Unstable Bodies: Poetry’s Longing For Future

In an essay,1 Andrés Cerpa writes, “[e]ach poem is comprised of all the poems that came before it.” Very similarly, each poem does run far; and each poem endeavours to run even farther. The poet can only not limit this expanse of poetry: they can give directions to this expanse, but not limit it — that’s the beauty of it. This is so because poetry has a general tendency to run far. It is attracted towards distance, to the inexperienced beauty of it. A Hindi proverb in its most literal sense goes: “things from a distance seem unusually praiseworthy;”2 and in the very similar way, poetry follows that trail, and fortunately most of the times for good.

When one writes what hasn’t yet happened, the poems are made insightful; it takes a little time based on how a reader contemplates the future. More often than not, we find discomfort in such verses — a discomfort that turns out to be beautiful too. When Agha Shahid Ali wrote “I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir” in one of his most beautiful poems, it turned out more to be a wish than a statement, and as is often known his longing for home — Kashmir. He, unfortunately, couldn’t make it there in his last days, which happened to be in winter.

Also, most certainly, as it is, when we talk about poetry’s desire to run further, it not only alludes to distance, or to time, but also to emotions, which it carries away with itself, while also allowing us to savour the expression of the certain emotion verily at once.

Sometimes poetry can be like anything, disposable, and yet indisposed, and it stays. Every while a little longer. Like a pilgrim in the Sahara, with a burning throat lustful for oases, it still survives the sun every afternoon, the moon every night, with burning feet, delightfully tasting even the dreams of oases as existences that are more than a mirage. Day after day.

Now, poetry is also so much about future because it’s not itself without it, that is, poetry is not itself without a moment in the future tense, because while one writes it down on paper it may be poetry for them — the writer — but not for us, the readers. For when one writes and simultaneously reads it, they become at once both its writer and a reader, so the cycle in that case keeps working on itself continuously, draft after draft, until drafting itself is completed. However, as I see it, once it reaches the reader — unread, anew — poetry is not poetry again because a number of lines is not always poetry, at least not unless a reader has suggested otherwise. Which is why a poem is always both a poem and not a poem. For example, the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wouldn’t have been poems had it not been that some people read their irregular handwritings in time and named them poets. Also, very similarly, when Marie Howe3 and Carolyn Forché4 talk about maintaining day-to-day journals, the initials of their poems could be nothing more than journal entries that later become vivid on a different paper.

So, poetry desires future not just for the sake of it but also for itself — for the definition of an existence of its own, — which is important in case it has to reach any reader of sorts. And as it often is: when we think of the future, we outline a place and a weather or climate alongside it: outlining apparently the reason we see that future; and places and seasons walk apace in parallels in such poems.

However, the point remains, that while poetry does tend toward the future, it doesn’t much desire change as it does movement (or motion), also because any motion inevitably brings about change in manners than making things static. And in manners, poetry is deemed to woo future before, or above, everything else.

Hence, of course, every poem is a body of instability, and mostly for the good of all things. And because poetry is written on all grounds, also on those of destruction, longing for (a different) future is a generally expected tendency.

So, when Andrés Cerpa said that each poem is made up of the previous poems, he also meant that every other poem in the past altogether tended towards a poem in the future, which again will tend further towards another poem in the future. And, so, poetry, in one way or another — or it could be said that in every way — tends towards a change: one that is future.

And when one says “poetry, it can take you places,” have the nature to believe them, because before most things, it was the poetry of words that helped us move — together — and before even that, it was the poetry of symbols and hand gestures. But, as it is, it was always poetry!

REFERENCES:

1. The Library in Each Line, by Andrés Cerpa, on Frontier Poetry. [Read]

2. “The grass is always greener on the other side” is the very proverb in the English language.

3. Carrie Fountain talks to Marie Howe on KUT podcast This is Just to Say, where Marie tells her that she suggests her students to write down ten observations every week. [Read]

4. Carolyn Forché says that as a child, she used to keep a diary with a small lock as “a notebook of secret thoughts,” and it later became a habit; and keeping them has now become a “part of [her] writing process.” [Read]

This piece originally appeared in Issue 1 of The Hooghly Review.