Texture of Forgetfulness: A New Poem by Me

Texture of forgetfulness

Slips away from my fingers

I don’t even remember how it felt

Probably it was like sand or silk

Or like a young woman’s curves

Or like nothingness

Or like feathers of a dead sparrow

Texture of forgetfulness is like daylight

Inside which we can see everything clearly

For instance when I am on my bike

I don’t see the vacant spaces between vehicles

The spaces which would be vacant

And those which are already vacant

Texture of forgetfulness

Is like the eyes

Limpid and sharp

In their absence

I don’t even see

What I am not seeing

Even the invisibility

Is invisible to me

Texture of forgetfulness is like a poem

We have forgotten to write

We don’t even remember what it was

And how it went

Or where it went

I dream of touching forgetfulness

Which is full like a cup of tea

Or empty like the forgotten sea

I smell the texture of forgetfulness

It smells the touch of mother’s saris

Before she went away to sleep

Or dad’s trousers

When he used to take me out for Bruce Lee movies

I listen to the texture of forgetfulness

It sounds like the music of the forgotten son

Which you can’t even replay in your heads

Texture of forgetfulness grows like a cobweb

On a winter afternoon

I feel like a lazy spider

Spinning the web of my forgetfulness

Trying to trap some unknown buzzing words

Which I don’t even know

They exist.

19 December 2010

2.55 pm

Duty of Society towards Poetry

There is an entire Himalaya of public discussion on social duties of a poet, but hardly any discussion on the duty of society towards poetry and the poet. In nearly thirty six years of my life these are things I have realized as a poet regarding the `relation between poetry and society' issue:
I) Poetry is subject of ridicule and mockery. No one takes poetry seriously as it doesn't have any economic value or utility value. Almost everyone, including the poets, laugh at the derision they face.
II) Which proves that the whole issue of `social duty/responsibility' of a poet' is damn bloody shit

Who do you write for?

The question of who one is writing for is of great importance to almost all forms of writing, all genres,-except poetry. Now this I believe is a very controversial stance. I was reading the blog of Ram Gopan Varma and his discussion on ` Hits and Flops' and I remembered Marianne Moore's profound observation ( noted by Prof Harold Bloom in the Western Canon) that one only writes for oneself and for strangers. When you are writing a newspaper article you have a approximate image of the reader in your mind which comes close to the actual reader. But when you are writing poetry, its only you and the language, the most social of all social institutions. You never know who reads your works. Often it happens that only the poets read poetry and I am sure if your poetry is good they are NOT going to like it at all ( envy you see ) and if your work is really bad than you can end up with lots of praise from your poet friends) . Your readers are never the people whom you know because 1) most of them give a damn for creative and serious poetry 2) and those who do feel that you are their rival because they are mostly other poets!! If a poet says that he is writing only for himself, he of course lying and if a poet says that he writes for others, probably he is a bad writer. Conclusion: One always writes for oneself and for strangers. No one could have put it better than Ms. Moore

The Poet, The Philosopher and The Teacher

It is strange how people have misunderstood the poet to be either a philosopher or a teacher. Whats more even many philosophers and teachers and some poets themselves have nourished this fallacy. Actually, the poet is neither of the two. The reason, as I see it, is that unlike the philosopher or the teacher, the poet is not interested either in knowledge for its own sake or for the purpose of communicating that knowledge. What the poet seems to be interested in is the idea of philosophy for the sake of poetry and didacticism for the sake of poetic effects,rather than the other way round. Both didactisim or knowledge is put to poetic use in at least good poetry, rather than poetry being put to didactic or philosophical use. Same applies for the idea of the poet as a social reformer. The poet is interested in social reform as something that will fuel his poetry. The poet uses, misuses, abuses, knowledge, morality and didacticism for poetic purpose. Does it sound `formalist' position? Well, it cant be helped because poetry primarily is a form . A critical approach can be formalist or informalist, but that doesnt alter poetry as essentially a form.

Victory of Hope over Experience

Hemant asked me to scribble something like a blog for the forthcoming issue ofAbhidhanantar and I was wondering what to write. Actually, my poetry has come in for adverse criticism from various quarters and usual complaints are that I have no moral consciousness(ah-hem) ,I am actually a `romantic poet' and that my modernity is superficial, and that I have no social consciousness.That I resemble a `Pandit Poet' of the Pandit era of Marathi poetry. And I am irritated.

