The practice and appreciation of poetry [Archives:2005/870/Education]
Dr. Arunachalam Angappan,
Associate Professor of English,
Hadhramout University of Sc. & Tech.
Seyun, Yemen
I write because I am itching to communicate something. I have a message and that message craves to be disseminated in spite of it running the risk of being dubbed crazy. You may call me a neurotic, sick, maladjusted and so on but I will not be perturbed for every divine messenger, social reformer runs this risk. Either I am at odds with the society or there is something utterly kinky, skewed about the world. I write about the social milieu of which I am a product. I cannot escape this fact.
An artifact is a verbal construct embedded in the social milieu and produced by the writer who is a product of that milieu; it thereafter becomes the property of the reader bestowing on him a sacred right to deconstruct while negotiating for meaning, which depends on his own mental construct. There can be limitless meanings – as many as there are readers who will go on creating their own mental constructs, and who will go on creating as many meanings as the number of times they go back to it. The verbal construct may remain constant whereas the perceived construct (understanding of the meaning by the reader) becomes mutative depending on the times and cultures to which he belongs. An artifact is never a product; it is always a process. Once the poet completes his process, there begins the endless process of meaning making by endless visitors to that artifact and endless visits by the same reader. Thus go endlessly the process of creation and the process of re-creation.
I write about what I intensely feel about only. I cannot sit up, write down a few lines just like that and expect the world to accept it as a piece of literature. I have to put my heart, mind and soul into those few lines. For that some event, some phenomenon, say a political, social or economic injustice must affect me, wound me, hurt me, must impact heavily on my mind and soul. Some emotion, some feeling, some sentiment, which I must deeply suffer from. Unless and otherwise, it is literally next to impossible. I do not write much of love verses because I do not have the capacity for it. I cannot romanticize, because I am agitated over the stark realities of life to which I want to draw the attention of the people for the purpose of correction; I am not an ostrich; I do not merely create an aura of wonder, wrapping up the sordid facts of life around.
I am very much a part of the process of life in my time. I do not travel much back into the glorious, distant past. If I do that, that is for mutatis mutandis only. I live here and now. I perceive things, I get affected, I write. The social milieu of his times is inescapable to any writer. Society creates, shapes the writer, and conversely the writer also can create the society)that is, if his writing is a genuinely felt product. He presents the decay which stares the reader in his face, discomforting and embarrassing; he runs to at least put on a mask to cover that ugliness, if he cannot drop that ugliness entirely. To that extent, the ugly, seamy, ignoble aspect is under check.
Mostly I write on the spur of the moment, that is to say, instantly. As and when and where I suffer from an intensity of feeling. It depends on how I am affected, how much I am affected, how deeply I am affected. Most often words simply fly about like angels in the vast universe, alight gently on the white sheet, fold their wings delicately, and Lo! There comes alive the icon, the verbal icon. As the sculptor gently chisels open the eyes of the figure he has sculpted, the whole is there in an instant. The images, symbols, metaphors)all are there obeying some intrinsic command. The long and laborious process of the sculptor chiseling the sculpture remains seemingly ungone through; just the last phase of opening the eye, it all happens so quick, so, so well ordered. May be, there is a mental chiseling between the instant of conception and delivery, but that remains seemingly ungone, unsuffered..
Some other times, I postpone writing it down. I brood over it like Wordsworth's hen until my eggs become warmer enough for the chicks to break out of the shells; I let it, I mean the intense feeling/emotion/sentiment, to sink deeper and deeper, penetrate my person layer by layer until it sort of explodes my whole personality and drives me in search of a piece of paper and pen. I feel quite only if I accomplished the writing. Still there are occasions, a third kind, when something agitates, possesses, tortures my soul but will not flow out, something like an air-block in a conduit preventing liquid flow. The much-longed sense of satisfaction of expression eludes; I feel like sitting and weeping.
I do not look for architectonic excellence. I look for aesthetics in the shocking treatment of an everyday, commonly perceived but generally neglected subject matter. I do not prefer metrical compositions though I can. These are days of free verse. One or two sonnets I wrote in the initial days were not encouraged. People, not necessarily expert critics, spurn rhyme. But there must definitely be an internal rhythm without which no composition can qualify for being poetry.
Appreciation of Poetry
I shall begin with a quotation from Walt Whitman (1819-1892):
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? (“Song of Myself” ll. 31-32).
One can understand the difficulty as well as the aura of greatness attached to the reading and meaning making of poetry.
As K.L. Knickerbocker and H. Willard Reninger remark in the “Preface” to their book Interpreting Literature (1978), ” ost students regard imaginative literature as a conspiracy against their mental and emotional peace. Their minds are accustomed to work best at a literal evel” (v). They are “convinced that in most instances these shackles can be broken, that literal minds can be liberated” (v).
