In the last couple of years of curating poems for this newsletter, I have connected with several young poets chipping away quietly at language, trying to find the words to describe the contrasting things they are feeling. I have watched with wonder as they craft figurines that are sometimes unfinished or imperfect in the conventional sense. These poems betray a freshness of perspective and a rawness of vision that you will not find in the works of the accomplished, and the secure. They experiment with form, and create a new syntax for the complex realities that we exist in - Let me give you an example:
‘…with a touch, I harvest red
notification blossoms on green whatsapp boughs
watch the single tick split into two, then turn
blue under the dotted shade of typing, onlinetyping, last seen, typing…’
These lines are from Ajay Kumar’s ‘touchscream’ featured on ‘The Bombay Literary Magazine’. Kumar has a penchant for compound words, that rarely seem contrived. They linger at the edge of language, as sentries, allowing you to navigate new thoughtscapes.
This metaphor that conflated the apparently opposing worlds of technology and nature, stayed with me. I was happy to discover that Ajay is a regular at the Poetly cafe. It was not long before I asked to him to do a guest post for Poetly, and he has very graciously obliged. And so it is, that I share with you, today, a commentary by another friend of Poetly :)
There are many lanes that diverge from the pathway that Kumar has created through this Wallace Stevens poem. I relished treading on each one of these sometimes familiar, sometimes unfamiliar detours, and seeing the scenery of the present in a new light. I am sure you will too.
A note about the poet/critic:
Ajay Kumar lives in Chennai, India, where he's pursuing his BA in English Language and Literature. You can read his poems on Wattpad at https://www.wattpad.com/user/Ajay-Kumar
An Atom of Eternity
Sometimes a poem falls into your lap when you weren’t even looking; then you look at it and realize this is what you were looking for. What you want becomes what you need and what you need becomes whatever you have, and you are held together, even if for a moment, in a universe where things falling apart is the rule.
Sheltered from the noise of the pandemic (by relative privilege) I kept thinking about the flaps of butterfly-wings, the storms they apparently caused, and the unpredictable distance between the two. I was obsessed with observing how little things tumbled into chaos; how one moment ends up getting assimilated into one’s being while another may do nothing at all. And one can never predict with certainty which leads to what. “In a minute there is time,” wrote Eliot, “For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
Every day felt like a minute and every minute like an eternity. Like most undergrads, I was standing Janus-faced yet blind in the gushing stream of time. Like so many of us, I was at a critical point of confluence where I felt every drop of my action, every word I said, would carry me into completely different oceans of the future. If I cannot know, then why even be?
But when the past and the future recede, what remains shines brighter than ever: the moment (so quick confusion comes to bright things). Overcoming chaos not by denying it but by acknowledging, accepting, and embracing it, and yet at the same time moving away from the false and frankly impossible credo of living in the moment; seeing the moment not as an isolate speck but as a flowing spectrum of possibilities. Or better yet, as Kierkegaard put it: “The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.”
This is when I read Harmonium, Wallace Stevens’ debut collection of poetry published all the way back in 1923, and the poem I’m sharing today is a section from one of the long poems from this collection, titled ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’. Like any good work of art, it gave me words to describe strange thought-feelings that I thought-felt, to bind together something that felt unbindable. It felt as if the poem was talking to me when it asks (in another section of the same poem): “Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?” And I replied, “Yes, a thousand times yes”.
This parable-poem filled an unnamable void. In another of his poems, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, he writes: “Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns”, lines that somehow seem even more relevant in today’s times, when heaven seems fuller than ever its hymns louder than ever, background-scoring the rise of fanaticism and demagoguery. The guffawing centurions beating their tankards in the poem also reminded me to be more grateful for the few people that stayed in touch even though everyone was receding into themselves. It also reminded me of something that Saxena wrote: “कितना अच्छा होता है / एक-दूसरे के पास बैठ खुद को टटोलना, / और अपने ही भीतर / दूसरे को पा लेना ।“(How wonderful it is / to sit near another and feel the self / and within the self / find the other).
This section of the poem I’m sharing, especially the last four lines, fell into my lap like a prayer for the prayerless, for those of us who attempt communication with atoms of eternity, and for those of us who try to belong to that faithless faith of the here and now.
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