This is actually the seventh in Scarriet’s Great Poems Scarriet Found On Facebook series.
Scarriet’s number 6 was worked up into a longer piece and handed over to Outlook India, who asked me for some critical prose. Kushal Poddar is the editor of Outlook India and Daipayan Nair the brilliant poet featured. After Outlook India publishes, I will present the piece to the Scarriet audience. Outlook India copyright is confined only to the vast populace of India and its regions—and does not include the tiny, poetry-hating, population of the United States.
In defense of my country, there are many good reasons to hate poetry.
There is a secret hatred of poetry by all the great poets in the best tradition, the Platonist one, this hatred the very source of the informed irony which makes the best kind tolerable for this very reason—to those who care genuinely about poetry, and smile at poetry’s wonky, crude, Modernist, poster-board, Frankenstein monster, counterfeits.
I first became aware of the poet Susmit Panda (and his contemplative eagle-eye) through poet and translator Philip Nikolayev, who edited 14 International Younger Poets for Ben Mazer’s Art and Letters press—a book which included many poets (including Susmit Panda) from India; a large nation geographically distant from the U.S. which nevertheless features a great deal of poets—who write poetry in English with humility, daring, and philosophy, aware of Anglo/American Modernism—without really giving a fig about it, as you are forced to in American colleges.
One is just as likely to get a pleasantly drunk Heinrich Heine as a caffeinated Charles Olson.
Can Shelley be far behind?
Here is Susmit Panda’s poem, seen a couple of days ago on Indian Poetry, a Facebook group run by Nikolayev. If I talk about it first, I’ll ruin it for you. You will not enjoy it and it will be an exhibit on a table.
Untitled
I’m thinking what would life be if
Life never was what life is like.
& not to please, & not to grieve
An often-dreamt heart-break.
The Lord is a someone sometime somewhere.
Ah, nothing doing but to trust!
Life nonetheless was scarcely fair
Despite what clawed out of the dust.
Shut up & deal. There is no use
In picking, parrot-like, a card
& flapping it like crucial news,
As if life were lifeward.
Sit back, my soul. If troubled, croon:
There is the door & there the key.
& there the come-home acres green,
The damp piano by the sea.
The first two lines of Susmit Panda’s poem let me know immediately sound and sense were engaging with a concentrated force creating lift-off and separation: “I’m thinking what would life be if/Life never was what life is like” inhabits a mind trained to be a good mind playfully—discipline and play are not the same except to the genius; it is rare for a poem to stop you with the desire to read a part of it over and over again—in this case an accomplished phrase singing as a couplet; the only analogy I can think of is meeting a couple you find so interesting that you long to know the couple—as one person—even if it’s uncomfortable that you are a third person interfering, so charming are they.
A poem’s temporal thrust ought not to be stopped by an interested looping back—like the eye going back and forth over a painting even as we are looking with one look—the painting is read and the poem is seen (!)—impossible, but this is what these first two speculative and sound-rich lines do with their “if” and “like” and “life.”
The rest of the poem has a lot of work to do to match the giddiness of the first two lines. It can’t possibly match them (I still have the first two lines in my head as a song) and it will just have to be a cloth hanging down from the window. But wait—the poem does continue and with all burners burning. This “life” not what life is like involves “not to grieve an often-dreamt heart break.” A description of life—but with a “not”—because we are describing “if” life “never was” the life we know. A further impossibility (the first was stopping a poem which, because a poem is temporal, can’t be stopped) because we can’t know that life—we must posit what we know and add “no.”
(I’m spelling this all out—the genius of the poet does it.)
In an effort not to “spell it out” too much (what every poet fears) an ampersand is nonchalantly introduced rather than the word “and” spelled out.
The lovely, spondaic
“oft-dreamt heart-break”
must have been dallied with? and was probably rejected as sounding too archaic, so we get “often-dreamed,” instead.
(I once read that Keats, though archaic now to us, was deliberately archaic at times, seeking a certain misty effect.)
The second stanza continues the fun—“The Lord is someone sometime somewhere” is another elevating yet playful moment. And lines 6 to 8 are masterful. Nominalism is delightfully nominated in stanza three. The final stanza lands the rocket. Singing saves us. The piano is wet but still plays. What is a poem? The child thinking, the adult playing.
See? I said obvious things and ruined the poem for you.
My apologies.
The best poems are too delicate for praise.
Salem, MA
August 21, 2022