Poets can teach us more about life than most other people, if only we are prepared to listen
I can count the number of bookstores that stock great poetry on one hand, which is sad because poetry often allows us to understand aspects of our lives that we rarely stop to focus on. representation Pic/Getty Images
The English poet Fiona Benson saved me from a dismal January, weeks before the pandemic would make that month seem glorious when compared with the rest of the year. Her collection of poems, Vertigo & Ghost, was published in 2019 and I plunged into it with much happiness.
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On the surface, her work shouldn’t have moved me as much as it did, given how the first half focused exclusively on the Greek god Zeus. And yet, there were startling parallels between the violence of that antiquated world and what India’s women were grappling with at the time. I came away from the book shaken but rejuvenated, in the way only good poetry can act like a tonic for the soul.
It’s hard to comment on whether we read as much poetry as we should. I can count the number of bookstores that stock great poetry on one hand, which is sad because poetry often allows us to understand aspects of our lives that we rarely stop to focus on.
For instance, reading Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, also published in 2019, held a mirror to the dystopia that India was turning into, one that millions of us had accepted without question only because it didn’t appear to have any immediate consequences on our day-to-day lives. It also implicated us in our complicity because we chose silence instead of speaking up.
Midway through the year, Life on Mars, American poet Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer-winning collection from 2012, taught me about death. It forced me to contemplate the possibility of my own story ending prematurely as millions began to die of Covid-19. ‘Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,’ she wrote in the poem My God, It’s Full of Stars, ‘That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip - When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic...’ For a minute, there, it made me feel less alone, for which I was grateful.
I learned a lot about resistance from Danez Smith, the HIV-positive queer American poet whose 2017 collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, took an uncomfortable look at racism that suddenly became a battle for that country’s identity in the weeks leading up to its Presidential election. There was a deep sadness in those poems, a recognition that little appeared to have changed over centuries. And yet, there was defiance and hope, as Smith ended the powerful ‘dear white america’ thus: ‘this new story & history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or hang or beat or drown or own or redline or shackle or silence or cheat or choke or cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or ruin / this, if only this one, is ours.’
The English poet Jay Bernard’s debut collection, Surge, added much to my understanding of how identities are being reshaped across the globe, specifically in communities that are being marginalised and squeezed out of the spaces they live in by powerful forces beyond their control. As I read Bernard’s poems about police discrimination, the difference between public and private truths, and how governments often failed to address the concerns of the most vulnerable members of society, there were farmers marching towards Parliament in India. There should have been no parallels between those groups of people - Bernard’s British victims and India’s poor - but there were, and that resonance gave his work power.
It wasn’t all dark and gloomy reading either. In the poet Ross Gay’s 2015 collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, I found happiness and a celebration of the little things that give our lives meaning. This was a world where even the survivor of a heart attack had a ‘pacemaker’s scar / grinning across his chest’; where the poet showed his deep appreciation for what so many of us take for granted. It made for particularly poignant reading as wave after wave of infections shut the world’s biggest cities down, reminding us all of how fragile we really are.
As I end this column, my eyes alight upon a new anthology titled Singing in the Dark, a global collection documenting how poets have responded to the pandemic. A Google search reveals several new collections, all of which were published while the world hunkered down and prayed for better times. We wept, lost much of what was important to us, and probably gave up more than a few times as well. Through it all though, our poets never stopped singing. For that, I am grateful.
When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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