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To start with, poetry can by no means be outlined both definitively or adequately. Thus, there can’t however be steady makes an attempt to outline poetry itself. The good Nineteenth-century French poet Paul Valery as soon as noticed, “Most individuals have such a obscure thought about poetry that this obscure feeling itself is their definition of poetry.” However then one can rapidly hint its etymology. The phrase “poetry” is derived from the Greek phrase poiesis, which suggests “creating” or “making.” Poets are creators. It is not for nothing that the good mediaeval Bangla poet Syed Alaol asserts that poets are God’s real disciples. Initially, poetry—as outdated as historical past—was oral. Poetry and music had been then indivisible. However, later, the emergence of print capitalism contributed to their bifurcation, whereas additionally yanking poetry from the human physique itself. Certainly, the historical past of poetry is the historical past of mutations, metamorphoses, and actions in addition to experiments and even iconoclasms, ruptures and inaugurations, amongst different issues.
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However why can’t poetry be concretely outlined? One perspective—rooted as it’s in a selected Sufi custom of poetics within the Arab world and South Asia—means that in its inventive, expressive enactment of sounds, indicators, and symbols, poetry affords the thresholds of the unattainable, the silences surrounding the unsayable, the nuances of the infinitesimal and the infinite, the reality of the “one plus one equals the One” (as represented by the Sufi poet Mansur Al-Hallaj’s well-known ecstatic pronouncement of Aanal Haq)—in such a manner that poetry ranges past the borders and limits of definition, comprehension, and even translation. However then, on this occasion, the mysterious, the metaphysical, the magical, the musical, even the mathematical, and the poetic intersect and work together to supply a brand new expertise that requires a brand new mode of being on this planet.
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But, poetry is a concrete signifying and sensuous apply that phrases the world and worlds the phrase. However what’s the “concrete,” in any case? As Karl Marx maintains within the Grundrisse, “The concrete is concrete as a result of it’s the focus of many determinations, therefore the unity of the various.” On this sense, then, there are poems on this planet—and there are worlds within the poems—which might be concrete. And I consider within the worldliness of poetry, at all times jazzed up by the dialectical dance of creativeness, whereas I additionally maintain pondering of the poetry of worldly issues—concrete issues. And as I’ve maintained elsewhere, I consider Pablo Neruda’s well-known odes to issues. I consider how he says, “I like issues with a wild ardour.” I consider how he cherishes tongs and scissors; how he adores cups, hoops, hats—issues small and issues grand; how he loves dishes, vases, the curves of a shoe, or the glints of eyeglasses. He loves rings, talismans, clocks, compasses, cash, and, after all, the silken plushness of chairs. And he loves wondrous tables, floating ships, even damaged staircases. And he loves buttons, cups, knives, shears—the velvety depths of issues, or the serene surfaces of issues, or the multitude of issues crafted by the human hand. The tone, tune, timbre, tenor, and texture of the textual content in Neruda’s poetry additionally contribute to the creation of magnificence—magnificence born out of frequent, extraordinary issues and of the temperature of language itself.
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And I am with the English poet WH Auden when he maintains, “A poet is, earlier than the rest, an individual who’s passionately in love with language.” Certainly, there is no such thing as a poetry with out language. However, then, not each language is poetic. The language of accounting and enterprise and legislation, for example, will not be essentially the language of poetry, though a loopy lover like Florentino Ariza in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love within the Time of Cholera might try and make all these languages surprisingly, even shockingly poetic. It is not for nothing that the Mexican poet Octavio Paz as soon as put it this manner, “Poetry is the opposite manner of utilizing language.” And this “different manner” of utilizing language—like God, like love, like magic, like even cash—can do loopy, mysterious issues in poetry. One might recall Stéphane Mallarmé—broadly thought to be one of the vital musical and philosophical of recent poets—for whom the poet appears to be additionally a kind of magician or alchemist of language. As Mallarmé observes, “Poetry is the expression of the mysterious sense of the features of existence via human language introduced again to its important rhythm; on this manner it endows our on a regular basis life with an authenticity and constitutes the one religious activity.” And our personal Mirza Asadullah Khan—the good Ghalib—would no less than partly concur with Mallarmé whereas worlding the religious, which, for Ghalib, can’t be divorced from the philosophical as such.
Poetry has use values and (non-capitalist) change values. Poetry offers communion, communication, catharsis. Poetry might function a car for preserving cultural heritage and histories by means of its oral and written traditions. And the best poetry on this planet is love poetry, and love poetry is in flip political poetry, all of which re-creates us. Poetry may even radically prepare our senses and even radically educate us. Its metaphors could be epistemologically enabling, its pictures could be sensuously partaking, its rhythms could be even therapeutic.
