 4-wheel drives and family cars. On an average 600 to 800 mainstream feature films are released in India and waiting for me at the theatres. Not to mention non-mainstream movies and documentaries. I have a collection of 62 classic movies on my hard disk. This year 3600 feature films were submitted for consideration at the Sundance Film Festival. A rock band screams to birth every five minutes somewhere in the world. MTV screens on an average 10-15 new music videos in a week. Penguin, Faber, Random House and Harper Collins together release hundreds of brilliantly written novels every year. Every minute, around 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube . A new website is uploaded every minute. Blogs breed like rabbits in cyberspace. In the space of writing this paragraph, a window has popped up six times telling me I have new mail.

These experiences rush past at breakneck speeds every minute, red lights flashing and sirens blaring. They dance before us in startling cuts and split windows like a Kill Bill sequel. Beeping, ringing, alerting and reminding. Windows pop up even in our dreams with strange numbers displaying syntax errors. So where is the place for a quiet bicycle ride on a summer morning?

More importantly, if you still like poetry, whose else’s fault can it be?

I who have just stepped out of a meeting on the impact of financial downturn on the advertising budgets am now thinking of poets, exile and Palestine.

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window!

I who live among coconut palms and monsoon drenched evenings; I who have never seen the olive trees of Palestine read these lines with trembling lips.

I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.

As the train moves through green fields swaying worlds away from Palestine, I imagine the land of milk and honey, I see the land of spilt blood and scarred flesh. Soon, I hear another voice that filters through the Sycamores; a voice passing through me like a needle so sharp that pain hides from it.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
I shudder and roll down my window. I close my eyes and think of Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai again. I wonder how memories about the same land form different utterances. I wonder how by being opposites, they become the same. I smile. I think I know why there are only dead poets and no dead poems.