I wrote this in one feverish night, a couple of months back. Reading it later, I realised that I didn’t entirely agree with every word in the poem, yet, on the whole I do believe that a poem is much larger than the sum of its parts…
Poetry as I see it
The poem is the pattern,
Not the words.
It is larger than the sum of the words
It is emergent
Not reducible.
It is the idea
Not the form;
the form is but fluff.
The poet who is obsessed
with fluff is still
a child who has not outgrown
his toy.
The poem is not separate
from the poet; the poet
is an essential part.
The poem is larger than the poet.
The poet is also larger than the poem
The reductionist is not a poet;
he does not understand poetry,
he is its murderer.
He is a victim of the Fallacy of Composition.
A poem is a manifestation of Wholeness;
A Bohmian Wholeness of Implicate Order.
(The Explicate Order is
of Simplicity and Coherence.)
A good poem must die after it’s read,
must transcend language
leaving just its lingering suchness,
like the scent of a perfume,
like a ghost haunting the rooms of your mind,
like the contrails of a jet after it has passed.
A good poem must disturb the reader,
must anger him, must make him love
and hate—hate even the poem.
Does a poem need images?
Images add flavour but a poem
should not rest on them.
To use an image, they are the ornaments
of a bride. If the ornaments are too much
they hide the bride’s inherent beauty,
make her stoop by the weight of gold.
Are you marrying the bride or her ornaments?
Why must one write poetry?
Don’t write poetry for your father
or mother or teacher or son.
Don’t write poetry to impress
academics, those self-appointed pundits of poetry.
Don’t write poetry to meet deadlines.
Don’t sit at your desk and say,
“Today I am going to write a poem.”
Write when you must,
when you cannot hold it back any longer.
People always tell me not to use certain words
like “soul” and “memories” in poetry.
I tell them to “go fly a kite”,
to use another cliché.
I don’t write for them who have read
too much of poetry,
they who have been deluded by form,
they who have come to believe that
the best poems are the least understood,
they who do not know what they like.
I have often heard poets say,
“There is no money in poetry
and no poetry in money.”
I ask them—Why
is there no money in poetry?
Because no one wants to read poetry anymore.
Why does no one want to read poetry?
Because the poet has distanced himself
from society. He writes in a language
no one understands. He wallows
in his incoherence.
And there is poetry in money.
In fact money is flush with poetry,
Ask anyone but the poet
When coins jingle in your pockets,
doesn’t it sound like poetry?
A poem is not the laboratory of language,
It is a medium of ideas and opinions
It is a conduit of passions.
***
On poetry,
Opinion poetry
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