The Practice and Appreciation of Poetry

I write because I wish to communicate something. I have a message and that message craves to be disseminated in spite of it running the risk of being dubbed crazy. You may call me a neurotic, sick, maladjusted and so on. Every divine messenger, social reformer runs this risk. Either I am at odds with the society or there is something utterly kinky, skewed about the world. I write about the social milieu of which I am a product. I cannot escape this fact.

I only write about what I intensely feel about. I am very much a part of the process of life in my time. I do not travel much into the glamorous, glorious distant past. If I do, that is for mutatis mutandis only. I live here and now. I perceive things, I get affected, I write. The social milieu of his times is inescapable to any writer. Society creates, shapes the writer, and conversely the writer also can create the society–that is, if his writing is a genuinely felt product. He presents the decay which stares the reader at his face, discomforting and embarrassing; he runs to at least put on a mask to cover that ugliness, even if he cannot drop that ugliness entirely. To that extent, the ugly, seamy, ignoble aspect is under check.

Mostly I write on the spur of the moment, that is to say, instantly. As and when and where I suffer from an intensity of feeling. It depends; on how I am affected, how much I am affected, how deeply I am affected. Most often words simply fly about like angels in the vast universe, alight gently on the white sheet, fold their wings delicately, and Lo! There comes alive the icon, the verbal icon. As the sculptor gently chisels open the eyes of the figure he has sculpted, the whole is there in an instant. The images, symbols, metaphors–all are there obeying some intrinsic command. The long and laborious process of the sculptor chiseling the sculpture remains seemingly ungone through, just the last phase of opening the eye, it all happens so quick, so, so well ordered. May Be, there is a mental chiseling between the instant of conception and the instant of delivery, but that remains seemingly ungone, unsuffered.

Some other times, I postpone writing it down. I brood over it like Wordsworth’s hen until my eggs become warmer enough for the chicks to break out of the shells; I let it, I mean the intense feeling/emotion/sentiment, to sink deeper and deeper, penetrate my person layer by layer until it sort of explodes my whole personality and drives me in search of a piece of paper and pen. I feel quiet only if I accomplished the writing. Still there are occasions, a third kind, when something agitates, possesses, tortures my soul but will not flow out, something like an air-block in a conduit preventing liquid flow. The much-longed sense of satisfaction of expression eludes; I feel like sitting and weeping.

Appreciation of Poetry: One can understand the difficulty as well as the aura of greatness attached to the reading and meaning-making of poetry.

Nobody can be talked into enjoying poetry, but one can bring oneself to such pleasures by learning to understand individual poems. When we read a poem for the first time, a certain kind of sense comes through to us almost immediately. This is the poem’s plain sense, sometimes called literal sense or literal meaning. With this begins, but not ends, the understanding of poem. Then we move from the plain sense to the figurative sense. Why should the poet use figures of speech? Can’t he say it plainly? Such a question is asked as if only poets resorted to figures of speech. Remember our everyday life is peppered with figures of speech; Ex. We “lead a dog’s life,” “smell a rat,” “got it for a song.” Then there is the question of symbol. Symbols are identified and their meanings made clear by the full context of the poem.

There are other elements. It is difficult for readers to believe that such matters as rhythm and rhyme are used to convey meaning. Poetry is speech, and the voice, or tone, of the poet communicates his attitude toward the facts of the poem. A very old definition of poetry regards it as a fusion of sound and sense.

In short, a poem is a living organism which contains the necessary elements of its own life. If the poem is a good one, every element in it contributes to its meaning.

The figurative meaning is mistaken for the hidden meaning. The right word in the right place, the intimate fusion of sound and sense, and the economy of rich suggestion are virtues of the structure of most poetry. When we read a poem we sense the language of poetry because of the devices of rhythm. It requires various kinds of scholarly information—biographical, historical, and textual, all together or separately, for an academic appreciation.

For an amateurish appreciation, an ear for words to go rapturous over the rhythmic beats, a capacity for wondering at the difference in the way the artist has perceived the subject that he himself has failed to do, and an ability to identity the various elements of which a work is composed are enough.

* Excerpts from the address delivered at the World Poetry Festival, Taiwan, March 23-25, 2005.