|
 Writing
poetry in the age of the novel - By Arundhati Subramaniam
"You
write poetry? How nice. Now when are you going to publish
your first novel?" I've heard the question more
often than I can remember. The real question is: why
poetry? Why on earth poetry?
My response is to grin sheepishly and mumble something
about not really being a fiction person, about believing
that poetry offers more challenges than I can negotiate
in a lifetime, about being wary of the horizontal seductions
of narrative. But it's too late. By that time my questioner
has invariably lost interest and has moved on to what
s(h)e considers less fluffy matters (like the Sensex,
the cricket scores, ICICI bonds, Kurdish refugees),
and I humbly lapse into silence (or into poetry, which
to my questioner is the same thing, anyway).
A
couple of months ago, a senior colleague at the cultural
centre I work in actually looked at me with compassion
and said, "But you really should try your hand
at the novel, my dear. I'd like to see you do something
with your life." The implication was loud and clear:
devote a lifetime to poetry? What a loser!
Perhaps she isn't far from the truth. After all, there
appears to be no rhyme or reason to write poetry. It
doesn't improve the rabi crop yield or the GNP or the
quality of people's sex lives. Recent American researchers
claim that poets actually die sooner than other species
of writers. (Terminal invisibility has a way of doing
that.) And then, of course, everyone stays clear of
you: readers and publishers in particular. You rarely
see a royalty cheque. If you crave for fame, you've
got to be willing to do something truly spectacular-like
die a picturesque death with a bitter entry in your
journal about preferring death to mediocrity. After
that, if you're lucky, some folk will leaf desultorily
through your work (lucky you-posthumous or prehumous,
you're actually getting read), shake their heads sadly,
and say, "Good poets die young". But woe betide
you if you live past the age of 33. There's nothing
as vulgar as a live middle-aged poet.
You get the picture. Basically, you're a bit of a dowd
and the sooner you accept it the better. Once you realise
that anonymity has its advantages, you might actually
start enjoying yourself.
How did we get here? When did poetry become passé?
Why did we decide poetry was adolescent activity and
fiction the adult genre? Good questions. Here's why
(or so I believe).
#1 Because everyone endlessly paraphrased 'I wandered
lonely as a cloud' in school exams till they began to
associate daffodils with dyspepsia. #2 Because few believe
any poetry has been written since the 19th century.
#3 Because those who do believe in the existence of
20th century poetry think it's esoteric and difficult.
#4 Because most folk believe that poetry without rhyme
is no fun. #5 Because most believe that free verse is
self-indulgent stuff that anyone can do without much
effort.
No, it's not my mission to evangelise. I'm not going
to say poetry is good for the soul to those who prefer
to take chicken soup for that kind of thing. But yes,
I do think American poet Randall Jarrell had a point
when he pointed out that it's not that people have stopped
reading poetry because they find it difficult, just
that people find poetry difficult because they've stopped
reading it.
Of course, there's plenty of bad poetry-as there are
bad movies and lousy Thai restaurants. But if we aren't
put off cinema and Thai cuisine forever, why on earth
have we sworn a lifetime of abstinence from poetry?
I'd like to share an unsettling hunch that has been
with me for a while. I believe that one of the foremost
reasons for poetry being unfashionable is the fact that
we live in an age when it is increasingly difficult
to hear oneself. An age that prioritises stridency over
tentativeness, certainty over doubt, statement over
question, certainty over ambiguity, self-projection
over self-exploration, function over form. In the age
of the megaphone, it's easy to forget the need for a
murmur. Poetry is a form for intimate spaces-for galleries
and coffee shops, rather than the stadium and the auditorium.
It is a form that, almost by definition, must speak
softly. If it is to increase its volume, it distorts
its own reality. Tone is its raison d'etre-if its minute
shifts of register are ironed out, it runs the risk
of losing its integrity.
Unlike prose that lives exclusively on paper, poetry
is still a form meant for the spoken voice-but emphatically
not for the raised voice. Poetry connects with our interiority,
but not through the jingoistic reiteration strategies
of advertising and propaganda. Poetry relies on an older
magic. Its guile lies in taking you unawares-either
by seeping insidiously into your pores, or by giving
you that sharp sudden jolt of surprised recognition.
Its effects are rarely visible, almost never quantifiable.
And yet, it is capable of creating major shifts along
your internal fault lines.
The culture of utilitarianism has taken over our lives
more comprehensively than we realise. We live by irreconcilable
dichotomies: work and play, day and night, weekdays
and weekends, truth and beauty, precision and passion,
ethics and entertainment, science and art, fact and
fiction, prose and poetry, and ne'er the twain shall
meet. Poetry disrupts these smug oppositional categories.
It's about allowing lunar concerns into your day. About
bringing question marks rather than full stops into
your life.
And if that makes life difficult for the reader, let
me add that it isn't easy for the poet either. I believe
that those with some amount of verbal dexterity have
a particularly important responsibility towards themselves.
The responsibility not to allow their gift to turn into
glibness. Not to allow that capacity to illuminate and
clarify through language to turn into a love of their
own voices. Not to allow the impulse to explore a world
of word, rhythm and sound to turn into a self-aggrandising
desire to impress, to conquer.
Words don't come easy. And when they do, they're meant
to be watched, not censoriously, but with caution. Which
explains why all writers are word-watchers before they
are wordsmiths. They know that old secret only too well-that
we don't merely use language; we are also used by it.