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However what’s the relationship between poetry and philosophy? I can’t resist recalling the main French thinker Alain Badiou’s piece “Philosophical Standing of the Poem.” Badiou right here brilliantly meditates on the three doable relations of philosophy—as thought—to the poem. He takes up Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle. Based on Badiou, then, philosophy envies the poem, as within the case of Parmenides; philosophy excludes the poem, as within the case of Plato; and philosophy classifies the poem, as within the case of Aristotle. In different phrases, the three doable hyperlinks between poetry and philosophy are “figuring out rivalry” (Parmenides), argumentative distance” (Plato), and “aesthetic regionality” (Aristotle). Badiou additionally takes up the German thinker Martin Heidegger, sustaining that he has “very legitimately re-established the autonomous operate of the considered the poem,” however by Badiou’s reckoning, Heidegger within the closing occasion “has solely been in a position to revert to the judgement of interruption, and to revive, beneath refined and diversified names, the sacral authority of poetic proffering—and the concept that the genuine lies within the flesh of phrases.” For Badiou, to the extent that poetry is the considered the presence of the current, poetry isn’t any rival for philosophy. Though poetry and philosophy usually are not equivalent, poetry will get philosophical in additional methods than one.
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The Latin American revolutionary poet Roque Dalton’s “Ars Poetica” is a poem of three strains: “Poetry/ Forgive me for having helped you perceive/ You are not product of phrases alone.” As Claire Gebeyli, a Lebanese author, places it, “Of what use is the pen if it forgets to press down on individuals’s chests? If the phrases it pours forth are mere particles sewn and resewn on the physique of language?” On a considerably completely different register, the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde underlines the duty of a poet as being one “to call the anonymous so it may be thought.” Dalton, Gebeyli, and Lorde—their completely different stylistic signatures however—converge no less than round the concept that poetry is greater than “word-making,” greater than even a intelligent play of phrases. Is poetry, then, a type of world-making? The worlding of the phrase and the wording of the world, as was indicated earlier? Is not the poet an Orphic singer who brings issues into being for the primary time? Is not poetry additionally the letting go of language itself? These questions usually are not merely Heideggerian ones. For me, such questions, amongst many others, had been already prompted by Lalon Fakir’s personal lyrical theories of the physique and language, though they had been broached in numerous contexts.
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And what, then, is the connection between poetry and politics? Poetry can’t be lowered to the political. However poetry is inherently political. True, because the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti states, “no dictatorship has ever fallen due to a sonnet.” However, then, I am with James Joyce when he ardently asserts, “Poetry, even when apparently most implausible, is at all times a revolt in opposition to artifice, a revolt, in a way, in opposition to actuality.” It is within the Joycean sense that Jibanananda Das’s ostensibly aestheticist “Banalata Sen” is a political poem, for its spatial creativeness and its new mode of linguistic changing into or being problem and unsettle the reality of dominant linguistic “manufacturing relations,” if you’ll. However, then, poetry may also be intentionally political. Kazi Nazrul Islam’s “Bidrohi” (The Insurgent), for example, is an explicitly, explosively political poem—one which seems to be an unrelenting revolutionary praxis. Let’s additionally recall what the Puerto Rican revolutionary feminist poet Iris M Zavala has to say, “I can solely conceive of poetry because the expression of the shouts within the streets—these which might be muffled, which might be felt. It’s inserting your ft firmly on the bottom and making the White Home, Washington, and Wall Avenue tremble, and having the tremor attain all the best way to Spain. A poem is an immense ‘Sure!’ to the wretched of the earth.” Virtually equally, the Nicaraguan feminist poet Rosario Murrillo asserts, “We make a revolution after we write a poem.” And Audre Lorde famously politicises poetry by positing it as even existentially pressing praxis, “For girls, then, poetry will not be a luxurious. It’s a very important necessity of our existence. It kinds the standard of the sunshine inside which we predicate our hopes and desires towards survival and alter, first made into language, then into thought, then into extra tangible motion.”
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Poetry has use values and (non-capitalist) change values. Poetry offers communion, communication, catharsis. Poetry might function a car for preserving cultural heritage and histories by means of its oral and written traditions. And the best poetry on this planet is love poetry, and love poetry is in flip political poetry, all of which re-creates us. Poetry may even radically prepare our senses and even radically educate us. Its metaphors could be epistemologically enabling, its pictures could be sensuously partaking, its rhythms could be even therapeutic. And “being” itself is rhythm. We ourselves are a number of, sliding, travelling rhythms in area and time. After we stop to have rhythm, we’re lifeless. And after we stop to have poetry, we’re spiritually lifeless, a technique or one other.
Dr Azfar Hussain is director of the graduate programme in social innovation and professor of integrative/interdisciplinary research at Grand Valley State College in Michigan, US. He’s additionally summer season distinguished professor of English and Humanities on the College of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) and vice-president of US-based World Middle for Superior Research.
Views on this article are the writer’s personal.
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