STARPLINE:
Poetic creativity comes with implicit expectations of reverence for the ambiguous and the abstract from the reader
It's strange how you read what you do. My appetite to read and my choice has been shaped by a series of coincidences ” interesting blurbs, names referred persistently by disconnected sources and by clicking on links and journeying through labyrinth of Internet search. On one such convoluted online reading spree, I found Allen Ginsberg. I had read Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' and while surfing for more beat writers, I found Ken Casey, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg.
After a long time, in Ginsberg I found a poet I quite enjoyed. Ginsberg's poems can get racy and raunchy, serious and hilarious. He uses brevity with great skill and his thoughts are explained in short and crisp sentences. There is conflict and irony. Ginsberg has a single-minded connect with his words and imagery ” he seems to obliterate everything else. There's no room for explanation, he doesn't bother to cut out ambiguity and his thoughts flow unrefined and are not manipulated.
Here's an except from 'A Supermarket' in California:
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I tried to see how many figures of speech I can find in the above excerpt. "In my hungry fatigue" has metaphor and personification in the sense that fatigue has been given the animate quality of being hungry. There is quirky, visual hyperbole in the line "Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands" while "Wives in the avocados, Babies in the tomatos" seems a great use of assonance due to the rhyming sound of the words, avocadoes and tomatoes. He uses apostrophe to directly talk to poets Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman. The line "Who killed the pork chops" is my favourite. It uses synecdoche by substituting pork chops for pigs as well as personification by the idea that pork chops can be killed.
The site www.poemhunter.com has 48 poems by Ginsberg besides a delightful collection of other poets. Other nice poem by Ginsberg is 'September on Jessore Road' named after the road near Kolkata airport that stretches all the way to Bangladesh. Here is an excerpt from the poem: Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain? Where can these families go in the rain? Jessore Road's children close their big eyes Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?
The site www.kalliope.org also has a good collection of poems. A short, quirky poem on the site by D H Lawrence goes like this: Good husbands make unhappy wives so do bad husbands, just as often; but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.
Most poems make bold, sweeping statements that take readers to fascinating journeys of introspection and second-guessing. I like this non-committal, non-conformist streak. Poets can speak their minds without bothering to leave trails of explanations and footnotes. Poetic freedom of creativity also comes with implicit expectations of reverence for the ambiguous and the abstract from the reader. Such a free flow of expression and enjoyment is rarely accorded to other literary media.
A reason why poets may evade the 'scanner' is perhaps because no one (or certainly not many) takes a poet quite seriously. Poems are passed off as art, and given the belief that 'all art is useless' the controlling mechanism doesn't quite bother to eye it with such zeal as they try to keep a tab on journalists. The Gutenberg Project is an excellent online resource and www.gutenberg.net.au has a collection of 50 essays by George Orwell. In support of this argument I made in favour of greater creative liberty that poets get, I quote from George Orwell's 1946 essay, The Prevention of Literature: "..It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possible find it breathable .. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet, than for a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other 'practical' men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying .. The thought contained in a poem is simple, and is no more the primary purpose of a picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and association, as painting is an arrangement of brush marks .. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies: and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice ..
The destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic and the poet, in that order.."
