In Search of Good Poetry - 3 by Dr Koshy AV
In the second part, I stopped after comparing two poems, one each by Cohen and Shakespeare, but one cannot stop it just like that. I had done a comparative study more or less on the close reading principle. But that is not the only way to look at it or the only way to explain why I enjoy poems. Let me again quote those poems and come back to explain.
Here is the first one again:
For Anne
by Leonard Cohen
With Annie gone,
whose eyes to compare
with the morning sun?
Not that I did compare,
But I do compare
Now that she's gone.
And here is the second one again:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
We come to readers and frames or contexts, and intersections. Literature, to live on, must be of depth, meaning to catch the attention of readers in different places and down the ages, into the future, must be capable of multiple interpretations, This is what makes it earn the name of literature. These interpretations must not be far-fetched. But there must be scope for many, for plurality, for readers to keep coming back to it again and again, so the work can live on.
It must still make enough sense to them, thematically or form-wise. whatever time or place they are in right now that they feel some connection to it and makes them want to keep it alive or pass it on.
So let us again look at these two poems. The first one is only a simple love poem. It has in it shades of regret, guilt, nostalgia, loss, beauty of the woman concerned and her soul, sentimentality, melancholy, sadness, even grief, but nothing more. In short, it is just one more good love poem.
The second one is not like that. Apart from the points I made about its rich vocabulary, diction, meter, rhyme, imagery, and figures of speech etc., in the earlier piece, all the usual IA Richards-ish stuff, what makes it better is the fact that it addresses not just an issue like compound themes I mentioned above indirectly or directly but many other ones. Two kinds of lovers are constructed, one set praising the lover falsely and Shakespeare who does not, and this also leads to the implication that Shakespeare is actually talking of two sets of writers, one those like him, who are more realistic and two, those who are given to clichés (eyes like the sun, breasts white as snow etc) and also mocking readers who actually like this kind of trite hyperbole or tripe or trash.
Shakespeare's style is closer to Donne's, a precursor to his - in using something more like the metaphysical conceit. Thus we are surprised he compares hair to wire and says his mistress's breath reeks, and at several points he undercuts familiar ideas, making us laugh or smile, the most startling one for Indians being that he does not think his mistress is a goddess (who floats above the ground). Yet there is no hint of him being a misogynist here, according to this reader at least, he is aware of love and equality, thus very much pro-feminist, (here, the frame I mentioned starts to creep in, above the personal (who is/was she?), and historical (seen in the Elizabethan use of language) ones. Thus, this poem is richer due to our being able to bring feminism by contradistinction, history, (auto)biography, form(sonnet), genre (poetry with humour and for that time unusual turns of phrase), meaning (irony, hyperbole, understatement) and also a rich use of images that wash over us opening to us the world of the Renaissance, with sun, red coral, snow, black wires, white, red, and damasked roses, perfumes, music, goddess, and finally ground and heaven and (not an image) rarity. These suddenly open out to us the world of Shakespeare, of exploration, of navigation and discovery and of muted exoticism as well as mythology, Christianity, modernity (yes, of and for his time in calling hairs wires and breasts dun (dull/ brown) and also a kind of poetic daring in using traditional imagistic tropes like that of sun and roses along with new ones like breath that reeks, and "false compare." The whole tone is, I repeat that of realism and of moving on beyond the world of myth and yet there is again no sign, to me, of any pejorative colonial sense in which words like 'perfumes' are used in a poem like this, as yet. Neither is there something against myth or anything else. The range of images which also brings in not just the visual but also the olfactory (perfumes/breath) and the auditory (voice/music) and indirectly the kinetic (how she moves) are also worth noting.
