On Poetry & Poets
by Abhay K.


I have been dreaming poetry
and I see in my dreams 
poems written in eyes of the galloping Pegasi
on shells of crawling snails
printed on colourful wings of swarming butterflies
on the serrated teeth of giant killer sharks 
on the claws of eagles hovering in the sky
poems on the bodies of naked angels
poems flowing in the veins of buffaloes 
on the petals of roses
poems rising as cacti thorns
I see poems swimming like blue whales
rising like a phoenix from the ashes of burnt books
I see poems smiling, whispering to me
in weird voices.

'What is Poetry?'-  Most of the poets  and even those who are not poets  ask this 
question at one or the other stage while writing or reading poetry. 
Poetry has as many definitions as there are poets and poetry readers. Poetry is 
like a giant elephant and poets are blind men, each with their own description of 
this humongous creature. 
The great German poet Goethe pronounced that those who had no ears for 
poetry and music were barbarians. Kavi Bhratihari's bold pronouncement  -'Sahitya Sangeet Kala Vihinah, Sakshatyapashu puchhavishanhinah' , echoes 
Goethe's sentiments. 
For the English poet William Wordsworth, poetry was spontaneous overflow of 
powerful feelings. This is also the view of Sumitranandan Pant who wrote-Viyogi hoga pahla kavi/aah se upja hoga gaan/umad kar ankhon se 
chupchap/bahi hogi kavita anjaan.
But there is much more to poetry than spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. 
Wordsworth and Sumitranandan Pant probably forgot about the art and craft of 
poetry.
Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry as best words in the best order 
which also holds good for prose or  other writings. Charles Dickens, though not 
known as a poet, thought poetry made life what lights and music did to the stage. 
The British poet Matthew Arnold had a philosophical take on poetry. For him 
poetry  at the bottom of all was  criticism of life.  He  thought poets as nagging 
creatures, complaining about life. 
Echoing the sentiments expressed by Goethe and Bhratihari who compared 
humans with no taste for poetry with barbarians and animals, Russian Nobel 
Laureate Joseph Brodsky said  -'What distinguishes us from other members of 
the animal kingdom is speech, then literature  -  and poetry in particular, being the 
highest form of locution - is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.' 
Brodsky describes poetry as a unique art form, like no other. In his Nobel Prize 
acceptance speech he elaborated on this uniqueness of poetry-  'There are, as 
we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was 
known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other 
forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily 
toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; 
and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer 
of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, 
further, perhaps, than he himself  would have wished for.' Poet and poetry 
readers are surprised at poetry’s power to reveal rare and unexpected 
relationships among words, thoughts, ideas. I have  found my own poems 
revealing to me. For example-Quark of a poet/blossoming in the subatomic space/writing the uni-verse.
What is revelatory here is quark as a poet and universe as one verse being 
written by a quark-poet. I have come across such revelation often in my own 
works that has left me awestruck, breathless. 
Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century believes that poetry 
reveals the secret manifestations of nature. He writes in his memoirs -  'I believe 
that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal 
partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the 
nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature.' Here is my 
poem ‘Neem’ that reveals relationship between Delhi and itself-Under my ubiquitous shade/lie scattered cities of Delhi/I and Delhi are one and 
the same/my yellow-greenish fruits/  delicious when ripe/ bitter when raw/only the 
wise know the difference.
The great poet from the Caribbean Derek Walcott echoed the sentiments of 
Brodsky and Neruda when he spoke in his Nobel lecture-  'poetry  is perfection's 
sweat but which must  seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, 
combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses 
simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the 
present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried 
language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one 
of excavation and of self-discovery.' 
One should mark these words-  ‘the process of poetry is one of excavation and of 
self-discovery.‘
And I made a self discovery when these  lines came to me one evening while 
walking the stretch that connects Kirorimal College to Delhi School of Economics, 
St. Stephen’s College and the Delhi University’s Rose Garden-I was always here/as the blowing wind/or the falling leaves/ as the shining sun/or 
the flowing streams/as the chirping birds/or the blooming buds/ as the blue sky/or 
the empty space/ I was never born/I didn’t die. 
Here poetry rhythmically restructures time.  It transforms the mortal into the 
eternal.
Seamus Heaney, whom we lost this month, called the process digging. A rather 
well known line from his eponymous poem-Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests, snug as a gun/I’ll dig with 
it.
As a man dedicated to poetic form he observed- 'Poetic form  is both the ship and 
the anchor...what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base 
of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic 
nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the 
poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is 
and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part 
of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all 
around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, 
that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an 
earnest of our veritable human being.'
Poetry provides us  with daily dose of ecstasy.  It takes us to a higher plane of 
existence away from the quotidian existence.  Emerson says 'Take all away from 
me, but leave me poetry.' I believe Poetry liberates. 
Why write poetry
As per Brodsky a  person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win 
the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding 
him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to 
leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth. 
The nature of poetry one writes evolves with time. Almost all of us start writing 
poetry with love poems. Then the subject of our poetry gets diversified slowly 
with time. The highest stage of writing poetry comes when the poets become the 
voice of the voiceless.
Brodsky further adds- 'one who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he 
courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, 
at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, 
or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't 
know the way it's going to come out, and at times he is very surprised by the way 
it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expec ted, often his thought 
carries further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of 
language invades its present.
I started writing poetry to express my inner awe and angst, the wonder I and 
disgust I felt in Moscow. The river of poetry started flowing out of me. There was 
nothing stopping it. It was Wordsworthian 'spontaneous overflow of powerful 
emotions'. I had no idea how my poem was going to shape itself. I wrote to 
preserve the exquisite beauty of the moment against  the incontestable ravages 
of time. 
I wrote love poems first. Only afterward death, immortality, nature, heroism, 
beauty, time, universe, cities, bureaucrats, became subject matters of my poetry. 
If you look around carefully, persons whom you love are going to leave you,  for 
heavens or for better opportunities, the career you love is also going to end some 
day, you are also going to leave this earth one day. Only your words, your poetry 
will never leave you till you are alive and chances are that your poetry may 
outlive you. This is one strong reason one should write poetry. Derek Walcott 
puts it very elegantly-  I have kept my own promise, to leave you the one thing I 
own, you whom I loved first: my poetry.
How should poetry be
Maria Tsvetaeva believes-'Poetry should be delirious and lucid.  The very nature 
of voice in written poetry must be metaphorical, it cannot be literal.' This may be 
one of the reasons people feel that poetry is esoteric art inaccessible to the 
common man. 
Edward Hirsch writes in his book How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry-It is said in great poetry there is always a dialogue between the individual and 
history. There is powerful dialectic operating in our lives between reality and 
imagination, between history and philosophy, bet ween the temporal and eternal. 
Two contradictory elements meet in poetry: ecstasy and irony. 
There is no ideal form or content of poetry, only approximations. Each poet and 
society values its own kind of poetry. Truck drivers all across South Asia cherish 
their own poetry as Philip Larkin or Sharon Old do or the lovers of  shero-shayari
do, Kabir with his pithy couplets, Walt Whitman with his long prose-poems, each 
poet to his own. 
What it means to be a poet-Many of us write poetry, few of us are published poets whose works have 
appeared in various poetry anthologies. But how many poets are sure about 
being poets, about our art and craft of poetry?  Wislawa Szymborska, winner of 
Nobel Prize in Literature in1996 in her Nobel Lecture interestingly titled ‘The Poet 
and the World’ said  –  ‘Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even or 
perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only 
reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it.’ 
‘We are poets’ has the sound of outcasts. (Maria Tsvetaeva).  'The poet 
confronted nature's phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to 
safeguard his vocation.  Today's social poet is still a member of the earliest order 
of priests. In the old days he made his pact with the darkness, and now he must 
interpret the light.' (Neruda)
The word poet comes from the Greek word poesis which means ‘making’ and a 
poet is foremost a maker. Edward Hirsch writes in his book  How to read poetry  –
‘A poet's function is not to experience the poetic state, his function is to create it 
in others. A poet is recognized by the simple fact that he causes his reader to 
become inspired.’
A poet never speaks directly or writes literally, there is always a  phantasmagoria, 
figure of speech involved in his writing.
For example here are two my poems titled Delhi & Chitwan
Delhi
My smell
my nakedness
entices
hordes of human flesh
from faraway lands
traders, 
emperors,
marauders.
I
pose 
nude 
up on the hill
below
the feast of eagles-possessed,
intoxicated.
Chitwan 
A river full of crocs
a canoe filled with dreams
rowing.
eerie silence in the jungle
an elephant riding a human
trees strolling
statue of a frail man 
at the central square
in the city of rhinos. 

