For the last couple of weeks, I’ve received several copies of the same email with some very minor variations from a range of friends. It’s a sweetly worded email that is meant to end in you getting poetry from 20 other people — in return for sending a poem you love to one other person and sending the copy of the email to 20 other people.
It’s a forward. What, you remember that thing vaguely? From way back when everyone in your family sent you jokes and proto-emoticon-based humour giving you proto-WhatsApp rage. And you sent clenched emails saying “Kindly Do Not Send Me Forwards”. But this poetry email is more than a forward. It’s the return of a historical artefact called chain mail, which in turn was an updated version of an artefact called a chain letter. At age 8, I went over to the neighbour’s house and tried to persuade an 11-year-old (and superior) stranger to join my chain letter. She didn’t and has never quite stopped laughing at me for this. But she also became my very first best friend. That was the very last chain letter I remember but I do remember people complaining about them as they’d go on to complain about >WhatsApp .
This fortnight’s chain mail exchanges separated the generational wheat from the chaff quite neatly. The older participants of these vague exchanges sent out mails chortling about not wanting to participate but being afraid of the curse of Lord Venkateswara or some other such dire situation. The young people looked puzzled not knowing that the old chain letters had always come with the direst of threats. Break the chain and you will lose your fortune and your family will die and your cat will run away.
Talking to strangers At first I resisted these new poetry emails feeling very bah-humbug-ish. But when I succumbed, I got a dozen poems from sheepish strangers. Everything from the most earnest Tagore poem to a true gift of a Dr Seuss quote that said, “Everything stinks till it’s finished”. This reminded me of that moment from the first episode of ‘Veronica Mars’ in which Veronica is asleep in class (after a hard night being a teen detective). The teacher asks her about Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man . She raises her head and with her characteristic sangfroid recites: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast;/Man never is, but always to be blessed:/ The soul, uneasy and confined from home,/Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
When the teacher asks her what Pope meant by that, Veronica replies: “Life’s a bitch until you die” — just the hard-boiled teen version of that Seuss quote. And no one needs poetry more than hard-boiled teens.
Meanwhile, the poetry exchange mails have stopped coming and even the meta mails (“I don’t wanna”, “I wanna”, “make me”) have more or less stopped too. But it has reminded me of a couple of different things: how much fun it is to talk to strangers and acquaintances without the set agendas and the planned corporate party games of Facebook and Twitter. This, of course, is a worldwide phenomenon which is why young feminists, scientists, poetry lovers, all kinds of people really, are going off the grid in a manner of speaking and turning to that old-fashioned, yet amazing, tool of communication: newsletters on email.
The other thing it reminded me of was a time not so far back in the past when poetry was part of my everyday life. I wrote and read it every week. I had friendships built on and judged people for their poetic choices (“BUKOWSKI? Waiter, bill please.”) I discovered new poets often. I had guilty pleasures. I quoted it and blogged about it. I was part of a poetry mailing list called the Wandering Minstrels that had the bracing elegance of a gin and tonic. I bought copy after copy of The Cinnamon Peeler and was thrilled each time to read, “what good is it/to be the lime burner’s daughter/left with no trace/as if not spoken to in the act of love/as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar”. I cursed my college friend who had pretended to be an ex-Maoist to pick up girls, but also introduced me to A.K. Mehrotra’s translation of the Gathasaptasati so full of feverish and languid lovers that I forgave him. I ran out and spent my non-existent savings on The Oxford India Ramanujan when it came out.
For a while though, I’ve accepted that poetry, the reading and the writing of it, has gone away. But I felt no fear. I just assumed that it was going to come back when the time was right. Poetry, the reading and the writing of it, is all about timing. It comes to you when you are feverish from life, open to ambiguity, so open to multiplicity of futures that you seem to be swimming alongside a dozen versions of yourself. You are not hostile to your thirst for the playful and the purely ornamental. That’s when poetry comes into your life. Or, when you want to pick up girls.
This latest poetry chain mail was only one harbinger, I am convinced. Poetry is returning to me with perfect timing just as I am beginning to accept that many certainties of my life are not certain any more.
It’s not just me, I’m convinced. We are a country that’s returning to poetry.
Poetry in politics Sometimes you need to express yourself in poetry, even if you’ve been deprived of it and told that only technocrats know what’s best for the world. It’s leaking back into the world in hyperbole and wordplay. The judge presiding over >Kanhaiya Kumar’s bail hearing needed to reach for a song from a Manoj Kumar film in her judgment. And Kanhaiya, a sizzling speaker, infused the play, byplay and structure of a song in his back-to-freedom speech. And news website after website parsed the beauty of these speeches, as we once did with poems. Even Rahul Gandhi, hitherto uninspired speaker, seemed to relish the new-found pleasure of the rousing, poetic register. The repetition of good lines, that babbar sher reference and the comedy of representing his mother as the panicked party president feeling trumped by a mysterious Naga Accord were all devices that invited enjoyment. But the biggest sign that Mr. Gandhi might have had an epiphany of language was in his exhortations to his peers to thump the benches if they liked what he was saying. Show me some love, you tough crowd, he was saying. Because this was a performance of light-heartedness and in this performance of light-heartedness, we may return to actual light-heartedness. But you must thump the bench too.
So I do not grudge the judge her desire to express her complicated feelings about India and Kanhaiya Kumar in ways the law does not quite permit. I was ready for it. I was ready for it most of all because the greatest tribute to the return of poetry had already been paid this month. After hearing that the title of a Jawaharlal Nehru University event had been ‘ >Poetry reading — The Country Without A Post Office ’, a young man from Hyderabad filed an RTI. He wanted to know if Kashmir really had no post office, not realising the event had been named after a poem by Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. He had wondered, he said later when he was mocked heavily, “if the students were trying to misguide others into believing that Kashmir was backward enough to not have a single post office.”
Kanumuri Manikanta Karthik was a man seeking information because he has been brought up in a country that has for a while been hectored into valuing information more than truth or beauty. That is why he focussed on what he could do with the second half of that event title. But still, the strange feelings created by poetry are inexplicable. It is why you sometimes understand instinctively what the poem is about without understanding half the lines.
Like a child addressing a letter to the North Pole in the hope of presents from Santa, Kanumuri was a man seemingly writing to the government for information about Kashmir while in the hope of the truth (and beauty) of Kashmir. He was a man looking for love from a tough crowd. He was a man sorely in need of a copy of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Gathasapthasathi.
(Nisha Susan is a writer and a co-founder of the online feminist magazine The Ladies Finger .)