Words are a means of making ourselves vulnerable-frequently
to each other, but also to ourselves. For far too long
we have used them as weapons, as armours, as territorial
markers. And with every verbal parry and thrust, with
every dogmatic full stop, we move further away from
the possibility of opening ourselves to growth. To surprise.
To the startling confrontation of self with self.
Which is what poetry-when it works-is all about.
Why write poetry? That's why.
Arundhathi
Subramaniam's second collection of poems, Where I Live
(Allied Publishers) has just hit bookshelves.
 Your
money or your life by Shobhaa De
The
man who started the "Her looks sell her books"
was Tarun Tejpal with a huge double-spread in India
Today. Now that his book is out and he's posing like
a rock star, hair spread out, styled down to his shoes,
I'd like to return the compliment. He's going for the
looks to sell his books. Why not?
This looks thing is part of a larger phenomenon. It's
the style of reviewing in which who you are and what
your life is about dominates the review; it's not about
your work. But then I don't think we have a well-developed
culture of criticism here. Most reviewers are young
people, who have been handed a book and asked to review
it, in between covering dog shows and loan melas. They
haven't read much more than books about mobile cheese
and fish salesmen and car-selling monks. And those they
think are literature. There was a time when we had great
reviewers: Sham Lal, Girilal Jain, even Dileep Padgaonkar.
But that era seems to have passed. Now there isn't much
space in the mainstream media for books and that space
is dominated by the semi-literate.
I have noticed that the first review sets the tone for
the rest of the reviews. We rarely have the confidence
to make our own judgements. So as soon as the first
one is out, everyone reads it and takes their cues.
My first ever review was something Bachi Karkaria wrote
in her usual style in which puns are forced into every
nook and corner of copy. It was called 'De of Whine
and Poses' and it stung a little.
I still read all my reviews. Some sting, some hurt,
a very few I learn from. But I'm grateful for them all.
It is better to be noticed than to be ignored. I remember
when Dilip Bobb's positive review appeared in India
Today, John Abraham rang up and said, "I hope the
next one trashes you or we're not going to sell any
books." - As told to Jaiteerth Panth
 Do
aankhen baarah haath: writing cinema by Anurag Kashyap
Words
can get in your way. The people I relate to most are
people on the fringes, the ones for whom survival turns
into the kind of religion that will allow them to do
anything in order to survive. These people are very
rarely articulate and that means you can over-write
them into oblivion far too easily.
So when I'm writing my own films, I try to write as
little as possible. I don't even do too many drafts.
I write short staccato sentences which are pointers
to me, signposts that will tell me what I want out of
the scene. If I write the words, the dialogues, I try
them out on my breath. There are characters in my films
who are verbose, like Luke in Paanch. Luke is not the
kind of person who has any sieve between the thoughts
that occur to him and his voice. He churns with ideas
and those ideas, sick with self-indulgence, pungent
with his own excesses, come pouring out of him in a
flood. Those words are important because they define
Luke for the viewer. The others are ordinary boys caught
up in the maelstrom of who Luke is and the power he
wields over them. Their words come therefore from a
more ordinary consciousness; for instance, they enjoy
ribaldry, bathroom humour because they aren't capable
of maturity. Their words are as important in that again,
those stupid jokes define them. But what I write doesn't
define them; their words will change, that the actors
will modify them to suit what comes naturally to them.
My words are only indicators of what I want from a scene.
The actor who speaks them must make them his own.
That's fine with me. I believe in the bound script,
that new signifier of the transition from old style
Bollywood to the new style commercial Hindi film. But
I do not believe that the script will be anything like
the film. The nuances will become clear in the space
in which I shoot. They will emerge from the actors who
perform the roles. That is why it is very important
for me to cast the right people with the right faces,
to find the write locations and to have the right cameraman
who can let the city into his camera, rather than make
his camera capture some version of the city. Perhaps
because my cameraman Natrajan Subramaniam comes to cinema
from a news and journalism background, this connection
between the city at night and the story we're telling
becomes a little more seamless. If I were to allow myself
to rely on the script, even my own script, I would be
doing what the novelist does. You can rewrite a film
even in the editing room and that is the danger and
the power of cinema.
Dialogue, I believe, should never seem like it has been
written at all.
Translating what begins as words into cinema needs a
continuous negotiation between the original words and
what the camera finds, what the actors do, how the space
is and what happens in the editing studio. The words
are the vertebrae. I am careful with my vertebrae but
like any good working spine, they should allow me to
move and to flex. If they turn rigid, if they determine
everything, if they turn dogmatic, they're not a spine
any more.
When I'm writing for someone else it's a different ballgame.
I write as many drafts as they want me to write. I don't
go on the sets because there might be a conflict of
opinion. I don't even make pictures in my head, don't
even consider how the words will fit into the frame
and work there because I don't think there are too many
people in this industry who can imagine things out of
words. Most of the time, it's an ad film consciousness,
a desire to make everything look as beautiful as possible.
In some ways, what has helped me translate words into
that peculiar thing called cinema is the graphic novel.
There's much you can learn from the way a skilful graphic
novel negotiates the tension between the words on the
page and the images. You can see a point of view being
developed and illumination changing as it moves, either
inside the character or without. You can see how a character
stands or holds a cigarette (or a gun) creates a certain
curiosity about him. That's how I like to shoot my characters,
lingering on their faces, allowing them silences, allowing
them to show what's happening inside their heads through
their eyes.
Anurag Kashyap has directed Paanch and Black Friday
and has written a number of influential Hindi films
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
