Poetry: Harping On

While answering the question “Why write Poetry?”, I more or less feel like Orpheus, who knows that the answer is behind him for which he just has to look back, at the same time also aware that if he looks back for it, the Euridician answer will disappear. So I can only walk on and keep writing without looking back for answer and finding the answer at the end of the journey. Strictly speaking then, this is not the time for me to answer this question as the journey to Underworld has just begun.

But, the myth of Orpheus metaphorically answers for me the question raised here. First of all, Orpheus was a fine musician even before meeting Eurydice and he saved Argonauts from the killing song of Sirens. He did not fight them, but played his music over theirs so delicately that their song was no longer heard and they set their ship to sail and were saved. In the same way I write poetry to overwrite a version that already exists there. As a Kashmiri one overwrites the Indian songs that are hued with seductive images of ‘Beautiful Kashmir’. The ship of truth can only be set to sail again only when the poetry is written so loud and delicately that the song of Indian sirens would be heard no more.

What is this song of sirens in Indian context? It can be a simple Bollywood lyric playing on our local Radio station that enchants us with their images of truth or it can be their state ideology that also enchants and lures us like sirens into falsehood. The only way of breaking this spell is by writing poetry. Poetry of course cannot as Seamus Heaney says stop a tank, but it can stop the tank-driver or at least keep the sailors away or warn them about the coming tank or siren song.

Another important metaphor that resides in the myth is that when Eurydice dies, Orpheus avows to bring her back from the underworld by melting the hearts of gods with his soulful music. This explains a very important reason of my writing poetry. Poetry always tries to regain some lost Eurydice, who can be anyone and anything. She can be the beloved, a loved one, a friend who migrated or a friend killed in an encounter. This loss is regained in the act of writing poetry. It tries to fill the empty heart with the treasures of words, similes, metaphors and images. But, this loss is not only mournful, it is also hopeful. This loss does not stem from a lacking but from an ideal that is missing from the mundane life. In the act of writing poetry one tries to recover or accomplish that ideal, that missing territory which is always barbed off to the margins of reality.