On Poetry and its Purpose

Part 3 in my 'writing' series.

Find Part 1, here and Part 2, here.

In our popular culture of carefully curated spectacles that we consume from the side-lines, poems are not spectacles, neither can they be observed passively. Carefully curated, yes. Spectacles, no. A conversation could never be a spectacle. Poems demand an exchange of electrical currents through the daily, mundane, abused, and ill prized medium that is language. The force that is used for deception, as often as it used for revelation. Through the tactile material things - the baseball bat in your dad’s trunk, the oar floating away from a boat, the unused spoon in your kitchen drawer, or the space where once your grandfather’s favourite willow tree stood forty feet tall. The bat becomes a lost passion, the oar/your dreams, the spoon/an opportunity and the tree/now a drum soundtracking the memories you never had. The language that is an old vehicle, fuelled with familiarity, arriving at destinations further than it has travelled, always having more to mean than it has to say.

It is a test [that] genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

~T.S Eliot

What poetry is made of is not just words, but also time. Something that is so old that it is easy to forget about the silence it successfully overcame, the quiet battles it conquered in the poet’s mind. And that the poem arrived, in time, on time. Lit by us, the readers - stained in our shadows. Travelled from the nervous system of the poet, unfinished, to the nervous system of the reader, the one who listens, the active participant. Poems are the literal definition of ‘sparks flying’.

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Let me confess, I have written poems to manipulate. Formed from selfish, dishonest motives, they always, like an ill-made sweater fell apart at the seams in my own hands, ultimately flailing in their shoddy warmth. I cannot write a poem to manipulate. Neither can I write a poem simply from good intentions and argue to change the world. The energy will leak out of it, and it will end falling short of its intended meaning. I am also told, I can’t write a poem that transcends my own limits. To that I can argue that I have written poems that often pushed me beyond my horizons, into newer pastures, where I wandered freely, just off the freeway, without the guardrails pacing me forward. In those poems, I found parts of my own being, walking beyond the rest.

I find it amusing is that someone (me) writing a poem already believes in an entity, in a reader. In a way, that’s entering the conversation with limited syllables. Like sitting down at a card table where all the cards are already face up. Self-reference becomes inevitable, the reader is just my extension, my clone. I am just sending letters to myself, limiting their reach to my own house. Writing is a lonely art.

But over time, I have come to realise the ‘who’ of the envisioned reader is constantly flickering, that ‘I’ in my poems can morph into a universal ‘we’ without extinguishing the others, that a shared language exists. Readers with a vibrating range of difference, strangers that bring their own heartbeats, heartaches, memories, myths, and images exist. And the reach of my poem, therefore, is not limited to my own experiences anymore. That my poems can sometimes show a mirror to the world, a mirror that contains the world. In a language that itself has learned from heartbeats, heartaches, memories, myths, and images of strangers. Most if not all readers go into a poem with a slight apprehension at the back of their minds. But why do I care? Am I going to find anything for myself in this poem? And that is not a simple question to answer. We enter a poem, sometimes losing our way back. What if I enter something that breaks me and fails to put me back together? It is risky business.

I’ve started writing, believing my poems will speak to whomever chooses to listen, whomever needs it, and there’s a comfort in that. I try to avoid easy answers, the limited and stunted closures. No convenience is allowed, is accepted. Rather, at the root level, I write them to just remind you, the reader, that we are not alone – in our feelings. And maybe that means nothing to you. And maybe it means just enough. I expect the readers to find my limits, in units of their own landscape. Not to get manipulated but tell me how I arrived here. Selfish, but never dishonest.

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A poem is being crafted. The words are laid down in a force field and it’s dynamic. It’s almost as if the words themselves possess magnetic properties. They either veer together or repel each other, in a symphony of alignment and opposition. The energy in the field is fuelled by the moving history of the words, how they come together to form someone’s language, how that someone’s unconditionally embraced, questioned, relied upon it in their life. The staging of the poem is a series of choices about its spatial and temporal dimensions—how the chosen words should rest on the page, their pauses, their speed, their phrases and how they will interact with the one who comes along to read them. Reader who will convert the written words into images and let them flood the brain. I ‘read’ Sarah Winman write “And I wonder what the sound of a heart breaking might be. And I think it might be quiet, unperceptively so, and not dramatic at all. Like the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth”, but I ‘heard’ her heart break, and with hers, mine too. And I was finally free to say “I think I am hurt. I am also scared. I don’t know what happens next?”

The handling of my need to construct around destructiveness that I move through, some of my own making, through language is how I reclaim my own identity. I often feel my primary appetite for both, destruction and creation, but I choose to create. To create a space to hold my life, my hopes and dreams. I project physical aspects of myself into that space to better envision, contain, maintain and express them. Poetry, and to an extent all art, if willing, is a space for my most necessary communications. After all, the poem never needs to clear its throat. It transcends the need for introduction or explanations of its purpose or origin. It exists independently of its creator. Detached from the utilitarian use of language, it holds no capital, yet insists on being worthy. It reconnects me to myself, a self, kept safe from societal norms that often demand emotional conformity. “Why, as poets,” says Carl Phillips, “[should we] strip and, thereby make visible, difficulty instead of satisfying the majority of people by veiling it? Because poetry is not only what reminds us that we are human but helps ensure that we don’t forget what it means to be so.” Thus, a poem is far more than ink on the paper or the esoteric pursuits of the intellectual elite. It is, at its core, an invitation to engage in an essential conversation.

And yet, we live in an era where mainstream discourse often challenges the significance and relevance of art, especially poetry. Its need, its purpose. In a generation that is more comfortable to hide behind self-proclaimed, often filtered (corrected) identities online. In a generation, where the vulnerability of expressing fear or pain is getting as difficult as increasingly rare. Here, poetry arrives as a refuge, like a fire escape. As resilient as it is slender in its framework, it has become my most concentrated architecture of expression, of resistance. It is here, stood outside my apartment already in flames, that I find freedom to talk about my obsessions and fears on a structure just strong enough to hold the weight of my life. Watch the apartment go down in flames, rest assured that the fire escape will hold me up for as long as I desire.

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Notes: After a hiatus, I'm thrilled to return with the third instalment in my 'writing' series. I'm aware there are numerous topics I've yet to explore, but rest assured, they will be addressed soon. While my definition of 'soon' may stretch to a couple of months, I deeply appreciate your continued patience and support. Speak soon. Stay tuned!