Mirror for My Muse

By S. Viswanathan

Wisdom lies not in playing the right cards, but in discarding the rest. It should not be taken as an offense if the same is imposed on the Nobel Phantom called poetry. In that - the whole essence of poetry sprouts out in our wisdom of discarding specifically what it isn't, and thus any attempt to define it, is but a futile effort. For what defines, confines too, and confining the heart-bled verses of countless departed giants can only be a graveyard, silent and dead.

T.S. Eliot once said, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”, and what better a line to demonstrate that than the quote itself. The catch lies in the adjective - 'Genuine'. Now feel this through with me. If we agree that a sense for poetry is developed over time, rather than understood first and worked upon, then poetry is a mere apparition given life: line by line, verse by verse, sonnet by sonnet (precisely how most of the modern forms of poetry emerged). Thus, it is quite counterintuitive to conceptualize 'genuine poetry', because there is no such final thing yet. In other words, it cannot be understood. Does that mean the quote is meaningless? No, because Eliot asserts a possibility, so the question to ask would then be - How exactly?

Our five basic senses bring along memories that our body better remembers than our mind, that is: a thought is formed only after we are reminded - like the touch of amour that reminds us about love by invoking momentary clarity. In that very way, our sense of poetry (depending on how concrete it is) perceives the quote through the many impressions stacked so far. Therefore, it communicates and finds acceptance without having to bribe our minds with comprehension. At first, the argument may seem tailored, but this is precisely what motivates me to pen a few verses of my own. It always begins with the memory of the poem that it would be, the more vivid the memory, the stronger the urge, and sharper the impulse to weave words around it. Then follows a delightful ordeal of introspection and retrospection that ends in transparency. Or to put it in other words, the opacity reduces between what I know and what I want to write, as I write.

In my opinion, it would be better to ask - Why poetry? Rather than the other which we just talked about. To begin with: a blank page - a poem without any mistakes. One so perfect that it doesn't exist, for there is nothing to point at. Now consider a scribbled page, still a perfect poem, for there is nothing to point with. Thus, it would be apt to conclude that the beauty lies in imperfection, or within the journey towards perfection. So arises the need to abide by laws. It would sound absurd if said that laws are in fact tools. Indeed, how can obeying a rule be a tool?

Universe nearly obeys Newton's law of gravity - planets spin themselves to spheres and revolve around gigantic balls of fire, whence originates the concept of time. Through mere cyclical movements, we have a tool that builds a world, our world, your world, and my world - a ticking clock. Although in our case the rules are pretty modest, only three: context, rhyme, and meter. All sonnets, ballads, elegies, odes, limericks, couplets, villanelles, terzanelles, blank-verses, and even free-verses are resurrected to words from this vast spiritus mundi by poets, who share intimacy with just those three tools.

A poem is hence a creation - only by the means of language, which then also becomes a reason for it to be the highest form of expression. Now to finally answer the question - I must beg your pardon, for the answer can only be personal, such is the nature of the question. For me - poetry provides means to age backward to a womb, where awaits either birth or oblivion. The more I write, tender I become, younger I become...

By S. Viswanathan