I guess I write the kind of poetry (or prose for that matter) that I like to read. I translated a poem by celebrated Marathi poet, who wrote under the pen-name kusumagraj, sometime back and it was such an exercise. I think what you say hold true about lyric, not poetry per se. Poetry can tease your mind or heart, whatever really. But then that’s according me, of course!
Perhaps. Obviously, one cannot put any specifications on poetry, and one still wonders, then, how we have come up with a word called poetry, which is supposed to refer to only a certain kind of literary form. Two quotes come to the mind here.
1. Every word was once a poem
2. Poetry often enters through the doors of irrelevance
It is this irrelevance that brings the ambiguity into poem, thus making sure that its not maths.
And yet, it represents a kind of thinking that is super-maths - it could even be the description of an entire set of precise thoughts, distilled into something that each can quaff, in the way that one wants to quaff it.
I will myself look at a complete poem as the highest kind of minimalization that communicates precisely as well as as ambiguously something. I have not really studied modern Marathi poetry (I don’t even know whether Kusumagraja falls under modern, but I refer to his generation of poets), but the biggest thing that I notice about marathi poeetry is that it declined steadily when the poets became more urbanized and intellectual. The best marathi poems/lyrics that I have heard, and indeed, the best marathi music has been from those who had rustic origins, whose psyche was more rural than urbane.
And it actually has nothing much to do with the complexity of philosophy that is being spoken of. Sometimes, the thought/philosophy behind it might be powerful, too, and yet as a poem, it doesn’t get there. For example, if I read something by Dnyaneshwar, or Tukaram, it speaks of absolutely deep stuff, and yet it floats into one’s head, like a chocolate that just melts in your mouth and you notice just the beauty of the taste.
Simplicity…I think, thats what I am referring to. There are so many times when I write something, and then the next day I just delete it, because it seems too complex - it just doesn’t feel right when there is no simplicity in it. And simplicity is actually an indication of how well the thought/philosophy has been digested, that it no longer comes from the mind, but from one’s being. When I write some stuff that I delete the next morning, I think I find it wrong because its complexity tells me that it did not come from within me - it came from some surface layer of my head.
It feels like the thought is a mere thought, it has not yet even begun to pervade my being.
And yet, poetry can begin there, too. Why not?
I haven’t looked at Marathi poetry as a phenomenon, nor have I really read enough of it to make any generalizations, so I’ll speak about somewhat more generic issues:
Decline is itself a very very subjective word. Rejection by masses will pose problems for the poet in those days because finally the publishing companies would want that acceptance, too. Kusumagraj was actually from a generation when modern poetry was still just knocking on the doors of the Marathi poetry scene and he’s not classified as modern AFAIK. In fact many people think of him as perhaps the greatest Marathi poet that there was (if you exclude the likes Dnyaneshwars and Tukarams, of course). Yes I like him more when he dabbles with the complex. Those poems if I narrate, many of those same people won’t be able to recognize them as Kusumagraj’s work. But were they his “best” poems? I don’t know. For me they are. So if the later day modern Marathi poets had experimented at that level, I’d have been happier. Some of them did, and I don’t think of that as a decline at all.
There are many layers at which poetry or some other art forms (including films of course) can be enjoyed at. Some people will love a simplified form and complex concept, some people comlex form and complex concept, some people complex form and wouldn’t care about concept and so on. Best then is really a subjective matter. Tukaram, Dynaneshwar had a specific audience they were writing for, just like Aarti Prabhu (a modern Marathi poet) has. There is an overlap, but even Dyaneshwar’s owya (tiny poetic wisdom) are enjoyed at different levels by different people. At times the simplicity gives an impression that everyone has got it, but people haven’t really got it. So my Grandmother who read all those saints still believed in untouchability and her excuse was that they were great people and I’m not that great. But that’s kind of tangential to the point.
The point is simplicity has its virtue and it has its problems too. It’s just that as a poet you want to choose your share of virtues and problems. And that too differs from day to day.
Well, I guess I shouldn’t talk without having read kusumagraj, right?
About decline being a subjective word - perhaps.
I just know that contemporary/modern marathi poetry, wherever I read it accidentally, just doesn’t give me a trip like the earlier rustic forms of poetry did. Or, maybe I am too hooked onto the saint-poets (or sant-kavi, to use the popular phrase) to really dig anything else. Yet, even look at poetry in cinema - which is probably a pretty good indication of the average poetic value of a culture (lemme call it the APVC). I am really talking about what the popular culture adopts and demands and appreciates.
