Daily Times

“Everyone is born a poet – a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?” writes American poet William Stafford.

I can now vaguely remember something that I had read some time ago that an Arab poet of yore had said that every Arab child by birth is a poet. One of my teachers begrudged that in his language the quantity of poet is flagrantly proliferating and he considers this a kind of disease. But I don’t. As 35th president of USA John Kennedy writes ” when power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Lately I happened upon a questionable and escapist quote by German philosopher Martin Heidegger, ” being intelligible is suicidal for philosophy.” For me what this quote signify is that poetry is ubiquitous and pervasive. Even philosophers do not escape the net of unintelligibility which is the ambit of poetry – of course this is reminiscent of what YB Yeats said: what can be explained is not poetry. Let’s not forget the simplicity propounded by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Harrari writes that in Israel a teacher prone to hiding behind professional jargons is simply considered jarring. He writes you have to be limpid and clear in terms while making your students understand something ambiguous and or in Heideggerian terms unintelligible no matters about what. I think being intelligible is more suicidal for poetry than for philosophy. Nonetheless, the recurrent unintelligibility in any field is by default vindicating the predominance of poetry.

Similarly, I have happened upon numerous lines by audacious and intrepid thinkers which were written as though by poets of great stature. For example, Jacque Derrida the great post-structualist whose pioneering work on deconstruction has invariably battered the age-old and taken for granted narratives writes in one of his essays – perhaps memoirs of blind – ” tears and not sight is the essence of eyes.” What else is this if not a piece of poetry? Moreover, I wager that this line is in any terms a poetry but written by a philosopher. By that token, the language which poetry entails is intrinsically a language beyond language not language within language. Therefore, it is more often than not averred that the language of poetry is wholly other.

Besides Derrida, another gutsy and stout thinker, linguist and journalist Antonio Gramsci had had a very intellectually-induced poetic flavour. Gramsci was an Italian based communist thinker who in his prison note books composed in spell of his imprisonment until his death rather philosophically analyses the way powerful sections and bourgeoisie of a society through cultural hegemony deploy institutions to dissipate a common sense of docility across society. He captured and then evinced those niceties and subtleties of complex comprised of economics, society and state that informs our subservience which were even elusive to Marx, so to speak.

He was arrested on 8 November 1926 aged 35. Apart from the note books which spanned thousands of pages, Gramsci wrote almost 500 letters to Julka his Russian wife, Delio his son and to his mother. Christian Spurrier writes in The Guardian that his letters, of which there were more than 500, tell the story behind that work. And they are a remarkable account of imprisonment. He was grossly disturbed by the sleazy environment of the prion but he was nonetheless optimistic and full of intellectual vigour and animation. During this period, he wrote to his mother, ” “I felt I was living in a fantastic novel.”

Similarly, he insisted on his wife to incessantly write on him. Gramsci wanted his wife and son to write ” nothing but trivialities.” He asked them to keep him up to date with the current height and weight of his two son. His wife in one of her letters expressed her willingness to him that she would visit him soon in Italy. This auspicious news swaddled Gramsci with glee and happiness so much so that it invoked the most poetic passage Gramsci ever wrote. He wrote this passage when he was shifted to a prison hospital. Gramsci writes: ” “What a terrible feeling I had, after six years of looking at nothing but the same roofs, the same walls, the same grim faces, when I saw from the train that all the time, the vast world had continued to exist, with its meadows, its woods, its ordinary people, its gangs of little boys, certain trees and certain gardens. After so many years of a life swaddled in darkness and shabby miseries, after all this, it would do me good to be able to speak to you as one friend to another. If I say this, you mustn’t feel that some awful responsibility is weighing on you; all I’m thinking of is ordinary conversation, the kind one normally has between friends.”

I was profoundly smitten with this passage. This portrays what the pinnacle of Persian Literature Hafiz wrote in one of his Gazals: Hama Shab umeed waram k Nasim i sohb gahe. Ba payam i Aashna hi zi Nawaz a aashna ra. These lines more or less say that I nevertheless hold out much hope that by the time night subsides the morning breeze will bring a message of friend. What I am arriving at? The point is that no one escapes the realm of poetry. You are a man of taste and this impels you to express your most inner self in poetry – the form, genre and meter does not matter.

Marx in precocity was a poet and even published a collection of poems. Nietzsche, the pioneer of atheistic existentialism, was a poet and wrote poetries. His special knack of writing in aphorisms was a subtle and mysterious manifestation of an inchoate poet residing in his soul.

That being said, when Julka stops writing to Gramsci for months this is what tumbles forth from Gramsci, ” I am so isolated that your letters are like bread for the starving.” He then complains quite plaintively, ” so why do you measure the ration out so cannily?” I am amazed at the veneers of these lines informed by profound sensibilities of a poet.

Moreover, throughout his life Gramsci was overwhelmed and inundated by illness and different kinds of biological disorders. Once he wrote to Tania, sister-in-law of Gramsci who administered to Gramsci and preserved most of what he wrote in prison, ” rarely have I known any but the more brutal sides of life, but I’ve always managed to get through for better or worse.” The fortitude and enigmatic resilience of Gramsci is inexplicable. When he was unrelentingly beleaguered by TB, recurrent flu and a disease of his spine he never acceded to depression and wrote with a strange temerity to his mother in 1931, ” “It’s true that I can’t dance on one leg,” in the following line he is flabbergasted by his own dauntlessess, “but sometimes I’m amazed at myself in my own powers of resistance.”

In one of his most powerfully unfathomable essays Derrida who shies away from definitions affords us an impressive definition of poetry, ” it is a text that requires to be “learnt by heart.” All those lines and text susceptible to be learnt by heart are more or less poetries in generous terms. And the aforementioned lines either Deridda’s or Gramsci’s are easy to learn by heart and listen to friends like lines of Shakespeare’s plays – to be or not to be and many more. These all are my reckonings and conjectures. Gramsci was a Marxist philosopher, journalist and politician and Derrida a French philosopher best known for deconstruction.

But before leaving – What do you reckon about these lines? Are these lines excerpted from a prose poem by Derrida or excerpted from one of his essays? ”But psychoanalysis has taught that the dead-a dead parent, for example-can be more alive for us, more powerful, scarier, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.” – Jacques Derrida

The writer is a student, based in Turbat. He Tweets at @shahabakram6 and can be reached at shahabakram0852@gmail.com