Dear friend, tell me, is there any feeling more intense, more exhilarating than walking hand-in-hand down the streets of a city of verse with a learned friend whose ear is as deeply attuned to the other worldly music of new language as yours is?
(forget the superlative, because all things, when you reach their kernels house the sublime. this is what gives art its true name - love)
As me and a friend read a Marathi collection of poetry called Dron today, I caught myself feeling like the poet kolatkar was speaking to me - to us - and, in that moment, only to us. But I heard him speaking to Ram too, and admonishing him. And to Sita, recognising her fierce beauty, her gentle creative fire, and re-embedding it in the lived world, the current of now. Through him, I spoke to the monkeys after the great war, who were more human than humans. I whispered fearless questions, in a concert of voices, lost in the impassioned buzz of naive idealisms, too fragile for this world.
One is never alone in poetry. When reading poetry together (or even by oneself, for that matter), the imagination soars into a churning manthan of phantasmagoric worlds. Words alight, pregnant with life, oscillating slowly in the light of their vishwaroop. Two voices grow into tree-shaped-clouds draped in rainbows, across time and space, sinking intoxicated into a narration sprayed with anachronistic dreams.
It is the word that is the unit of thought, the phrase, on the other hand, is the unit of poetic imagination. The fatal flaw of the phrase is that it opens, like sunburst; or the first time a baby glimpses the world, as it opens its eyes. Chimeric opera that the phrase is, it resurfaces across generations, but always in different clothes. It is the vehicle for the juggernaut of ideas, and the cycle on whose twin wheels, the ragged old man of history rides. Another way of thinking about tradition, perhaps?
When you read poetry closely with another - a friend whose curiosity outruns their ken - you enter a world outside of your present, you dissolve into a mythology of the future. That place, I would like to believe with an insistent idealism, overturns the corrupted social, the reductive, what we experience empirically, in this chaotic, unjust today. It is a place of possibility, and perhaps the truest creative act, even though it springs forth from the fertile loam of the past.
Maybe this is sounding like an escape.
But it is far from that.
Art doesn't take you away from reality. It teaches you to return.
And the return is always deeper, more humble, more drenched in the uncertainty of understanding. Art teaches us about our own experience, the way that even the experience - doused as it is in the immediacy of the five senses - cannot. This is only because it is another. We throw our lives, our unwritten poems against another's. We feel as another. Is this what community is? I do not know. But I write to you with the warm assuring breath of the poets I read, on my neck, and the fumes of their feverish arguments and stories in the virgin air.
One is never alone in poetry...
I share with you today, an old poem of my own about Bombay. I share it simply to continue the spirit of ‘Bombay city poetry’ in which I’m currently steeped.
Resharing a link to the call for poems below
Meanwhile: A call for 'Contemporary Mumbai/Bombay City Poems'
P.S. Deep gratitude for the anonymous dear friend who reads poetry with me :)
I hope you are finding the space to write, to dream, and to resist.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’
Here's a sonnet about a different time and a different place:
Bali Sonnet
As dragonfly does beating wings advance
Through aether's mists of magic making spells
To Drop and dive thus carve a feasting prance
Oer manned village propp'd upon the tell
Four his wings, to chase the darting fire fly
As one may capture love in well sung song
Six the legs to seize upon perch or pray
Yet daytime moment's stay will end ere long
Aware the silhouette that lofts on high
Portends the cleaving moment all must know
The quick on earth must like the dragons die
Both chaste and those who carnal pleasures know
Heed the sound, that gamelan sweetly chatters
Sacred dance where every movement matters.