In hindi, one does regularly finds great poetry and experimentation in popular movie songs, too (I like the way gulzar uses unusual words in his poems, for example, daring to use really unpoetic words and getting away with it. I mean, remeber his mowgli song - “chaddi pehen ke phul khila hai” - so delightful - even though chaddi is not a standard poetic word).
But in marathi cinema, good poetry in songs is not just dead, but has been smelling badly for quite some time now. And I don’t think that its because of the lack of budget in the vernacular film industries. I think it is just because somwhere down the line, the Maharashtrian popular culture lost the poetry within it, and this period, for some reason coincides with the takeover of the marathi film-making by those with urbane upbringing/tastes. The golden era of marathi literature and cinema and songs was undoubtedly when the creators were firmly entrenched in traditional rural maharashtrian culture - those who had grown up primarily in villages and came to cities later. There is no imagery, there is no manifestation, no metaphor, no similes, that enrich poetry in this urban maharashtrian life. It is as if no poetry is left in the maharashtrian soul. Zero APVC
All that is left are abstract ideas (which may be profound in themselves), which are discussed or communicated without form, bereft of an inherent timeless beauty.
Very rarely does one hears something moving. The last good marathi poetry I heard was, surprisingly, from this young pune kid called, I think, Sandeep khare. Lovely imagery, and all the tools of poetry used, without any pretense to depth. At least in the poems that I heard him recite!
But then, I have been accused by some, of being a barbarian without any refined tastes, by many (especially my wife ), so I must request you to take my ramblings with a pinch of salt. I do not speak with studied knowledge of the field - I speak only as a layman.
Interesting stuff.
Its like each line is holding back a crowd of philosophical ideas, or is a facet of some multi-sided quest.
More intellectual than poetic, more of a search than a song, I’d say. Which does not detract from what it says, very obviously - its a poem in which you have to use your head.
When you don’t have to use your head at all and it just floats softly and easily into the reader’s head, it will be a real poem.
According to me, of course!
Comments
atra
I guess I write the kind of poetry (or prose for that matter) that I like to read. I translated a poem by celebrated Marathi poet, who wrote under the pen-name kusumagraj, sometime back and it was such an exercise. I think what you say hold true about lyric, not poetry per se. Poetry can tease your mind or heart, whatever really. But then that’s according me, of course!
Thanks for dropping by,
asuph.
asuph
Perhaps. Obviously, one cannot put any specifications on poetry, and one still wonders, then, how we have come up with a word called poetry, which is supposed to refer to only a certain kind of literary form. Two quotes come to the mind here.
1. Every word was once a poem
2. Poetry often enters through the doors of irrelevance
It is this irrelevance that brings the ambiguity into poem, thus making sure that its not maths.
And yet, it represents a kind of thinking that is super-maths - it could even be the description of an entire set of precise thoughts, distilled into something that each can quaff, in the way that one wants to quaff it.
I will myself look at a complete poem as the highest kind of minimalization that communicates precisely as well as as ambiguously something. I have not really studied modern Marathi poetry (I don’t even know whether Kusumagraja falls under modern, but I refer to his generation of poets), but the biggest thing that I notice about marathi poeetry is that it declined steadily when the poets became more urbanized and intellectual. The best marathi poems/lyrics that I have heard, and indeed, the best marathi music has been from those who had rustic origins, whose psyche was more rural than urbane.
And it actually has nothing much to do with the complexity of philosophy that is being spoken of. Sometimes, the thought/philosophy behind it might be powerful, too, and yet as a poem, it doesn’t get there. For example, if I read something by Dnyaneshwar, or Tukaram, it speaks of absolutely deep stuff, and yet it floats into one’s head, like a chocolate that just melts in your mouth and you notice just the beauty of the taste.
Simplicity…I think, thats what I am referring to. There are so many times when I write something, and then the next day I just delete it, because it seems too complex - it just doesn’t feel right when there is no simplicity in it. And simplicity is actually an indication of how well the thought/philosophy has been digested, that it no longer comes from the mind, but from one’s being. When I write some stuff that I delete the next morning, I think I find it wrong because its complexity tells me that it did not come from within me - it came from some surface layer of my head.
It feels like the thought is a mere thought, it has not yet even begun to pervade my being.
