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FRIDAY FUNDAS When I was writing my first book, my friend Drago was very keen I give it a title that pleased him. Drago was a poet from Croatia who grew up along the Dalmatian coast, listening to the sea on the sand and its tidespeak among the little caves tucked into gnarled formations of rocks. He would collar me at a party if he hadn't seen me for a long time and ask me if I had been writing. "In the hills, my friend; writing, in the hills," I would reply, sipping my whiskey. "Writing in the hills," Drago Stambuck would say with a whimsical look on his face, as if he was tasting the words. "Writing...in...the...hills." Drago first wrote his poetry - or, rather, he had his first intimations of poetry - beside the ocean. We would run into each other casually on winter balconies in Delhi, when the late mist would be trying to insinuate itself as an uninvited guest into the yellow warmth of drawing rooms full of conversations, cigarette smoke, colourful rugs, mahogany shelves and people in tweed and wool. Drago would speak with nostalgic intensity about the summer sea of Croatia, the coast of his formative years and adolescence, with the reverential acuteness most homesick people have if they have been away from their country for many years. He would speak about the white pillars of his childhood villa, the clean patio and the large windows through which the ocean came in many forms - salty spray, sound and in the breeze. It was then that his eyes would grow softer and begin to depart, and a shadow flit across his smile. I recognised it as the poet's smile, and would hastily change the topic to some salacious issue. How much ever I am fond of my friend Drago, I have a problem: I, as a rule, cannot abide poetry. I always thought poetry is rather pansy and effete, unless it has the grand passion of Pablo Neruda or the ruthless vision of Goethe or Milton, who were more prophets than poets. These men, I think, wrote prose disguised as verse. I could never understand blokes like Wordsworth and Shelley, who went about wispy willows and glens and dales and penned ephemeral sections of syntax within rules like iambic pentameter and alternative rhyme Closer home, once invited to a mushaira, my eyes glazed over in the first 15 minutes and I fell into a stupor. Blokes in red beards and spectacles wearing loose clothes kept repeating the same words over and over again, while the audience kept shouting, "Wah! Wah!". Urdu poets confuse me and make me feel that I am in some sort of bizarre dream. The basic fact is that I am suspicious of poets. If you can't tell a thing straight, why tell it at all? I shall always remember the honest poet Percy, (not Shelley) a creation of the estimable P.G. Wodehouse, who asked, "Doesn't the sunset remind you of a slice of roast, underdone beef?" Rather unpoetic, the purists would argue. I agree that "I wish to do to you what the spring does to cherry trees" sounds better. Sounds terrific, in fact, like good advertising copy. But then is there a difference between a good copywriter and a poet? A poet is subliminal and refined, I am told, while a copywriter sells base stuff like detergents and tyres. To me, the look of poetry on a page itself is odd. The poet's habit of stringing together images that look left-aligned and end abruptly should be deplored. It reveals personalities with a deeply ingrained need for popular attention. I am sure this is going to raise a huge gender hullabaloo, but I have always felt that poetry is mainly a woman's furl. Christina Rossetti or Sylvia Plath I would welcome and cheer from the rooftops as the true practitioners of the craft. A woman has an intuitive understanding of poetry, the way the convolutions of the muse work upon the mind and stylise words to meld with the idea. In fact, at the risk of being accused even further of being sexist, I would say that true poetry is the recipe of an idea. I have a sneaking suspicion that even Lord Byron, with his Grecian neck and his long-lashed eyes, wrote poetry as a relief against all that warring: There is something pseudo-sexual about a man's rendering of verse, or even the birth of verse. It is like a bullfighter letting his latent femininity hang out; an ardhanareeshwara in drag, a concept so inwritten with contradiction that only limericks would solve the issue. But then poetry makes me feel that way, flippant and bemused at the same time. Writing in the hills, as Stambuck cadenced so softly, is a chore fit only for the gigantic span of prose. A long and honest journey, of a storyteller's meander through a calendar full of ghosts. Prose is a river, and rivers meander. There is inbuilt in the word "meander" a sort of jolly aimlessness, loitering for the sheer pleasure of it. Far from it. The word comes from the movement of the river, and there is even a river which still carries its name: Meander. Rarely does a river flow aimlessly, and it would be noticed that when it curves it brings in the shore into the centre, thinning in the middle over time, spreading and deepening at the sides. Banks cave into it, with their wealth of memories and passage, and a new shore is born as the water's course straightens again. Poetry is like pools: it needs the wind to create ripples and movements; prose has its tides, its own momentum. In the hills, the wind howls among the pines and there is no rhyme to it. (Ravi Shankar is Senior Editor, INDIA TODAY. He is also one of India's best cartoonists. Write to Ravi Shankar) |
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