Poetry has a Human Tongue

Once, I was asked what the most pivotal aspect of my poetry is and the answer was a performative jumble of false ingredients, embellished to achieve a semblance of what I thought the query desired. Now however, in hindsight, asked anew, the response would be simpler, easier, resonating not just with the importance it demanded but simultaneously elucidating the centrality of the void it hoped to fill, the human one, the present and the particular and all that lay smoldering in-between.

I often thought that to find a thing was to grasp its form. But it must mean more than that. There has to be a stripping of the commodified prescription down to the bone, a visceral unveiling of the personal, private manifestation of things, such that our encounters, when they occur, are filled with a knowing clairvoyance that forces open the closeted apprehension of individual and communal fears. This is, perhaps, the form our impressions must take when we communicate our distemper, endorsing the assemblage of conditions that should be prioritized over and above all others.

Here, there is a bashful sight, where shame comes to us unshackled and sits by the fireside of our ineptitudes, reproachful of the inhibitions we have deliberately donned, brocading them on our march toward (in)humanity and on the many courses we have abandoned along the way. As such, shame is a companion, a valance articulating in the extremity of its expression the tone our bodies demand of us when we are to blame, with all the villainous contempt deserving of that participation.

One might ask then if that is it, if the sum of our inspiration, or my inspiration at least, is the grotesqueness the human condition provides? If, without it, we would lack the perspective required to do, through the medium of art, a pre-emptive forward-thinking prognosis of the problems that litter our world or give the push necessary to jolt awake the slumbering present to the glittering potential of the days ahead. Unfortunately, we cannot. . . or I certainly cannot tell. Our interactions have always existed side by side with the capricious expletives our existences command and we have looked to them with contempt or content, for where contrition serves the first, satisfaction finds the latter.

Alas, the possibilities for a Utopia, of terms, thrive on the desire to excel at life or at living and to become not just one with the permanent, but permanent in ourselves. Fortunately for us, there is nothing short-sighted about ambition. It has given us the finest linen to dress our art, to hone it and, from within its walls, we have acquired new eyes akin to the kindness a second sight provides, to learn from kings and dynasties and conquests, the numerous expeditions and the intrigues at court and to understand too that ambition has an exhaustive pattern that applies itself in time. Wasn’t it Baldwin who asked why human relief had to be achieved through so much desperation, following a fashion so “unutterably old and unspeakably new”?

No, there is no scheme to it, no reason behind the various shapes or forms it takes because it is influenced most potently by the fragile corpus of feeling and thought, where action is a fleeting hum of gestures teetering on the fringes.

To draw inspiration from anything else is to force upon one’s self a mechanical rapture so hollow, so empty in its communion with the true that there is no redemption to be expected or experienced from it. Poetry, like art, is a window to the fallible entreaties of a fallible universe barring which, all its energies would excoriate in a struggle for an application, for where there exists the ideal order, art would be a needless appendage gasping for air.

Art, after all, “is born out of an ill-designed world.”