And yet, poetry can begin there, too. Why not?
atra(2)
I haven’t looked at Marathi poetry as a phenomenon, nor have I really read enough of it to make any generalizations, so I’ll speak about somewhat more generic issues:
Decline is itself a very very subjective word. Rejection by masses will pose problems for the poet in those days because finally the publishing companies would want that acceptance, too. Kusumagraj was actually from a generation when modern poetry was still just knocking on the doors of the Marathi poetry scene and he’s not classified as modern AFAIK. In fact many people think of him as perhaps the greatest Marathi poet that there was (if you exclude the likes Dnyaneshwars and Tukarams, of course). Yes I like him more when he dabbles with the complex. Those poems if I narrate, many of those same people won’t be able to recognize them as Kusumagraj’s work. But were they his “best” poems? I don’t know. For me they are. So if the later day modern Marathi poets had experimented at that level, I’d have been happier. Some of them did, and I don’t think of that as a decline at all.
There are many layers at which poetry or some other art forms (including films of course) can be enjoyed at. Some people will love a simplified form and complex concept, some people comlex form and complex concept, some people complex form and wouldn’t care about concept and so on. Best then is really a subjective matter. Tukaram, Dynaneshwar had a specific audience they were writing for, just like Aarti Prabhu (a modern Marathi poet) has. There is an overlap, but even Dyaneshwar’s owya (tiny poetic wisdom) are enjoyed at different levels by different people. At times the simplicity gives an impression that everyone has got it, but people haven’t really got it. So my Grandmother who read all those saints still believed in untouchability and her excuse was that they were great people and I’m not that great. But that’s kind of tangential to the point.
The point is simplicity has its virtue and it has its problems too. It’s just that as a poet you want to choose your share of virtues and problems. And that too differs from day to day.
-asuph.
asuph
Well, I guess I shouldn’t talk without having read kusumagraj, right?
), so I must request you to take my ramblings with a pinch of salt. I do not speak with studied knowledge of the field - I speak only as a layman.
About decline being a subjective word - perhaps.
I just know that contemporary/modern marathi poetry, wherever I read it accidentally, just doesn’t give me a trip like the earlier rustic forms of poetry did. Or, maybe I am too hooked onto the saint-poets (or sant-kavi, to use the popular phrase) to really dig anything else. Yet, even look at poetry in cinema - which is probably a pretty good indication of the average poetic value of a culture (lemme call it the APVC). I am really talking about what the popular culture adopts and demands and appreciates.
In hindi, one does regularly finds great poetry and experimentation in popular movie songs, too (I like the way gulzar uses unusual words in his poems, for example, daring to use really unpoetic words and getting away with it. I mean, remeber his mowgli song - “chaddi pehen ke phul khila hai” - so delightful - even though chaddi is not a standard poetic word).
But in marathi cinema, good poetry in songs is not just dead, but has been smelling badly for quite some time now. And I don’t think that its because of the lack of budget in the vernacular film industries. I think it is just because somwhere down the line, the Maharashtrian popular culture lost the poetry within it, and this period, for some reason coincides with the takeover of the marathi film-making by those with urbane upbringing/tastes. The golden era of marathi literature and cinema and songs was undoubtedly when the creators were firmly entrenched in traditional rural maharashtrian culture - those who had grown up primarily in villages and came to cities later. There is no imagery, there is no manifestation, no metaphor, no similes, that enrich poetry in this urban maharashtrian life. It is as if no poetry is left in the maharashtrian soul. Zero APVC
All that is left are abstract ideas (which may be profound in themselves), which are discussed or communicated without form, bereft of an inherent timeless beauty.
Very rarely does one hears something moving. The last good marathi poetry I heard was, surprisingly, from this young pune kid called, I think, Sandeep khare. Lovely imagery, and all the tools of poetry used, without any pretense to depth. At least in the poems that I heard him recite!
But then, I have been accused by some, of being a barbarian without any refined tastes, by many (especially my wife
asuph
Interesting stuff.
Its like each line is holding back a crowd of philosophical ideas, or is a facet of some multi-sided quest.
More intellectual than poetic, more of a search than a song, I’d say. Which does not detract from what it says, very obviously - its a poem in which you have to use your head.
When you don’t have to use your head at all and it just floats softly and easily into the reader’s head, it will be a real poem.
According to me, of course!