Poetry Workshop

Poetry is an art form which can be termed as the most accessible but only sometimes. As an example, let me quote the most famous four lines of English poetry ever written (at least for Indians):

The woods are lovely dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
Miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep

Probably because of the hammering by our English teacher, we end up remembering the moral lesson conveyed by these lines — do not get distracted by the beautiful woods and concentrate on the journey. Let’s take another example in another language. These lines of Dushyant Kumar that were used in the movie Masaan:

Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai
Mai kisi pul sa thartharata hun

Ek jangal hai teri aankhon mein
Mai jisme raah bhool jata hun

You might not revel into deep contemplation to decipher the seemingly simple but appropriate metaphor of shivering (closest word in English for thartharana I know) like a bridge but it hits you somewhere and you go about reciting the song again and again until it gets etched in your memory and stuck on your tongue. Zabaan pe chadh jana is what it is called in Hindi.

This is what poetry does to you. It invokes sadness, joy, love, envy, anger, shame and what-not but unfortunately most of the times it invokes confusion and incoherence and that is when you leave poor poetry for good and meet her only accidentally. The accident of finding an emotional common ground with the poems you come across. Let’s take Shakespeare’s famous lines for example:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
Thou art more lovely and more temperate

A person madly in love would be on the emotional common ground with that of these lines but there might be some to whom it reeks of nonsensical cheesiness.

Or let’s take our national anthem. Though most of us do not understand the meaning of the anthem but we do feel a wave of patriotism running through our spine when we stand up and recite the anthem. Patriotism is the emotional common ground where we meet our national anthem.

Or when Shelley says:

I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed

We meet these lines on the emotional common ground of hopelessness. There are as many examples as there are poems (probably more). The general perception about poetry is that there has to be an emotional connection to be able to feel or understand poetry. This is true but partly. Take this poem by Arun Kolatkar:

There is no story behind it.
It is split like a second.
It hinges around itself.

It has no future.
It is pinned down to no past.
It’s a pun on the present.

It’s a little yellow butterfly.
It has taken these wretched hills
under its wings.

Just a pinch of yellow,
it opens before it closes
and it closes before it o

where is it?

It is highly unlikely that someone would find any emotional common ground with this poem but you still like what the poet has done in the last two lines. The anticipation is built as soon as you read ‘closes’ for the second time — of course the next words is going to be ‘opens’. but what happens next is something totally unexpected and beautiful. Which brings me to the question:

Are emotions the only common ground we can have with poetry?

The answer, of course, is no. Apart from the emotional connection we feel with the meaning of a poem, there is something else that makes us like it. That something is nothing but language and the way it is used in poetry. Right from our childhood our ears are trained to identify rhymes. That is our basic understanding of poetry. A few lines that rhyme:

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky

You can’t read it without laying stress on the end rhymes star/are and high/sky. This was our basic introduction to the use of language apart from merely communicating with each other. Poetry that we read as adults is nothing but an extension of this very concept of using language in as many new ways as possible. Apart from rhyme, many other elements of language come into play to compose a poem. These elements create the magical effect that makes us like a piece of poetry.

Innovative use of language is the first common ground we find with poetry because it is the beauty of language that draws our attention towards a particular poem in the first place. It is hidden in plain sight because what we focus on is the meaning of the poem and ignore how it sounds. Even a person with no interest in poetry whatsoever will be able to tell the difference between a ‘poetic’ line and a ‘non-poetic’ one.

What is it that makes a line ‘poetic’? What are the elements of a poem that make it sound better than other poems? Why should we read poetry in the first place? There are many such questions that we intend to answer through our poetry workshop. It’ll be an informal interaction with people who want to read and write poetry. Every aspect of this dying art we intend to cover with the limited knowledge and exposure we have.