The voice
I wasn’t actually going to do a post today. I wanted to take a break. It is so beautiful outside. The weather is just right for a pleasant walk, with Marwa in my ears. Nikhil Banerjee’s Marwa, where the raag trills through the body, with the beautiful ferocity of winter. The screen is not very inviting at such times. But then I read a poem today. Dangling their legs from the blinking interface, the words leapt out, and now they refuse to budge. They’re coming in the way of things, actually. So I thought, chalo, let’s talk to them for a little while more. I’m sharing my burden,
don’t mind <read that in the voice of Sonali Bendre’s character from Sarfarosh>.
I want to talk a little bit about this question of the ‘voice’ that is mercilessly tossed about in discussions that fall at the intersection of craft and identity. If we think of the persona of a poem, the one ‘talking’ in the poem, as the one whose ‘voice’ we are listening to, I think we must consider a subjectivity that the poem is being addressed to. At one level, this is the reader, and our own affective response does construct a kind of subjectivity as well. But consider for a moment, a singular character that the poem is addressed to. Will that not decide the tonality? For instance, for argument’s sake, let us say a poem titled ‘Son’ is about a father talking to a son (the assumption that the persona is cis-male is tethered to the identity of the poet not the persona). This will decide the tone of the poem - is it light and conversational? is it a rant, or advise? Perhaps the persona is just thinking aloud, just observing. Even then, we can imagine an audience to which the poem is being addressed. There is the reader, of course, but there is another audience, always, in the poet’s mind. Perhaps even the poet is not always conscious of this listener, but the timbre in which the words string meaning together is a clue. I want to read this first poem keeping this trellis of questions in the background. Whose words are these? Can we create a character who is saying this? Who are they addressed to? What kind of person? What is the relationship to this person?
Many of these ideas seem to find an echo in Kumin’s poem. She explores multiple things by using the frame of a poet conversing with an artist through her own utterances. I’m not sure if every italicised line is a ‘real quotation’, but in a poem about the use of language in the construction of identity, as a reader, I’m already reading the italics with some distance, some irony even. I love this poem because it brings so many subjectivities into its fold, and then, of course, reflexively interrogates that act. It does all this, while taking a position of someone who is speaking as an equal, who has made something of a conversation, and is self aware enough to presume to advise. When I think of it like this, I do not grudge the poet her omnipresence, and her mumblecore aesthetic. Consider the tone of the next poem.
It does feel a little harsh doesn’t it? But it doesn’t too. She softens the blade of her accusation ‘you are bone-sore fool’, with an undercurrent of concern. This is the care of the Karate Kid’s hard taskmaster, the older sister who has seen the world and doesn’t care about tact. This might also be the friend who is unable to see how the emotion has grasped you so completely (despair) and is therefore a wee bit insensitive.
Then again any poet who writes like this - ‘Somewhere a brown owl fastens into his mouse’ - already has my heart. And I am happy to sit at her feet and listen.
P.S. I just want to express gratitude to The Alipore Post for their support. It is my favourite newsletter about art and poetry. The contribution felt like a pat on the back from a fellow traveller and it made my day :)
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