I would now like to come to Indian poetry in English for a divagation. I have not read any of the new anthologies coming out whether by Sudeep Sen or Jeet Thayyil, or Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita A., though I have one of them with me, and I figure in none of them. The reason is that I fear that on opening them and reading them I will be disappointed and not find enough in those poems to hold me just like the Cohen poem does not, as they will be written by people who have no idea what they are doing. Derrida says absence is presence and in the same way my absence from these anthologies as both writer and reader is the best favour I can do for them. My presence as the former would be to bring myself away from my search to be a writer like Shakespeare and my presence as the latter would be injurious to them, perhaps, or mayhap not. I don't know. The truth is poetry for me is the crown of literature and having been schooled in its best it is difficult for me to want to test new waters to find out if it is worth bothering about at all or not. There are anthologies I found impressive but they are mostly in translation (two) and a third one in which an editor was a woman, a Dalit writer. And no, I am not in any of them as contributor or editor or anthology maker, so that is not why I mention them. I do not see much being spoken of them as behind all these are economic, political, gender-based, caste-ist, class-based, and ideological as well as religious forces at play, all of them being clichés by being part of cliques, not to mention being driven also by deep, deep-seated colonial hangovers and phobias and mindsets unknown to the editors themselves, even, at times, and not forces that read impartially, unlike how it is done in the West. I will write more about all this in my next note.
I want to end on another Shakespearean quirk whereby he is aware of Biblical parallelism and uses it but to his own purposes adroitly by making it into a kind of anti-parallelism with the same kind of telling effect. This makes for the power in his comparisons and contrasts and juxtapositions or permutations and combinations whereby he can take an example like "apples of gold in pictures of silver" in the Bible and bring it in here "changed, changed utterly" so "a terrible beauty is born" of "coral is far more red than her lips' red."
In Search of Good Poetry - 4
When I quote a sonnet by Shakespeare, a particular one, there are more aspects to it than that I can do a close reading of it or give it frames like pro-feminist and point out it is about poetasters and readers who don't know how to read. I can compare it with sonnets or other poems by him or his contemporaries, with sonnets or poets/poems of the past like Petrarch's or sonnets or poets/poems of the present like Vikram Seth's. Or with sonneteers and poets and poems of any age, place, and language.
But there is something I need to talk of in connection with not only the production of literature but its canonization which never happens apart from factors that I discount but cannot be discounted in the long run. These factors are economic, political, social or sociological, philosophical, psychological, religious, spiritual, and mythical/mythological etc. You need two hands to clap. Thus, to read Shakespeare I need to know English which would not have happened if we had not been colonized but much more than that the text has to be acceptable not only to Englishmen but also to Indians of whom I am one and appear in homes, schools, colleges, and universities as well as libraries as one that is on a must-read list. Shakespeare is not just a writer but a discourse, built up by Dr. Samuel Johnson, Milton and Arnold, and others in England to make him famous and a rival to European contemporaries like Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and Dante showing English culture's EQUALITY, if not superiority, to those of Greece and Rome and Italy was being established by the rising tide of nationalism there and these makers of culture that could match the products of those empires and nations but at the same time, or at least since the time of Queen Victoria this culture was also being spread with Shakespeare along with the King James Bible as its best products, as literary products of 'Great' Britain, in a sense, and it was accepted as their/its peak by America, Canada, Australia, India, Asia, Africa, and New Zealand, the books carried to these/our shores on the same ships that carried guns here and also carried back spices in India's case. If students of India preferred Shakespeare to the guns they cannot be faulted as in the former case one can see a genuine reaching out for excellence in the art of drama, verse and poetry and prose which struck a chord with readers here familiar already with classics like the Vedas, Puranas etc., but also looking for something modern they could relate to, partly a change that included the fact of the awareness of European culture and its roots and the confrontation and interaction between it and our culture and roots in the vanguard of the earlier one with Mughal culture. There were many reactions to such a conflict or confrontation or complication to put it in terms of fiction and plot and rising action but it had its beneficial side, as well as its detrimental one.
