‘Everything that enters my consciousness enters first through the prism of its poetic utility. Were you ever a kid who would hold your shirt out like—I don’t know if you can see it—like this, and you would fill it with stones or shells or whatever? I feel like I’m just moving through the world with my shirt out in front of me, filling it with language and images. And over the years I’ve realized that one hundred thousand percent of the time, if I’m like, “I’ll remember this, I don’t need to write it down,” I forget it instantaneously. So I just write everything down.’
I remember reading this interview in the Paris Review some time back, (save it off fast, or else it’ll escape into the no man’s land behind paywall!) featuring Kaveh Akbar - a poet who I’m head over heels in love with. He reminds me of a squirrel a little bit - eyes trained on a word, a turn of phrase, an image, sudden jerk of intense activity, then calm, and then another burst. His language unravels with the multifarious eyes of an angry sea, each wave devastatingly gorgeous in its indignant scream, and then, its quiet receding. My first reading of the poems in Calling a Wolf a Wolf was a quiet affair - I remember sitting there, still as said squirrel (in a moment of prolonged watching), the book ticking away in my hands. The path through addiction that he bookmarks with uncertainty and the neon glitz of metaphors hurtling in different directions is anything but dissonant. It is held together by the calm assurance of one who knows how to name what is broken, and then surrender it to the library of attention, or oblivion. But the documentation of it is enough.
He talks about this erratic streak that punctuated the work:
I love my first book very much, I’m very proud of it and I have a lot of affection for it—but it is this sort of clumsy, loud, noisy, urgent, uneven thing, and so much of that has to do with the sense I had that I was floating out in the ocean, clinging to this two-by-four.
You can see some glimpses of this in The Wild Pear Tree, a poem from the collection I shared on Poetly several moons ago.
Anyway getting back to the squirrel and the impulse to turn the world into one giant shiny object, filled with bazaars of colourful little things, things that are to be collected, recorded, carefully archived, and re-exhibited… I’m sure you are familiar with Keri Smith’s lovely little ode to the creative spirit, and the collector’s sense of wonder: ‘How to be an Explorer of the World’.
I bring this up today, because I’ve been feeling like this lately. For various reasons (including the reimagined #SealeyChallenge), I’ve been reading more poetry than usual, letting the percussion of the verses I love, gambol in my mouth, even as I cycle through Delhi’s quiet morning streets. What this kind of drowning in words, image and metaphor has done, I believe, is quite interesting. Juxtaposed with the reality of truant leaf and stray cur, newspaper stall negotiation and cigarette haze, static screen and dynamic wallpaper of the world slowly fading away to reveal the moon, words take birth again in the womb of little things. It is quite something to feel the infinite in the ordinary. I think I’m bordering on woo-woo here. But I’ll share a poem I wrote about it. Perhaps it will explain what I’m trying to convey better. It is a raw draft… ah, well.
Have you ever seen a squirrel? Like,
really watched one? The other day
this fellow whose diameter of operations
arcs around a bench by a Peepal, visited
while I was sitting there. He had sprinted
to a spot a few feet from mine. It wasn't
me he was interested in. The kirana helper boy
throws rotting grain and other refuse out
from time to time. He was polishing off
the last of his meal. He picked up a grain
with two paws, and looked up at me as he sat
on the lod of his hind legs. His teeth beat
a continuous rhythm, and eyes cast a slew of darts
at me, sizing me up from foot to tip of curl.
He didn't flinch - you might have been forgiven
for thinking it was a sculpture if it were not for those
whirring jaws. Then suddenly, he stopped, the darts
settled on a dried leaf, before taking off again
and alighting on a stick. Again and again they flicked,
like a hyperactive 4-year old in a mela, from twig
to banana peel and finally, back to the remaining grain.
He looked down, examined the morsel carefully. His eyes
scanned it for viruses, and then, after recording data
that would be useful to carbon date it, he started gnawing again.
The darts were back on me. We sat motionless both of us.
only teeth gnawing away. When he finished, the darts lingered
for a stray second before falling on a half eaten biscuit
some distance away. Without warning he sprang into a bird
and darted to the next stop. Again the ritual began -
spot, caress, scan, surround, survey until satisfaction
opens a door, and then eat, or store to deal with later.
I think this is how we must meet the world -
turn everything into an object.
Regard it with care - this museum
of burnished beings
and obscure speaking fossils.
Soooooo... after visiting many islands not necessarily in the initial route, the barge of this post finally settles at the poem I’m sharing today. As I was telling a friend (and you), I have been feeling like poetry is falling out of my ears; and it is always, always, a heady, enlightening feeling. Bas.
Ab read Mark Strand’s ‘Eating Poetry’, will you? :)
Note: You can also check out his classic ‘Keeping Things Whole’ from Poetly’s archives.
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