Nobody can be talked into enjoying poetry, but one can bring oneself to such pleasures by learning to understand individual poems. When one reads a poem for the first time, a certain kind of sense comes through to us almost immediately. This is the poem's plain sense, sometimes called literal sense or literal meaning. With this begins, but not ends, the understanding of a poem. The literal meaning, i.e., paraphrasing helps to move onto the other level, higher level, of understanding the imagery. “The function of imagery in poetry is identical with its function in everyday speech: it presents to the reader his concrete world of things, and recalls to him the sight and sound and feel of them. With imagery the poet peoples and furnishes the world of his poem, and causes us to experience that world as directly and unmistakably as we experience life itself” (219). At this point we are moving from the plain sense to the figurative sense. Why the poet should use figures of speech? Can't he say it plainly? Such a question is asked as if only poets resorted to figures of speech. But our everyday life is peppered with figures of speech. Eg. We “lead a dog's life,” ” smell a rat,” “got it for a song.”
Then there is the question of symbol. Symbols are identified and their meanings made clear by the full context of the poem. It can be stated, “the whole poem helps to determine the meaning of its parts, and, in turn, each part helps to determine the meaning of the whole poem” (220).
There are other elements. It is difficult for readers to believe that such matters as rhythm and rhyme are used to convey meaning. Poetry is speech, and the voice, or tone, of the poet communicates his attitude toward the facts of the poem. A very old definition of poetry regards it as a fusion of sound and sense. Note that word fusion: not a mechanical combination, a melting together of sound and sense. The pulsations or the beats in each line is called rhythm; it is measured in foot; each foot may contain one or more syllables: some syllables are stressed and some other unstressed. Each line may have one or more metres. The most commonly used metre is penta (five) metre. Some have tetra (four). Still some have just one (mono). Rhythm is not a mere decoration, but a basic element in the poem's structure and meaning. One of the purposes of rhyme is to tie the sense together with sound.
In short, a poem is a living organism which contains the necessary elements of its own life. If the poem is a good one, every element in it contributes to its meaning.
A poem has two levels of meaning: the literal and the figurative-symbolic level. A poem suggests much more than it says literally: like lovers' conversation, a poem gives out hints of extensive meanings along the way. Poets do not play a hide-and-seek game)the hidden meaning is not secretly and deliberately placed there by the poet. The figurative meaning is mistaken for the hidden meaning. A poem has a concentration and intensity which helps to make it memorable. The right word in the right place, the intimate fusion of sound and sense, and the economy of rich suggestion are virtues of the structure of most poetry. The misreading of poetry comes from the reader's failure to realize that there are many languages within the English language, such as the languages of science, history, journalism, and, of course, the language of poetry itself. When we read a poem we sense the language of poetry because of the devices of rhythm (iambic [one stressed followed by an unstressed syllable] pentameter, the most commonly used form), rhyme (queer/near in Frost's “Stopping by Woods ), figurative language (a horse that thinks), and symbol (a horse that stands for practical sense as against the impractical sense of its driver).
It requires various kinds of scholarly information) biographical, historical, and textual, all together or separately, for an academic appreciation. An academic critic, according to David Daiches (1956) “is often tempted to combine information, explanation, elucidation, and praise in his remarks on a given work or a given writer” (281). This eclectic method is not necessarily muddle headed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century academic criticism, the “bio-critical” approach flourished vigorously. It succeeded “in conveying to the reader a sense of a writer's achievement set against the background of his life and time” (282). This approach was much useful in assessing the writers of a period as a whole and the writings of a period in their entirety than in assessing the individual writers and individual works. This was more in the nature of a critical chat than a strictly literary criticism.
A fully professional criticism depends on precision and subtlety. His activity may be ontological (the philosophical question concerning the nature of imaginative literature), functional (what literature does, that is to define it in terms of its function), normative (distinguishing the good from the bad), descriptive (the realm of description includes a value judgement also), psychological (the question of how the literary mind operates in the act of creation), or appreciative (asking no questions at all, but simply seeking to increase the appreciation on the part of the reader).But, as David Daiches says, there is a great danger in relegating critical discussion solely to the highly specialized technical expert)the professional critic. A civilization, and an artifact as an embodiment of that civilization, can best be judged by its amateurs not by the professional experts who tend to develop a technical jargon of their own to place themselves in an indispensable position between the creator and the ordinary reader.
For an amateurish appreciation, an ear for words to go rapturous over the rhythmic beats, a capacity for wondering at the difference in the way the artist has perceived the subject that he himself has failed to do, and an ability to identify the various elements of which a work is composed are enough.
[An address delivered in absentia at the World Poetry Festival 2005 organized jointly by Kaohsiung Government and Literary Taiwan Foundation during 24-27 March 2005]
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