To sum up, it was an early form of 'hybridization' that lies behind my admiration for Shakespeare's sonnet, as seen in my reading, but if canonization then was already enmeshed with economics, politics, intrigue and other such things not excluding skullduggery of the first order, nowadays it is even more tortuous and even less dependable. To put it in another way, nowadays it is even more dependable on politics, economics, and other market or capitalistic factors like advertisements, distribution, availability, 'toutability/pluggability', 'controversiality', translatability - though there may be no such words, mostly -, and even less on quality, sometimes, whichever terms are used to measure it. Thus, the canonization of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Arvind Adiga, Kiran Desai, and writers like Geethanjali Shree (sp?) may be following patterns that are even more enmeshed in present-day world politics as well as nationalistic politics and counter politics than in the time of Shakespeare, though not necessarily, always, (un)fortunately. Parallel to this is the controversy about Kuvempu in Karnataka, and the rise of writers like Amish Tripathi. One almost feels one is watching a drama unfold that has already been scripted or is scriptable, while the earlier ones too were, but were less scripted due to less knowledge/ more ignorance.
In the middle of understanding these strands and also other factors not mentioned like the role of the press in today's world, both free and not free due to being government mouthpieces or sponsors whether on TV or in newspapers or in online media, or of critics and university board members, award committees, and patrons of a new order, and new outlets for sales like Amazon, Flipkart, Pothis, and many other such places, in all truthfulness one has to take a long time and develop much distance to answer to oneself questions like what to read, when, where, why, and most of all who to read if one wants satisfaction from the reading process. The same amount of satisfaction I get out of reading that sonnet by Shakespeare.
I remember reading this beautiful passage I loved in Shakespeare in Richard II by John of Gaunt, I think:
“This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,--
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
It reminded me of Kerala. Not the 'kings' part but the rest, though only to some extent as only some of it applies. More on this later. Would Shakespeare who was obviously a patriot to write such lines have approved of colonialism and its evils? Or racism or gender bias? I am pretty sure he would not but then neither would he have approved of large nations and the people in them acting super patriotic as he would have recognized the danger in that. As did Dickens who was against colonialism and large nations and arms and gender bias, though probably not against racism. Today it seems to me that the rising fervor of so-called patriotism in right-wing led places or places turning increasingly to the right all over the world is a far cry from Shakespeare's kind which was an allowable kind of pride in the rise of a new world order that prioritized small nations slowly coming up over the hold of religion (whichever one) that had become stultified and evil and fossilized as a glue to stick peoples and languages together.
Let me fast forward to 2021 and FB where everyone is a great poet, as great as, if not greater than Shakespeare! As I do not want to hurt anyone, I will take no names but I once read an award winner who was given an award by a supposed Sahitya Academy which tried to claim to be great due to having numbers in an FB group and putting news of these awards in newspapers in countries that don't know better through those given these awards etc., to build a new canon to oppose the ones who are presently ruling the roost. We find this kind of chicanery only in places that are unfortunately called developing. To be honest, the poem made me feel seasick, carsick, and several other kinds of sick! And my only thought was that if these are the new great award givers and these are the new great poets, even Jeet Thayyil and Sudeep Sen and Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal (sp?) are better editors though they do not know I exist, and do not know that many other good poets writing today also exist! I hope our exclusion is to their not knowing we exist, anyway! Compared to that poem, poet and award giver the editors Padmaja Iyengar and Ravi Shankar N and the Dalit woman writer I spoke of last time, to be named at some future date in one of my articles, may be, are a hundred times better. But we live in such a world where an already sarcastic critic like me, sarcastic about the new 'greats' who succeeded the old guard in India, - and by the old guard I mean Keki N Daruwalla, Arvind K Mehrotra, Adil Jussawalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel, Hoshang Merchant, Dilip Chitre, etc., and by new 'greats' I mean people like Thayyil, Sudeep Sen, Vinita Agrawal etc., who already have my hackles up by omitting or leaving out really radical poets or critics I could name like Ashley Tellis (too radical) or Abhijit Shahaji Khandkar, or Aveesh K (unknown,dead) or Ajithan (dead, earlier not known, now I don't know if he is known or not) , especially a poet like Thayyil who started out as a supposed revolutionary, but is now after money and has learned to play the game ( ref. a Vangelis interview) - am now forced to say that even these guys are better than the new crop of writers, editors and award givers coming up who are literally the opening of the pits and the release of unclean spirits spoken of in the Apocalypse, frog like, and need desperately an antidote, the antidote to the virus of poetry in too many new anthologies, Indian English ones, contemporary ones, new poetry ones, year books, day books, monthly books, and so on and so forth, of too much of a 'good' thing, this rash or slew of anthologies, like diarrhoea, the antidote of me talking again of good poetry, through examples and analysis. There has to be an Indian Arnold or an Eliot to counter the poetasters and if no one else is there I am forced to take up the mantle.