Brodsky in his Nobel lecture said-  ‘The one who writes a poem writes it above all 
because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, 
of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one 
is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one 
falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on 
drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on 
language is, I guess, what they call a poet.’
This addiction, this dependency on poetry, on language for daily dose of ecstasy 
makes one a poet. A poet gets condemned to poetry as a drug addict to drugs. 
Brodsky brings the poet to the centre stage of language and literature stating  -'The poet, I wish to repeat, is language's means for existence - or, as my beloved 
Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to 
be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in 
which you read  them will remain not merely because language is more lasting 
than man, but because it is more capable of mutation. '
Writing poetry I have come up with new words ‘Bureaucrab’ or ‘Spritensual’ to 
exactly convey my thoughts and feelings. This only reflects  how much language 
is capable of mutation and the role poets play in keeping the language alive, 
enriching it with their new words and thoughts.
Neruda has his own thoughts on who is the best poet  -  ‘I have often maintained 
that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who 
does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic and unpretentious 
work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours 
and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet succeeds 
in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an 
element in an immense activity.’
Neruda obviously was a people’s poet. He was not a recluse as many poets are. 
He loved to be among the masses, eat and dine with them, share their joys and 
sorrows. Once he read his poems in a stadium full of over a hundred thousand 
people in his country Chile. Though at times poets have to find their solitude and 
confront the blank sheet of paper, abandoning their crowns and glories. For their 
poetry is finally what really counts.