About Mornings and Death, with Tomas Tranströmer, Ted Kooser and William Stafford

'Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around...'

Literature students have a weakness for melodrama. It’s an occupational hazard, of sorts. Everything beautiful kills us. The dream discovers reality, and remakes it in its own image. Is there any other way to be in the world then to devour it whole?

There is a zen koan which says, simply, ‘A thousand things will rise and fall’. When the world comes to us with an ephemera of offerings, we are caught in the midst of navigation, we don’t know where to look, what to love. We don’t know what will unhinge us from this creaky body and scatter our quiet suns into the air.

A fleck of sunrise pricks a mahogany table. A fly enters the room, god knows how. A notification rings a bell in the tomb of the smartphone. A strand of hair gets displaced momentarily and falls on the nape of a lover, and time stops.

Some accident of consciousness rescues these moments from oblivion. This act is often intuitive, sometimes deliberate, but always defined by attention. It is a kind of close reading, where each moment the thing before us changes, and something miraculous happens when the observation turns into experience.

When the student turns poet, the pain of beauty is so overwhelming, that it must be documented, it must find words. The poet lives in the eternal impossibility of language becoming communication. But the poem, sometimes, skirts the real, and with its cracks and silences, becomes another’s. This is what we live for, no? That we can understand one another.

I tend to be romantic about this question of “impact”, of art as essential, and so on. I have seen how the light of connection flashes in the eyes of one who has suddenly understood something about the world, simply because of a work of art, or a line from a poem.

I believe, actually, that there is a great theatricality to be unearthed here. The poet who sits at their table, in a room with a view, is quiet and alone, only in the postcard. When it sticks, the smear of the world is dancing the bhangra in their heads. The act of transmitting to paper the wordless sensations that are so filled with colour, renders itself as a frenzied blur of performance. I realised this once, while writing a canzone (a 60 line poem, with each line ending with one of 5 key-words. I think it was Jeet Thayil who called it a 'sestina on speed’). When I started writing, it was nearing 4 am, and I couldn’t sleep. I had been thinking of this form for many days, and so I sat at my table, poemising stray thoughts. By the time I lifted my head up from the draft the sun was already out. It wasn’t very good of course, but I had just finished running a marathon, and it didn’t even feel like “work”. There is definitely an element of the corporeal, in writing, and even in editing. It is all the more beautiful, because there is no audience. This becomes performative, at readings (that are often soft, respectful affairs - I prefer, myself, the energy of a concert or a mushaira with oohs and aahs, and wahawhi, but then why can’t poetry readings in English be like that too?) But in the act of writing poetry itself, there is narrative, a cinematic profusion of ideas, and even the pip at the end, after you have sucked the fruit to its very centre (but not always).

I do not ignore the element of artifice that creeps in with craft, that is inherent to the act of selecting detail, and sprinkling image with insight or the elusive, remembered ‘aha’. And every writing ‘zone’ doesn’t follow this same narrative. Some poems rip out with minimum fuss, in a matter of a few moments, when we catch the wave. Others flop around for hours like wingless flies, before falling down, beaten. There are moments of defeat, or being inconsequential, of doubt and an inability to find the right vehicle for what we want to say, and all this eventually froths to the surface when the poem meets another’s mind and continues its dance.

A most interesting category of poems finds the extraordinary in the mundane. Some of these poems masquerade as epics, but steal your attention with the whimper at the end. Others slowly build scene, caress each unit of thought with the gentlest of feather-touches, and then leave us breathless in the centre of their extending ripples. I have a soft spot for this particular strand of writing, especially poems about quiet moments in the day, when the heart stirs suddenly. My poet friends tease me about how many of my poems are ‘morning poems’.

Let me share with you a short poem of mine that perhaps better distils what I feel about mornings or spring, than this commentary.

home from work

the morning
bribes bravura
slipstreams
into surrender
speckles
into pen.

what night
left behind,
it found in the anxiety of mynahs
circling into sight
as they head to work,

the breeze,
a hungry bag
of stories.

I sit
outside this vision
that rusts sunrise

and wait for the day to break
into inexorable laughter

Buddhist monks stress on the importance of thinking consciously about death. In fact, some recommend a few minutes of this reflective, grounding meditation early in the morning as soon as we wake up. They say that it reminds us of our mortality, of our transience, and how much we take the world for granted. It makes us alert, and kind. Thinking of death makes us more alive, more aware of ourselves, a little apart, from the noise of the living firmament. In this small death, there is the quiet birth of anther world. In one of his poems shared on this platform, William Stafford, also talks of this revelation that is the morning hours:

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

I want to share with you a poem by the gorgeous Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer, who liked to write soft, lyrical poems which alighted in the human and nested in the natural world. This is a morning poem, and it exhibits his characteristic wonder in imagery, and the shift to a transcendent or surreal register, that poets are such suckers for. The way the poem starts itself is magnificent, placing a moment of quiet watching and movement in the very midst of the urban sprawl.

In his work on craft, and the poetic life, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser quotes this poem while talking about how “We serve each poem we write. We make ourselves subservient to our poetry.” He says “Any well-made poem is worth a whole lot more to the world than the person who wrote it” and picks out 3 lines from the Tranströmer poem: “Fantastic to see how my poem is growing / while I myself am shrinking. / It's getting bigger, it's taking my place." Indeed, this feeling of the poem filling up, not only the page, but the entire frame of the momentarily created literary landscape is astoundingly real. as real as what it describes. as real as a song performed in an empty theatre. It is nothing more than a momentary encounter, but its imprint is forever.

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I share, now, another poem by Ted Kooser which is about death. Death and mornings, what else is there?

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