Since no one cares about great poetry anymore, or cares to catalog it today—finding the task impossible, like a drunk person unable to keep up with their thoughts—might there be great poems currently written today, right under our noses, if we just know where to look?
For the truly fugitive experience, we are throwing our nets from the electronic shore.
Instagram (populist), Twitter (ambitious), and YouTube (theatrical) are good places for poetry, but we prefer Facebook for sincerity and value.
As an experiment, Scarriet—the world’s top poetry website—rolls out a new feature: Great Poems Scarriet Found On Facebook. GPSFOF.
The first poem we have selected in the series is by Aakriti:
POET
I’m not a poet.
Who is a poet?
What is a poet anyway?
Does poetry come from a poet
or does a poet arise from poetry?
I’m not a poet.
I don’t even know what that means.
All I know is that the odour of blood is romance
and the weeds are lemon glass, lucid so—
I like to forget to breathe.
All I know is that I barely know
but what I know I tell.
I would tell it in silence
but words tend to arrive and shuffle as strings in the body.
They tend to arrive
and I let them.
They wish to be
and so it is.
But I’m not a poet;
all I know is just some things.
‘Things,’ what are they?
Who made all these nouns —The Mad Hatter?
Some things are but what I know.
Some things like not knowing what is poetry.
It merges so fast, it is so thick and thin.
It blurs against everything.
I cannot distinguish it anymore;
from the table to the lamp — a single beat.
Who is a poet?
I’m not.
©️ Aakriti Kuntal
The uncertain is embraced—what is a poet? what is it possible to know?—within a framework of knowing (“Who is a poet? I’m not”) and poets who don’t understand how important these are: to know and not know, and to be alive to what the reader is able to know, not know, and wants to know, so that the poet’s visible efforts and the reader’s (hidden) expectations ironically interact, will probably never be a poet, much less a great one.
Aakriti’s poem appeared in 2019, but I saw it last month, shared as a “memory,” those charming notifications Facebook provides.
The re-posted poem received 59 loves/likes and a number of comments, including:
Wonderful Aakriti! Poetically codifying intuition is a feat. I like how you examine the ontological framework of the self, its habitability, its epistemic limits. —Shabnam Merchandani
She also included commentary on what it was like to encounter the memory, adding to the contemplative and charming experience:
Revisiting an old poem is much like visiting a fragment of the self. For most part, one feels like one is meeting a past self, but it is not entirely true. One is most likely reliving, in parts, a residue that has extended or morphed into the future (the now present) or perhaps, remains precisely the same today as well.
One is pulled back into the lurch of the moment of creation. The moment of creation is a memory; it is a memory of an entire space where a science experiment was conducted, the self being the key component. One remembers oneself writing the poem, and at other times one has no memory of writing the poem at all.
In the latter case, one meets an old poem— and one is suddenly met by the nature of the blatant disappearance of the self for one feels one has absolutely no memory of having written it and in it, one is both mesmerised and terrified by the letters of validity of one’s own existence.
©️ Aakriti Kuntal
Scarriet is proud to begin its Great Poems Scarriet Found On Facebook series with Aakriti’s “Poet.”
“I like to forget to breathe.”
Scarriet Editors
Salem, MA, USA
July 17 2022