Dr. Koshy AV
Author of A Treatise on Poetry For Beginners, Samuel Beckett's English Poetry, Wake Up, India! Essays for our Times and co-editor of The Significant Anthology, with Reena Prasad and Michele Baron and of TSL's Roseate Sonnet Anthology as well as co-author of hits like Wine-Kissed Poems and Vodka by the Volga with Jagari Mukherjee and Dr. Santosh Bakaya.
In Search of Good Poetry - 5
The time has come to talk not only of Shakespeare, Coleridge, Alfred Noyes, Oscar Wilde, and others like that who are already established but of today's poets so that one can easily begin to draw a line between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Or better still between the good, the mediocre and the average and those nowhere in the picture. But first let me define literature for my own satisfaction.
Literature, for me, of which the crown is poetry, is one of mankind's great or fine achievements, if not its greatest. It has depth, width, height, length and breadth as is said of God's love in the Bible. Just like Scripture is literature, literature is Scripture while writing is not. Writers are inspired and often by divide thoughts and expressions and creativity. Writing can influence, motivate and inspire and it has an effect even on the universe and writers are finally the measure of man as mankind keeps its literature/s alive or as some of it survives anyway and this comes to form a body but not only a body - it also forms a spirit, the spirit of literature and since this is vast and also very powerful to become part of this body could not be done earlier on as it can be now by techniques alien to it.
It is the same with poetry. No amount of today's fame is going to ensure your survival tomorrow is the only hope I have which helps me to go on writing as well as praise the few writers who I feel are worthy of praise.
So let me return to the anthologies and mention some names, to irk the bigwigs who are more known for their misdeeds than their poetry to me, and explain why they matter according to me. They are not all Malayalis, so that cannot be levelled against me that I am partial only to them. Neither are they Christians so that too cannot be levelled, against me as a charge.
I already mentioned DrAbhijit Shahaji Khandkar, in the previous article. I don't know if he has a collection yet, or not. I also mentioned Ajithan. And Aveesh K. Aveesh has a collection in Malayalam and his English poems are lost as of now, though they may yet surface, as we finally seem to have a lead.
Ajithan has one book to his credit. The Metaphysics of the Tree-Frog's Silence, it is titled.
"Ajithan G. Kurup was born on 25. 01. 1957, in Kadakkal, Kollam district, Kerala. At age four, he was admitted to the Infant Jesus Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School in Thangassery. In 1965, he joined Loyola School in Sreekaryam, Trivandrum. He completed his schooling at the St. Thomas Residential School (ICSE) in Mannanthala, Trivandrum in 1972. He was an outstanding student, winning the gold medal as the best out-going student. During this period, he was also awarded the National Science Talent Scholarship. He completed his pre-degree in English from University College in Trivandrum in 1974 and then moved to Bangalore to pursue his studies, graduating in English and Economics from National College in Basavanagudi in 1977. He returned to University College to do his M.A. in English but left without appearing for his exams. He finally completed his M.A. in Linguistics from Deccan College, Pune, while simultaneously immersing himself in learning German. It was also during this period that he developed a keen vision for cinema, spending a lot of his time at FTII. Professionally, he has worn many hats. In the early days, as a journalist, a theatre artist, a welder, a resource person with a fishermen's group, and a voice artist. Later, as a chocolatier (he trained in chocolate making at the reputed ZDS College in Solingen, Germany), corporate employee, copywriter, documentary and ad filmmaker, and consultant to the AP Government. Ajithan G. Kurup passed away in April 2015.
