Joie Bose belongs to the Calcutta New Wave of English-speaking poetry.
Romanticism, which began with Dante’s Beatrice-devotion in Florence in the 13th century—and peaked with Shelley six centuries later, is poetry which belongs to passion, not study, but is no less artful or beautiful because of that.
Some would say it is more artful and beautiful because of that.
The irritable Dante—Edgar Poe said all poets, as a rule, were “irritable”—called hazy, obscure poets foolish, and credited the “love letter” as the clarifying, accessible impetus for the new poetry of the 13th century.
The lover gives poetry to the beloved; poetry can be cooked up for other reasons, but the simple desire to impress and please in love, carries with it all that is necessary to make poetry sublime.
Love forces us to be philosophers—and poets. The poet emerges from this universal experience. Most of what emerges is, of course, not worth reading.
But forced to be a philosopher is always better than choosing to be one.
If love makes us poets, it does not follow that love makes us good poets—love doesn’t care about poetry. Love would rather we do not write poetry—and love, instead.
Writing begins in sorrow and absence. And nothing creates sorrow and absence like love’s tribulations. So this, in a broad sense, recommends love as an engine of writing.
True, love kills poets as quickly as it creates them, for the very thing that fires up the lover burns the lover to a crisp.
It follows, then, that most love poetry will be bad, since the lover is writing—when they should be loving. The lover is writing, and that usually means writing a complaint—instead of kissing; writing—instead of applying scents and sighing.
When we find then, a poet, who has survived the fires of love, and is producing more fires of love in poetry, this is worth celebrating.
Alexander Pope: “The proper study of mankind is man.” If this is true, there is nothing like love to make us ponder another.
It is not just that love is a good subject for poetry—it is the best subject for poetry—and love is not just the best subject to write about; more importantly, it is the best condition to be in, to write poetry. And now we see how the magic happens: the subject and the condition mutually feed each other.
Joie Bose has not been trained, like American poets these days, in a writing program. She writes from the heart. She is writing a sequence of poems called “Love,” which has just reached 100 poems.
Here is her line selected for the tournament:
Isn’t that love even if it answers not to the heart or heat but to the moment, to make it complete?
This is a beautiful, moving, finely crafted line of poetry, as good as any that’s been written, and anyone who doesn’t think so has either had too little experience with poetry in English—or perhaps too much, in a fussy writing program.
The question Bose asks belongs to the Socratic philosopher—and the lover:
“Isn’t that love?”
The devotee of love seeks answers, and “love,” properly worshiped, hovers over this whole line.
“Love” in the line quickly transforms into “it,” and we hear the ‘t’ sound—“love” is distinguished in this line as the only important word which does not have a ‘t’ sound, for there follows “not,” “heart,” “heat,” “moment,” and “complete.” The disquisition, transcending the two things we mostly associate with love, “heart” and “heat,” wings its way to “completion,”and ends in the most tragic, fragile thing imaginable: the “moment.”
And yet, if love can be complete in the “moment,” does this not recommend it? Or not? It is the sort of philosophy which feeds, and is fed by, love.
Michael Tyrell survived a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa to produce this wonderful line:
how much beauty comes from never saying no?
Poets, after 100 years of Modernism (dry) and Post-Modernism (jokey) find they want to talk about love and beauty again.
With this line, Tyrell does have a chance against Bose.
A beautiful battle for the ages.
