Unexpected encounters

Educator and haiku poet K Ramesh lives in Chengalpattu, Tamil Nadu, and teaches at the Pathashaala, a residency school of The Krishnamurthi Foundation India. “My poems are about little observations, everyday experiences that we simply pass by,” says the poet for whom the haiku is about transforming, freeing the mind from restricted patterns of thought. “A haiku is simple. It does not involve any complex wordplay. It stems from an experience and is easy to relate to… Next time, people will see something extraordinary.” Once at a traffic intersection, mesmerised by a line of soap bubbles floating across, he wrote:

Soap bubbles

From a children’s park

Break a traffic rule

Has he ever tried to introduce his poems in environments beyond the book? “Once in Chennai at The School, where I was teaching, I strung up my poems from a tree. Anyone could come by and read.”

The delight of poetry is in multiple readings, like watching a bud opening its petals. Its strength lies in gleaning secrets in every new read. In fact, knowing the words in advance gives greater joy. In India, on temple walls we inscribed stories. Today, people use walls for messages and propaganda. On the bark of trees and the surface of rocks, vandals and lovers scrawl their names and declare love. Why not find enriching ways to bring poetry to public spaces?

In the mid-’90s, Poetry in Motion was launched in New York (and other US cities), which saw poems displayed in buses and subways. In Chicago, I would walk into the L train to be immersed in a poem, drowning out the rumble and sway. Could I likewise sit in a train in Chennai and catch a glimpse of loneliness as poet Salma writes:

Loneliness too is weary

From keeping my company

To visitors and passers by

It keeps complaining

That it’s terribly bored

“It was always important for me to write immediately when the words came. Later, the thought is there, but the words do not come back,” says Salma, who writes in Tamil. Confined to the house from a young age, rebellious and gifted, she wrote on every scrap of paper that came her way. By the age of 16, she had written about seven poems, which were published in local magazines and later in books. The printed work always gave her a sense of achievement. She believes in the liberating power of the internet: “Through the Kindle someone can read my books in South Africa. A poem can go anywhere — into government offices, on an electricity bill receipt, on the ration or phone bill! My poems were printed on postcards and could reach anyone. There are different meanings to verse at different times. Also, each person’s experience gives him a unique perspective. We travel with the poem to find a story: it is like a journey, a many-layered experience.”

Self-professed nomad Arundhathi Subramaniam lives in Mumbai, and travels frequently to Chennai and Coimbatore. For her, poetry is not just a printed page, it is the art of the spoken voice. “As a child, this is what drew me to the art, as I suspect it does for many other children as well — this capacity of the human voice to leap, dive and soar. To be able to say it aloud was always the magic of it. It’s a great pity to lose that aliveness and allow it to turn into a printed artefact alone,” she says. Being a part of many public poetry experiments, including Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda festival some years ago, she has seen poetry performed in subway stations and city squares, parks and even near lamp-posts. Where else can we reach out with poetry? “In as many public places as possible, essentially to remind us that poetry is a vital nourishing part of our daily lives, not some stodgy textbook affair,” she says.

Her poem ‘ Where I Live’ is an attempt to articulate ambivalent feelings towards the city — a mix of loathing and affection.

I live on a wedge of land

Reclaimed from a tired ocean

Somewhere at the edge of the universe

At the end of a meal, when you break a fortune cookie, could you find a poem inside? What if, every morning when we went to work, we could find a selection of poems to read, carefully displayed near the counter from which we buy coffee? Could I wander into a garden to find a poem inscribed across three rocks? And while you walked along a corridor to work, could you hear a poem being read out? Then that journey — “from heart to tongue”, as Subramaniam puts it — would move within us and with us.

(Sujatha Shankar Kumar is a Chennai-based writer and photographer)

COMMENT NOW