Poetry Session - February 16, 2023

W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne was a great Irish romance.

W.B Yeats had one great romance in his life, pursuing the fiery activist Maud Gonne and proposing to her three times, being turned down each time. As his lifelong muse she inspired several of his poems. When Yeats told her he wasn’t happy without her, she replied: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”   

The Wild Swans at Coole which Devika recited has these wonderful lines about swans, who reportedly mate for life:

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still

Amy Lowell – Garden by Moonlight

Amy Lowell in a quiet poem presented by Arundhaty speaks of a Garden by Moonlight – besides flowers, there are animals and insects too. A vision of her dead mother appears:

Then you come …

Quiet like the garden

And white like the alyssum flowers,

… do you see those orange lilies?

They knew my mother,

But who belonging to me will they know

When I am gone.

Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'A Dream Within A Dream' questions the nature of reality and human existence

Edgar Allan Poe has a meditation on life as maya. His poem A Dream Within a Dream has the unmistakable sound and rhythm of his great poems; it was rendered by Geetha with great understanding. By the sandy shore the poet grasps at grains of golden sands and wonders 

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

… can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

He meditates finally  

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

One of the poets recited was Christopher Reid, who lost his wife to cancer after 35 years of marriage and felt totally lost. He writes about his Conundrum as a widower in a mini poem by that name that Joe intoned:

I’m the riddle to an answer:

I’m an unmarried spouse,

a flesh and blood revenant,

my own ghost inhabitant

of an empty house.

Kanakakunnu Palace, Trivandrum – the second edition of the Hay Festival was held there 17-19 Nov, 2011 and Simon Armitage was among the poets who presented poems.

We had a poem from KumKum by the current Poet Laureate of UK, Simon Armitage, whom she met in 2011 at the Hay Festival in Trivandrum; she heard him recite this very poem, The Shout.  He is a prolific Poet who takes his responsibilities to compose for royal occasions seriously – with happy results. As it turned out Pamela too lighted on the same poet, filling the evening with two more nature poems.

Vikram Seth – The Humble Administrator’s Garden cover

Priya chose a poem from Vikram Seth, harking back to his student days in China when he was gathering data for an Economics doctorate. There in the town of Suzhou he chanced on the ancient park laid out on classical lines by a high official who relinquished his career and built a garden to meditate in and there live frugally. There is a Chinese saying: in the sky there is heaven, on Earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou (pronounced su-jow). VS brings to bear his observant eye in describing the quiet pleasures of Suzhou garden, now a UNESCO Heritage site:

As magpie flaps back to pine.

A sparrow dust rolls, fluffs, and cheeps.

The humans rest in a design:

One writes, one thinks, one moves, one sleeps.

As often, VS writes in the sonnet form, using iambic tetrameter, following the pattern of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which he was to adopt later for his tour-de-force in verse, The Golden Gate.

Anti-war poems by Denise Levertov, a passionate advocate of peace and justice

A wonderful poem, Making Peace, by Denise Levertov seemed especially relevant in our time when bombs and missiles are raining devastation in Europe, and the belligerents have yet to consider the alternative of peace.

Levertov writes –

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses …

That seems to be the key: to stand back, pause, and ponder – weigh the suffering of blown limbs and snuffed out lives against the necessary compromise that will gain a peace, fragile, but still achievable.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – January 30, 2023

 First Edition of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ signed by Ray Bradbury, published by Ballantine Books in 1953

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, and one of his best works. A Dystopia (opposite is Utopia) is a place where everything is as bad as possible. The novel presents a future American society set some time in the 2040s where all books are outlawed and ‘firemen’ burn them if they are found. The novel’s tagline explains the title as ‘the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns.’

Fireman book-burner pictured with his kerosene flame-thrower on the cover of an edition of Fahrenheit 451

The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his job, and the society he lives in, after a series of encounters with a mysterious young girl named Clarisse, and a retired professor named Faber. Montag begins to secretly read books and becomes more and more aware of the oppressive nature of his society. He eventually joins a group of rebels who are working to preserve books and the knowledge they contain. The novel explores themes of censorship, the dangers of conformism, and the power of literature. Bradbury wrote the novel as a reaction to the McCarthyite political climate of the 1950s and as a warning about the dangers of censorship and the suppression of dissenting ideas.

Such trends are by no means things of the past. The Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris comes to mind. Though it is not strictly an issue of dissension or censorship, it certainly is one of intolerance. In the past year more than 1500 books have been banned in US school districts, mainly books on race and LGBTQ issues.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Charlie-Hebdo-shooting

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/book-bans-pen-america-school-districts

Even today in India authorities attempt to use the police to squelch the expression of works critical of the government. This is contrary to the latitude given in the Constitution to a free press and to voice opinions that dissent from the majority (peacefully, of course). Many writers face the fate of Perumal Murugan who was hounded by Hindutva and caste-based groups which demanded a ban on his book Madhorubhagan, saying it was derogatory in its depiction of women and rituals. See:

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/exclusive-censors-voice-within-me-now-says-writer-perumul-murugan-1448981

Most recently a BBC documentary was not banned, but its exhibition was suppressed in many locations, including educational institutions, by using the police to interfere.

It is well to remember what Salman Rushdie, himself the object of severe threats from Iranian mullahs, said: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

Salman Rushdie – After a near-fatal stabbing on Aug 11, 2022 — and decades of threats — the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy has emphasised that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and is essential for the functioning of a free and open society. She has also stressed the importance of protecting the rights of writers, journalists, and other artists to express their ideas freely, and the need to create an environment where dissenting voices can be heard.

 

It is an interesting fact that in 1954, the year after the novel was published, it was serialised in – of all places – Playboy magazine, helping it to reach an even wider audience.

‘Come on, woman!’ The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montag

The biographer Sam Weller has noted that Bradbury predicted a raft of later technological developments in Fahrenheit 451, among them flat-screen televisions, iPod earbuds, Bluetooth headsets, ATMs, and rolling news. Even Facebook – given that people converse via a digital ‘wall’ in Bradbury’s novel – seems to have been prophetically prefigured in this novel.