I feel that I should not have entered Marathi poetry scenario at all. I am taken aback at the crudity and superficiality of the conception of poetry today in Marathi. Poetry,according to many of those who supposedly take poetry seriously, ought to reflect social problems realistically and directly or ought to be a documentary criticism of society. For those who do not take poetry seriously it is hardly anything more than cliched and sentimental phrasing that they learnt at school. In short, the understanding of poetry in Marathi is shallow and crude. Do you hope to be appreciated Mr. Ketkar? Do you expect a sensible critique of your works? Forget it and write good poems and hope that some time in the far away future after your death, someone sensible and intelligent will come across your works and respond to it in more mature way.

Dr. Johnson described marriage as a victory of hope over experience. Writing poetry in Marathi is no different. You hope for a sensible and intelligent reader, even if you havent come across any.

My Programmable Women

My second serious short story `Programmable Women' appeared in the latest issue of New Quest. It is my first publication as a story writer. I often thought that I was incapable of doing justice to fiction as I considered it very extroverted, social and garrulous literary form which was very much unlike my personality. After this experience, I feel that I was wrong and like poetry, one has to find a way of writing that suits you. The art lies in transforming very private experiences into public ones, very much like any other art. Compared to more constricting economyof poetry, I liked the wider space it provided for the play of imagination, a bigger room for juicy digressions. Probably I will enjoy writing novels even more. Yes, I am planning to write one!

I had posted an earlier draft of this story on a Yahoo Short Story group. The reactions were very interesting. `More showing and less telling' is one common advice that comes to my way. My earlier short story` The Mesh' also received the same comments.One of my friends commented that she got an opportunity to read a good story after a long time and that my story was better than my perverse and morbid poetry. The other reaction was that I said many things too directly and there should have meen more distance, more irony regarding the content. Who knows, I thought it was a very good idea. And I enjoyed writing it very much. I dont know if readers enjoyed it at all.

The contrast between the programmable female androids and the real emanicipated women is a very interesting idea. The best thing about it is that it can be read in more than one ways. You can read it as a feminist text or you can read it as a sad story of human male. I found the germ of this idea in Dilip Chitre's remarks when I was preparing Live Update about women poets in Maharashtra. Another germ of this story lies in Vilas Sarang's short story Interview with Mr. Chacko.

Poetry is very agonizing for me at times and fiction can be fun!

Love and Poetry Thinking about Meerabai

Love is one of the oldest theme of poetry. In fact, poetry is traditionally considered as an expression of love. This is the reason why writing love poetry is one of the most difficult challenge for a poet today. It is so easy to slip into a cliche or be sentimental in your treatment.

Yet there is no denying the fact that some of the greatest poetry in the world is love poetry: Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Meerabai, Kabir and of course Ghalib.

I believe Meera composed the finest love poetry in the world. Why? Because most of the others mentioned above were unable to transcend their masculine consciousness. Masculine love poetry is always tinged with the violence of lust and certain roughness which reduces the beloved to an object of sexual desire. Meera wrote magnificient love poetry without attempting to write like men. and thats what gives her poetry certain delicate elusive beauty which the male poets lack.

The Morbid and Sordid poetry of Sachin

Today a friend said that if you get a job at MS, you must admit that there is still some room for merit in this world and your poems will get less morbid.

Well, Sachin's poems are Morbid andSordid and cant help it.

I am too disillusioned about things to believe that getting a job or being a father or being loved is going to cure me of my suffering and pain.

Why is my poetry so `morbid' and `sordid'? I dont know. My poetics, my shastra of kavya is built on my vision of the world which is sordid and morbid and all that. So I try to incorporate as much `unpoetic' and `unaesthetic' elements as possible into the grammar of poetry. The grammar of poetry, for me, is that it is a language of symbols and images. It is a `second degree' language, language within the language, a dialect without the region, an idiolect without the speaker.

But I am NOT believer in the idea of `Pure Poetry' in the Symbolist fashion because I dont like the idea of Purity at all. I am great beliver in the essential Impurity of things.

Thinking out loud about Art

I have recently renovated my msn blog. Da Vinci theme and all that. Every blog that I make seems to be about me as a writer. Is being a writer any different from being someone else? A doctor or a lawer or a mechanic or a farmer? Dont they all produce something? Arent they all creative in some sense? The writer makes art out of the activity of writing. Art, I think is not a separate category of activity but a dimention of any human activity. Art, in earlier days implied skill. Yoga is defined as the excellence in the skill in our day to day deeds. Poetry, then, becomes a certain skill in using words in a particular way. What kind of skill? What kind of way?