Poetry
I was recently invited to be part of a poetry circle. Flattered and suitably awed, I stuck it out for exactly four and a half days. The poetry was lovely. The urdu and bengali, the translations, original works, the classics: all were touched upon and very edifying it was too. But damned if this honesty bug hasn’t bitten me good. I begged off, confessing that my idea of poetry is not really Ghalib saab or Emily Dickinson, but 1970s and 1980s rock music lyrics. I was speedily excused and forgotten, having made zilch contribution to the proceedings.
I have no problem with traditional poets and their ways of getting to the root of the matter after meandering through soil and worms and such. I pledge to them my respect but not my devotion. I am myself a poet. Of supremely bad poetry, unfit for public consumption. But as the kilograms and grey hair increase, the appeal of the directly expressed sentiment grows ever stronger. Oh, there are songwriters that cannot say anything in less than convulsions. Procul Harum. The Velvet Underground. Jethro Tull. Darling Bob. But most have stopped trying so hard. The last fifty odd years of music, in which I am happily stuck, have been all about saying it like it is. I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thin line between love and hate. I want you, I need you. (Oh wait, actually I want or need someone else. Or something else.) I have no patience for the mundane and deliberately crude, as some modern musicians can’t help but be, but hey, what’s life without a little obscenity and crassly worded ditty?
But the songs of the late sixties and the seventies – these are a bass note that catches in the stomach and the heart. When the words ring true. When the lyrics talk straight. Of the poets, e.e.cummings does that sometimes. Or Walt Whitman. Auden often. And rock lyrics all the time.
This is your life. Don’t play hard to get – Queen
Poetry does that to me. Plays hard to get. The ancients, Chinese or Greek, the relatively younger Rennaisance poets or even the Elizabethans, I graciously excuse on the basis of antiquity. It’s some modern poets of the last one hundred odd years who confound me with their linguistic calisthenics. Read three times before the layers reluctantly unfurl. If I want to watch layers unfurl, I’ll watch a flower bloom. Or an onion. But often, I know what I want or need (you can’t always get what you want but you just might get what you need – to paraphrase Jagger), and I don’t want to meander along with the poet as he/she searches (sometimes through a very long series of verses) for the meaning of life. Brevity is no guarantee of clarity. Take Rumi, for one. I am fond of him, but the dear man was far too often in his cups and I know now to look first for a translation. Did Rumi really say: Your heart and my heart are very very old friends? That makes so much sense…though he probably couched it in a couplet about a well and two fish or broken glasses and spilt wine and I’d be none the wiser, reading him in the original. Translated from the complicated, poetry speaks clearly to the mind. Rock music, in my humble opinion, is poetry that mostly dispenses with the need for translators.
Death and suicide. Popular themes with the lady poets. There is a distinct bitterness that seeps through – a peevish annoyance that no one paid them much mind while they lived and sent out all those cries for help.
All those cries for help. Subtle, screaming, did no one hear? To hear is not always to understand. The AC/DC scenario is apt. Enough with the coyly stated sentiment. Or even the lost in anger puzzle. Say the words. Ask for help.
And I would have stayed up with you all night
If I’d known how to save a life – The Fray.
Or just a warning to “keep passing the open window” (or gas oven, as the case may be). Freddie knew all about flirting with life and death, but he didn’t mince words, did he?
I feel mildly indignant that the esoteric poem, the one that dabbles with the metaphysical or arcane, is too often lauded as great literature while simple truths in short words are dismissed as pop and half-baked. A young and impressionable self was taken in by this false perception. I sneered for years at anything less than sonnets from the Portuguese or Marcus Aurelius, hardle daring to confess even to myself that the going was hard and incomprehensible. My intellect was always meant for the simpler joys of life. A more mature and somewhat humbler self admits as much and happily gets my fix of poetry from Waters and Gilmour, Springsteen, Lennon and Harrison. Even the big hair one-hit wonders from the eighties, or Elton and Steve Tyler get it right on occasion.
(That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion – REM
Yesterday…all my troubles – L and M.)
And the Boss…
(Now I work down at the car wash
Where all it ever does is rain.
You can’t light a fire with a broken heart.)
These are the lines I can quote. These are the poems I grew up with.
(Don’t look back, a new day is breakin’ – Boston
Only time will tell, if you were wrong – Asia
No more turning away, from the weak and the weary. No more turning away from the coldness inside – Gilmour/Waters
And I have become comfortably numb – ditto
Coz I never thought I’d lose
I only thought I’d win. – Elton my man.)
Poetry. Each to his own. Find it where you will. These are the poets who helped me get through dark days and sleepless nights. Perhaps a poetry circle for these mostly unlauded and underappreciated poets would work. All headbangers, rockers and lovers welcome.