Poetry in effect precedes prose. When humanity was on its embryonic course of evolution things were less mechanical and more spontaneous. If a band of sapiens were living in a wee settlement they heavily relied upon poetic rhymes and rhythm to optimally remember and smoothly carry out quite hard and challenging activities.
This simply means poetry makes for a very sagacious place in human history. Without poetry memory of sapiens would have not been where it is today. Humans can think enormously in poetic forms. He can learn a thousand lines within days of poetry but the same does not go for prose.
William Wordsworth the great English poet of romantic age says poetry cannot be composed under duress, ” the clear spring of poetry must flow freely and spontaneously it cannot be made to flow through artificially laid pipes.” In a resplendent poetic mood poetry flows like a flowing river, nevertheless, it is not so that things are easy, there is a huge involvement of craft in poetry which works mechanically.
AR Dad, born in Gwadar, is a doyen of modern Balochi literature.
He writes on the first pages of his first collection of prose and free verse, at the time of dusk, ” poetry is my first love.” Apart from poetry he has written extensively on modern Balochi poetry and its literary calibration. He is an anomalous short story writer who has resuscitated the form of short story in Balochi with a mixture of Kafkaesque and Gogolian pattern of thought. His translations are worthy as well. Truly as Fazal Baloch has written on the pages of daily times he is a versatile modernist. Notwithstanding that, what I think, is that he has a very serious predilection for post structuralism and postmodern way of breaking things and then poking fun at them.
AR dad is a great reader of T.S Eliot and Ezra pound; either of them were modernist who bridged the gap between the spell of john Donne and Words worth. Donne was eminent for his metaphysical poems. His imageries are complex and irregular. He departed from traditional and genteel verses and composed psychological and sexual realism in his works. It becomes hard to find Donne’s personality in his verses as there is an influx of metaphysics throughout his work. I don’t think AR dad is a poet in league with T.S Eliot and Ezra pound but he seems to be wildly influenced by the craft of Eliot and pound inasmuch as their craft sounds daunting and intimidating.
I find a deep personality immersion and concentration in AR Dad’s poetry. He is not impersonal in his poetry. The rush of poetry inundates him categorically. T.S Eliot was a propounder of impersonality in poetry. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry is that the poet, the man, and the artist are two different entities. Eliot writes in his book sacred wood, ” poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
Tale of a night
I wonder
If it’s a shade drenched in mist
Or sand clad in blue
Rests on the grave of my dreams
The moon
Comes sailing in the boat of my lashes
Far away
The ocean tee scrawls the tale of the night
This poem prima facie ascertains that AR dad is more near modern Iranian poets who were led by Nima yooshij. Nima yooshij was the father of modern Iranian poems. He jotted down poems in symbolic terms extracting materials from nature, to wit trees, birds and the likes. Nima knew French and was greatly influenced by the pioneers of symbolic movement in French poetry. Arthur Rimbaud eminent for his surreal and transgressive themes was one of the poets who introduced symbolism to the world of literature. The thread is same with a few alterations. The line mentioned above, ” the boat of my lashes” is a very teetering line with a lot of uncertainty. Initially it sounds to be metaphysical but with a close reading there unleashes some other cardinal dimensions.
The language of Dad’s poetry is uncertain and the idea on account of uncertainty becomes symbolic by default. AR dad always gives credit to idea and content rather than form. Russian formalists are more enamored of form than content. They believe that there is a huge distinction between form and content, and their focus was on the form or structure of a text rather than its content. On the contrary, writers of new American criticism believe that the form and content of the text are closely connected and cannot be analyzed separately. As mentioned above dad has a deep predilection for Eliot and pound therefore his poems are technically on the side of content not form. He writes in unstable and non-metrical rhythm and the form become flimsy and fragile and this greatly affect the foundations of content. Eliot and pound both cared about form as their poems are composed very painstakingly.
Dad says poetry to build a milieu and an ambience of different events as a collage. Noon Meem Rashid putatively the pioneer of free verse in Urdu literature once said in an interview that the nature of free verse is like a film which is completed after taking a plethora of different shots in different angles. The film once completed becomes a single entity. The same goes for Pablo Picasso. Prior Picasso there was a huge tradition of small details and exacting regulations how to paint but Picasso broke this rule and turned a new page in history of painting. Dad composes poetry taking shots and then tries to reconcile them and derive meaning. This way of composing poetry is a modern technique. But Dad many a times fails to reconcile and bring an air of deep relevancy in his free as well as prose verses. His command seems to loosen and then reins are out of his control. This disturbs the essentiality of the poem to the core. And the poem goes towards ambit of cliché. A poem is judged in its entirety and if a single line or an episode disturbs the essentiality then the poem is no more counted as a poem of high calibration. A great part of this caveat is that Dad focuses on content than the form which makes the poem and develops it.
The collapsed night
Night has collapsed
In the eyes of a tree
Very much like the fire
That crumbles on my palms
Very much like the sun
That goes down into my soul!
Dad also seems to be very much influenced by another modern Iranian poet Ahmed shamlou who wrote in the poetic tradition pioneered by Nima yoosij. His poems are full of natural things. He composes poems on dreadful nights where there is sheer silence and a frog crocking. Here in this poems the collapse of night is a very strange phenomenon which is not there is Iranian tradition or at least I have not felt it. This makes him a wee bit separate but yet again this can be felt in poems of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Verlaine in his poems seems to be in a dream playing with symbols. And here Dad is very much in a sensation. What does fire on the palm connote and signify is difficult to say. Here reader has to follow his own intuitive stimuli and derive meaning. Allegorical symptoms cannot be avoided in this poem. Eyes of a tree is a great allegory. Dad has also translated and read Charles Baudelaire who more or less had said poetry in this tradition. When it comes to symbols and metaphors of Dad they are refreshing and employed with relevant literary devices. The sun is a symbol of light and hope but when the sun is too nigh it can burn you in one swoop and here the protagonist of the poem is happy to announce that the sun goes down into his/her soul. In the similar order, one can find deep meanings with rich symbols in Dad’s poetry. He has published two collection of poems so far. But the first book is richer than the following one.
One other way to understand Dad’s poetry is to well understand the relativity and subjectivism of postmodernism. When there is a lot of uncertainty in Dad’s poetry then why should not I understand him in prism of postmodernism. According to Britannica postmodernism is a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. As per the famed post structualist and post-modernist who pioneered the thought deconstruction, Jacque Derrida, meaning of a text is always deferred and never static. So in the realm of poetry meaning is always in a flow and cannot be controlled effortlessly. In the similar fashion, Jean Francois Lyotard famously described postmodernism as the, ” incredulity towards metanarratives.”
In poems with a lot of uncertainty the poem becomes a matter of reader. It is on reader how he understands and takes meaning. Nevertheless, the technicalities of poetry are necessary in a refined piece of poetry. The one thing that is a caveat for me vis-a-vis postmodernism is that it breaks every metanarrative and sits on its funeral with a sardonic posture.
In conclusion it is safe to wind up by saying that dad’s ideas are brimming with symbols and these symbols are quite fresh and anomalous. However, the problem is in the form and the lack of its authenticity.
When form becomes inauthentic then there comes uncertainty and reader stucks in making sense of the form as regards content. A poem should be final. A poem is not supposed to be teetering and shaking in essence. For me there are yet several dimensions to read and then write in AR Dad’s poetry. These were some which aroused by interest.
The writer is a student, based in Turbat. He Tweets at @shahabakram6 and can be reached at [email protected]