I return today to a task that I had outlined to you, dear reader, some time back. Last December I did not renew the subscription for the Poetly website. As a result of this decision, a couple of months’ worth Poetly posts have been taken offline. Many of those early posts held the seed of what I intended this space to be. In the beginning, I would diligently make the time, everyday, to write Poetly - and so, this evolving archive really did hinge on ‘a-poem-a-day’, at least, for the first year. This means that those early shares, drenched in the wonder of a new language, and an evolving form, had not yet fallen into the false confidence of experience. Reading some of those commentaries, from 2019, I can feel the fervour of this project - how it worked to set itself apart from literary criticism, how naturally it entered a language of encounter, over the opaque jargon of the analytical mind.
In an attempt to convey this initial impulse, I quote from an article I wrote recently about Shah Rukh Khan and Pathaan for Maktoob:
“The critique of the work of art reaches us before the experience. More often than not, we have made our opinions before the first cut has even been launched. Controversies plague the space of the film’s becoming. We want to feel a certain way. The lockdown and the COVID pandemic had us in long bouts of cabin fever. We had forgotten the intuitive joy of watching a film together in darkness, hooting to superstar entries, and revelling in the shared exhilaration of community.”
I draw attention to feeling over craft, in an attempt to emulate Lucille Clifton, perhaps, who would ask her students after reading a poem in class: Did it make you feel? This is not to suggest a romantic obsession with affect, over the nuances of production and creativity. Instead, I suggest that we be creative in our reading, and not let the poem drown in a deluge of opinion, parading as analysis.
Some of these ideas became the formative impulses of this space - and I discussed many of these with a co-conspirator whose poem I am sharing with you today…
Here is a slightly edited version of the commentary that I had written the first time I shared the work.
Raju Tai is a partner in rhyme and unreason. Her footsteps resound as she strides fearlessly in a quest for a kind of utopia - a place filled with metaphor, simplicity, words and children. With tremendous ease and sensitivity she excavates sensation, brushing off the dust from the surface of words, before making them gleam in unexpected ways. She loves the sound that beauty makes as it sings, and in delightfully irreverent and risqué verse, she leaves the reader breathless at a seemingly nonchalant turn of phrase, or image.
This tribute to Coke Studio Pakistan (a phenomenon that has bewitched an entire subcontinent) becomes a metaphor for her relationship with musicians and their music, and the idea of the other. These themes interact seamlessly with her own deliciously transgressive articulation of desire. There is no sophistry in her unabashed love for the rockstars who grace her TV screen, and even that act is made real. You can feel the coy stain of “Meesha Shafi’s lipstick” and bask in the audio-visual excess of the Coke studio set. This is where the compelling force of Raju Tai’s writing lies… not poetry, but an ethnography of desire.
I hope you are well!
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Also..fellow good hearted rascal, co-conspirator, partner in rhyme and unreason - what joyful titles to have in the Poetly world.. :)
Grinning! Thank you. How much has Poetly evolved since those initial days! Thanks for consistently seeing poets in ways they haven't seen themselves yet. 💌🌺