Guest Post: In A Parlor Containing a Table

Galway Kinnell

It’s saturday night, and perhaps our reasons for joy are different, but, if nothing else, there’s the subconscious weekend masti vibe I hope to tap into today. I’m especially thrilled to be curating today’s guest post.

There is a small group of people who truly understand the sentiment “make friends with words”. I’m happy to have met many such kindred spirits on my voyages with Poetly. Kunjana Parashar is one such poet, and (I’m happy to say) friend of poetly. I first encountered Kunjana’s generosity of spirit and deep engagement with the form when she made publicly available, in an open access format, hundreds of poems that she’d carefully collected from her forays into the mushrooming archive of poetry shared online, and on social media. This exercise was a boon for young poets everywhere in the country. I could not contain my joy when I chanced upon this initiative, and I immediately got in touch with her to tell how grateful I was. This translated into many meaningful conversations, where I was able to discuss in a safe, free and uninhibited manner, multiple concerns about poetry, challenges that we encounter as poets, and formal dilemmas. With every conversation, the humility and sensitivity that Kunjana brings to a poem, both as a reader and as a poet, was refreshing. Her thoughtful and consistent personal curation of poems that speak to her, is a gift for any young person interested in poetry. I hope this guest post is only the beginning, and there are many such collaborations with Kunjana in the future.

I am happy, dear readers, to share with you, the poem she has chosen, and her commentary. I love this commentary because of its honest, intuitive subversion of conventional notions of how a poem should elicit wonder and excitement. In its tone, it is the diametrical opposite of my often over-the-top readings of poems. I have learnt much from this poet, and I am happy to share her insight and feeling with you.

Kunjana Parashar writes poetry & lives in Mumbai.
She can be followed on instagram here

I come to this poem during times of fatigue when I have given up and ideally would enjoy a somewhat strong, self-sabotaging drink. Something about this poem’s controlled sense of resignation really soothes me. It’s just the perfect amount given how short the poem is – I believe it’s very difficult to do a short poem well. To start with, I love how plain and detached the poetic voice is. It feels like I’m watching a scene. I like the unglamorous and sensible title, it immediately provides the reader with a setting without wasting any time – in a parlour containing a table and three chairs. There is something about the use of the indefinite article “a” in the title that really points to both a sense of singularity of “a parlour” and “a table”, but also a sense of generic non-specificity, as if this exact scene could be unfolding anywhere in the world. It’s like there’s a mute “Somewhere” preceding the title.

The poet repeats this non-specificity by giving all the men the same problem – they are all miserable. I love the sense of dialogue that ensues. I also like how the poet seems to change the language of how these men are expressing their “inmost thoughts” and yet the essence remains exactly the same – almost as if they can’t see the commonality of it, can’t connect the thread, and almost like they are separated by the interiority of their misery. I think Kinnell does this beautifully in such few lines. He uses that sense of poetic distance quite well. As I read it from the outside, it strikes me as a sad kind of funny.

As the men are retiring for the day/night, their dialogue becomes united – Kinnell doesn’t even say “said the first”, “the second said”, or “asserted the third”, he only uses the common pronoun “they” – now highlighting even more directly the sameness of their situation. And after this point, the interjection of the poetic voice goes away and their dialogue forms the last two lines of the poem, two lines I love reading out loud and repeating to myself – something about those quick, mock-brave goodbyes really gets to me – we see it happen all the time. I love how the poet cuts up and punctuates those goodbyes – all of the six words of both those lines are single-syllabled and I think that really intensifies the feeling of separation, even as there are three units at play: good night / cheer up / sleep well. The repetition of the “you too” three times divided by the fixity of full-stops not only heightens the sense of division thrice but also points one final time to the sameness of it all. I enjoy the balance of all these contrasts. I also feel like Kinnell uses a clever final line because it feels like the speaker breaks the fourth wall a bit with the use of the pronoun “you”. I find Kinnell’s use of repetition extremely effective throughout the poem. I feel pleased when I go through all the pairs of three – three chairs, three men, reading about their misery three times, “quarter to two”, and the memorable final lines.

Overall, I love how I don’t feel transformed by the reading of this poem. I don’t feel like any catharsis has taken place. I don’t sense any epiphany coming on. Instead I walk away with the absurd assurance that there will be more of this same crap tomorrow. I walk away with the promise of it all repeating, multiple times, all over the world – and I think there is something realistic and sincere about that which endears this poem to me, which yokes me into a kind of a community, and so in a strange way, makes me feel less alone.

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