Blurbs: take as it is…… It is our loss that we did not know Ajithan Kurup’s work when he was alive, and we did not celebrate his brave and lonely project: to render the unsayable into language. He cannot be imitated or replaced, only admired. -JEET THAYIL"
Yes, it is their loss but not mine as I read Ajithan's poems in typescript when they were not famous and enjoyed them immensely.
Aveesh, another dead poet, does not have any such poet to speak of why he matters but his time will come. My articles are keenly read and afterward, people will claim him and say they discovered him, and as that is all I want I will settle contentedly for that.
These two poets being from Kerala, it will probably be considered by others that it is my love for Keralites peeping through.
But what will they ascribe my praising Aparna Lanjewar Bose to? In case you don't know who she is and never heard of her, it will not be surprising to me but I have and need to talk about her work.
Someone has written about her collection of poems In the Days of Cages: "This dazzling new collection of poems by a remarkably gifted poet penetrates to unravel, expose, and cauterize the stereotypes in a uniquely individualistic style. Rejecting the formalism of the elites, these verses appear disarmingly simple and direct, too profound and significantly complex to communicate. Without the danger of stunning nostalgia, there is resistance and reflection and a discernible sociopolitical consciousness in addition to a regular reproach of the self whose seemingly endless search for belonging, meaning, and sanity collides with a disjointed, base, absurd, and insensitive world. Tender, confessional, joyous, painful, disturbing, rebellious, and provocative, the poems in this volume celebrate humanity and womanhood in all its complexities."
This reminds me to also talk of two collections praised by K Satchidanandan who is one of the old- guard presumably overthrown by people like Jeet Thayyil and his friends and editors like Sudeep Sen who have now become the boring new old guard.
One is Penpiravi (Birth of a Woman) translated by Vineetha Mekkoth and written by Girija Pathekkara.
And another is R Lakshman's collection (not RK Lakshman) whose book was edited by CB Mohandas, another sound critic and poet, and also has an afterword by Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan and I together, Anil being another sound praiseworthy poet and critic.
Last but not least is Ashley Tellis whom I mentioned and whom I wrote of once, of one of his poems, who is also a superb critic. An India that does not know these poets and my friends whom I have not named here so as not to be accused of being biased or practicing nepotism does not know anything about poetry writing as it is happening today in English but only of playing the silly game which does not ensure that any of the poets given certificates by them or awards or put in anthologies or published or put in libraries is going to survive down the ages. After all it is not the Nobel, or Pulitzer or one of the Bookers that they won. Yet.
To know more about Ashley read these links: https://learningandcreativity.com/writing-theory-making.../
Three people who have done great service in anthologizing include, and two I mentioned already, Sunil Sharma for Setu, Padmaja Iyengar - Paddy and Ravi Shanker N, besides Aparna Lanjewar Bose herself, the middle two especially, like Vineetha Mekkoth, in the field of making available to us poets in translation, in the light of whose poems most poets writing in English can't hold a candle.
The last poet I would like to mention and stop with this time is Rukhaya MK. She too has no collection so far but is an exceptional poet, as is her sister Zeenath Ibrahim.
I will add more to this article shortly (it takes times as it is also research-based) by putting in some of the best lines from some of the best poems by some of these poets and quoting K Satchidanandan on Girija and Raman Lakshman etc., as people who look for external validation by those who have achieved more will be impressed by his word vouching that these are good poets rather than mine. But reading them gives me more pleasure than the poetry of those canonized mainly only as they know how to make the show go on and play the game and manipulate to get awards and cash and certificates and the so-called best foreign publishers and all that jazz or as the editors of their anthologies know how to do it.
No one is ready to publish this series as I am shaking all the present-day shibboleths but they cannot stop me from writing it or self-publishing it on FB.
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