Words that burn, thoughts that breathe

There is a growing appetite for social media poetry and there are more reasons for us to need poems. Sometimes, all art has to do is make you stop long enough to consider how you deal with realities.

Picture this. Ice cubes, sitting in a sweaty glass of lemonade, squeeze a swimming pool into slants of turquoise. You hear a splash of water, and then, laughter. There is sunshine and the smell of chlorine. Somewhere, a book opens — its pages reflected in oversized sunglasses.

What kind of book do you see here? A summer romance? A juicy mystery bought at an airport bookstore?

Bet you don’t see any verse on that page. Or maybe you do. And if you do, liar, is it Arundhati Subramaniam or Atticus?

I don’t mean to imply that poetry can be filed away into boxes. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that people do not read poetry any more. In fact, some might think poetry is making a comeback, while others know that it never went anywhere. It never will. So long as we have language, people will get intimate with it and this leads to all kinds of lovely, brutal or even cringeworthy results. I’m here for it. And if you’re still reading this, so are you.

Why is insta-poetry so popular?

One thing, though, is for certain – there are more kinds of readers around us now. Also, more reasons for us to need poems. We interact more than ever before, while somehow communicating less. There is more virtue signalling and photo dumping than conversation. Under such circumstances, even simple words, that may read like affirmations in verse, can give us the ‘permission’ we think we need just to stop for a moment and try to understand ourselves.

We scroll from a recipe by a home cook in Beirut to pictures of a stunning stranger holidaying in Athens. We watch, lust, sigh, crave, drool, empathise, and judge in a span of minutes. We may feel all we can until we are numb, but the journey towards that jaded state is undertaken without conversation or expression. For everything that we do say, there are several words unspoken, and with nowhere to go. This brings me to works that many a critic will argue should not be called poetry at all. Then why is Insta-poetry, social media poetry, so popular?

For this, I would like to go to another image, if you would humour me:

A shark suspended in a tank. Not water, but formaldehyde. With rows of jagged teeth, an underwater predator grins in a state of paused decay. I describe a controversial piece of art called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living created in 1991 by Damien Hirst. Many critics disliked it because the artist was not seen to be involved in the work that displayed a fish in a chemical-filled tank. What I would like to point out is that, while anyone with means could conceivably do such a thing, they simply hadn’t thought to. This is the great equaliser, and someone made the decision to freeze it, as they pictured it, and put it on display. To me, again, this is art because it spoke to me — not the creature itself, but the combination of it all. The idea. The art within one man screaming to the world: ‘come look, this is the shape of my fear’.

Language to look within

There is a need for popular art, no matter what anyone says. There is a growing appetite for social media poetry too when you know its artist has the ability to spot and point at a dorsal fin surfacing through coffee tables or the desk at work. Sometimes, all art has to do is make you stop long enough to consider your relationship with difficult realities and myriad truths around us. The fact that the simplest of stanzas does this for so many people nowadays is more a symptom of our times than a comment on the evolution of an art form.

Perhaps when we are parched, what we want most is plain water — for some, that may be in the form of the brilliant book Plainwater: Essays and Poetry by Anne Carson, and for others, it may be verse on a screen, set in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, structurally unimposing and otherwise, accessible. Safe. Simple language and relatable subjects. Sure, you might say these read like sentences chopped into bits and called poetry. Whatever you choose to call it, this new and popular form has a large and vocal audience and, more importantly, it serves them.

Socially relevant

When we create distance from something, like the use of words for their evocative quality, then yes, social media poetry is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as is expected of an art form. Whatever allows language to bring us back to ourselves, should be poetry enough. It is no different from what Louise Glück said of the simplest things around us: ‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.’ I think, from time to time, many of us would like to refresh this memory. Know ourselves as part of things we no longer think about. If a piece of writing helps us return to something taken away by constant stimuli, to let us savour for a moment the contours of words that we let slip without much thought, it is socially, and culturally relevant. And for those who use harsh words for these writers, I will point out that they are using words nonetheless, that there is now a discussion that was simply not taking place outside of classrooms before.

At the very least, if there are gatekeepers, there will be gateway drugs. It all moves towards a homecoming of sorts. Towards poetry in its more challenging forms. The sort of poems that dare you to interpret them by reaching into the recesses of your own psyche. Some say literary poetry is a luxury. I beg to differ. Where poetry is a necessity for mental well-being, literary poetry calls for more courage than time or money. You never read the same poem twice, and never get an opportunity to discover why a certain combination of carefully placed words may startle you when, individually, there may be nothing new about any of them. Read that poem on a different day, and you become a witness to your own evolution. The poetry within verse lies in the rediscovery of language, and through it, self-discovery, which might scare us, charm us and make us read a line over and over again. Or even slam the book shut. All it has to do is ask you to take a look at words as you use them and ask yourself what they mean to you. A lot of the art is within the interpretation, within the reader.

Therapy and self-discovery

Of course, all this is to say nothing of what the poem can do for the poet. Here, I can only speak for myself.

When I write poetry, I am not entirely certain who the reader will be. It is a form of expression, therapy and self-discovery all at once. It shows me things I have yet to heal from, and in this knowing, lies the road to recuperation. My poems have helped me manage a quieter form of distress that I don’t think anyone is without — in part existential, but also peculiar to unique circumstances. Postpartum anxiety. Rage. Self-doubt. And that almost painful realisation of times long past — the things that show you that nostalgia has teeth. One of the poems that may best describe this process for me is ‘Slow Night’ from ‘Meanwhile’, the writing of which allowed me clarity:

Slow Night

One of those evenings that stick

When your foot sinks so deep into the floor

You pull it out to find your kitten heel

Bearded with copper roots

Cloudbank stains window glass

Curtain cheesecloths grey from silver

And you cough up pomegranate seeds

Winking sharp as garnet

For me, poetry is no magic cure, but the respite it offers comes from the control I get in recognising pain and allowing myself grace. Perhaps that is why I continue to write so that I learn to show myself kindness even when I know there is no escaping the difficult days, or the uncomfortable stillness that creeps in when the guests are gone and the last glass sits empty. When the house is asleep and the bedroom ceiling plays canvas to fears and regrets.

A poem can capture the shark and suspend it in time. It can also be a mere ice cube, translating a season into spangles of light, giving joy a colour. Without it, we may not be able to process what we fear, love and believe in, and this is why I am certain that so long as there are people, there will be a place for poetry. After all, it makes us enchantingly, terrifyingly human.

Note: The headline is adapted from English poet and classical scholar Thomas Gray’s lines on poetry.

The author is a writer and editor. Her poems have appeared in Indian Literature, the Sahitya Akademi bimonthly journal, The Indian Quarterly, and in Gulzar’s anthology A Poem a Day. Her collection of poems ‘Meanwhile’ was recently published by HarperCollins.