Navigating the landscape of verse

Sudeep Ghosh

The purpose of this article is to enhance students’ dialogic interaction with a text and gain what Patrocinio Schweikart, Professor of English, Purdue University, calls ‘a dual perspective through reading both the self and the text in question, and enacts a reciprocal relationship an – “interanimation” – among author, text, and reader that is mutually respectful and liberating.’

The role of a teacher/facilitator is to foster critical thinking skills and make students develop an individual way of engaging with a text aiming at conceptual clarity and sound reasoning. Close reading, the key to analytical success, also calls for the attributes of a caring and careful reader to create a space for imaginative speculation in conjunction with the subtleties of a text and concretise the effects in seeking meaning.

The poem I have chosen is by Hoshang Merchant titled ‘6^th August 2007’

6^th August 20072
(Remembering Hiroshima during the Iraq War)

‘I’ is un-important
All I is drained out of me
It has gone into You
You are pouring into Me
I and You become indistinct: WHERE IS I
If You are Me

Hiroshima was not necessary to conquer Japan
Nagasaki was not necessary to end the War

When they tested the Bomb at Los Alamos
Where sister lives
The radiation burnt everything
Leaving charred reflections of windows on the walls
Like charred reflections of love on our hearts’ walls
Now my sister is dying
I write this poem
Hiroshima’s last survivor remembers it all Still

The cloth is torn
Come love, bring me a needle
The needle of love
For the torn cloth of friendship, my friend, my love
Let us make love one last time…

My sister, my spouse lies dying
My love stitches a shroud
Death’s golden needle points to the grave
I go around a graveyard but can’t find your tomb

This page is a rose garden I go around
My dead blossom here
And darken my eye
with the light of a 1,000 1,000 suns
(For Adnan)

Activity – 1 (on ‘poetic register’)
The teacher can provide the following propositions and ask students, divided into groups, to find out the ‘how’ and ‘to what effect’.
1) The poem displays the language of imaginative symbolism of a transcendental experience.
2) The poem displays the language of exalted rhetoric.
3) The poem displays the language of directness which is essentially deceptive.
4) The poem displays the language of supreme ecstasy.
5) The poem displays the language of mystic vision.

For example, if (1) of the above is considered, to unpack the proposition, the following could be examined –
i. Juxtaposition of pronouns ‘I’ and ‘You’
ii. Blending of ‘I’ and ‘You’ – allusion to religion?
iii. Juxtaposition of give + take (‘drained out’ + ‘pouring into’)
iv. Rhetorical and conditional expressions in capitalized and normal – ‘WHERE IS I/If You are Me’
v. Juxtaposition of antithetical ‘conquer’ and ‘end’
vi. Enjambment punctuated by long pauses (extended ellipses)
vii. Metaphor (‘page is a rose-garden’), oxymoron and personification in ‘dead blossom’ and hyperbole (‘1000 thousand suns’)
viii. Visual imagery of ‘cloth’ and ‘garden’ – religious connotations?

Activity – 2 (Class discussion)
Note:
• Teacher facilitates this discussion about the nature, attributes, function, methods and modes of poetry.
• Ask the following questions. Let students provide concrete evidence from the poem referred to above]

1. How is poetry a symbolic expression of far deeper significance?
2. To what extent is imagination in poetry an apprehension of reality?
3. How does poetry bridge the gap between the imaginary and the real, the real and the absurd?
4. What makes poetry timeless? What makes poetry shine a steady splendour of relevance?
5. How do raptures of subjective emotion in a poem create a universal consciousness?
6. How do multiple emotions crisscross in poetry? Does a specific primary emotion transmute/override/undermine/aggravate another primary emotion?
7. What makes a poem ambiguous? What is the role of context and language in making the style of a poetic expression implied with subtler richness?
8. How is the profundity of thought buried in the obvious denotation of a poem?
9. What drives a poem – mind or heart, emotion or reason?
10. How does poetry possess an inimitable ability for abstract thinking about the vagaries, idiosyncrasies and beauty of human life?

Activity – 3 (Creative writing)
‘Does the poem carry a whiff of the future?’, asks the teacher. The nature of the task can lend to the genre of ‘futuristic writing’. Students need to be aware of the facets of ‘magic realism’. They can work on the motif of relationship which is central to the understanding of the poem. They can further explore what is intangible in a relationship.

Since Hoshang Merchant’s poem is life-affirming, students can depict a futuristic society which is life-denying but which paradoxically implies the value of truth. If hope is replaced by despair, it is done only to reinforce the vitality of hope. If the characters are malicious, it is only to drive home the urgency of righteousness. If the landscape is hauntingly appalling, it is only to challenge the tenacity of truth. After all, the task will question the efficacy of a make-believe world with all its inadequacies, imperfections, and pretentions. Students need to be cognizant of and sensitive to the temptation of the evil and the glory of goodness in their creative evocation of a text. This antithetical relationship will pave the way for further deliberation on ‘relationship’ with all its associations and overtones.

Activity – 4 Finding links to other poems
(for perceptive, introspective students) Students to confront the rhetorical question – Is Hoshang Merchant’s poem an outpouring of profound realization?

They may be told to find links to other English or language poems from modern translations.

For example, a student, well-versed in Bangla literature may allude to Tagore’s poem from the volume of poems entitled Prantik³

‘This body of mine –
the carrier of the burden of a past –
seemed to me like an exhausted, cloud
slipping off from the listless arm
of the morning.
I felt feed from its clasp
in the heart of an incorporeal light
at the farthest shore
of evanescent things.’

Another student might refer to Rumi’s invocation⁴ –

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing
and right-doing there is a field,
I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

The teacher could generate an insightful discussion, stimulating high order thinking skills, around the following –

• Why is nature imagery central to Hoshang Merchant, Tagore, and Rumi? Does it make poetry romantic? If it does, can speculative poetry be ‘valued’?
• What is – belief, disbelief, and unbelief?
• What is body-mind dualism? What does it mean to negate/transcend this dualism?
• What is knowledge? How can a subjective experience gain a universal significance?
• How can language of poetry unravel the ‘undefined’?

I hope the above-mentioned activities will help lifting the veil, to put it metaphorically. In today’s post-truth world, poetry does achieve an unmistakable resonance.

References
1. Selzer, Jack. More Meanings of Audience.
2. Merchant, Hoshang. Sufi na Poems. India: Harper Collins, 2013. Print.
3. Kripalani, Krishna Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography, Oxford, pp.383-84
4. Chopra, Deepak The Future of God

The author teaches English and Theory of Knowledge at The Aga Khan Academy, Hyderabad. He can be reached at sudeepmailsu@gmail.com.