As the Poems Go....

I discovered poetry quite by accident. I'm not talking about the four-line rhymes I fascinated my teachers with in kindergarten, or the angst-ridden scribbles (that scanned far too well!) of my preteens, but poetry. Flowing words, and flowing lines, and emotions that jump out at you from a well-placed comma, a potent full stop. I stopped clinging to my ababa-suddenly-abcb metre and started reading Hardy. And then Shelley and Keats, even the mad, bad and dangerous to know Byron and opium-eating Coleridge, from dust-covered, silverfish inhabited volumes I took, as covertly as possible, off my grandparents' bookshelves. I never memorized stanzas, or knew what they were on about, but it was like nothing I'd ever read before.

Sixth standard came after that, and these books, that for weeks I'd placed under my bed with the most profuse care, were put back unto shelves. I forgot about poetry, and spearheaded myself into gang wars and class politics, and the culture that came with it; "Friends", Nancy Drew mysteries and MSN Messenger. The closest I came to poetry was the occasional internet search that yielded a mixture of Bob Dylan and Coldplay lyrics. And then, our English teacher Mr.Old made us write our first analytical essay. On a poem.

So maybe it was "The Charge of the Light Brigade", a ballad I found immediately irritating and familiar from my grandfather's lively recitations of "Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them", but I enjoyed the exercise, the frenzied activity of discovering alliteration and consonance that swept our class, even so. And suddenly, I felt like writing my own again. Poems, I mean, But proper ones, this time, with serious subjects and clever linguistic features I told myself. A friend of mine was practising her catwalk, and another emmersed himself in history magazines and British politics, making it clear his ambition lay somewhere in the Houses of Parliament, while I decided that T.S. Eliot was God.

That opinion has been somewhat revised since then. But I'm still a fervent admirer, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is still one of my favourite poems. I don't know how many times I've stared, fascinated at the lines "When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table" and thrown mental tantrums because the "deeper meaning" of the constantly appearing women who talk of Michelangelo evades me....

Now that I've got my own books, thick anthologies of all sorts of poems with coffee stains and somebody else's notes down the margins because I buy them second-hand at Blossom's House of Used Books, or from a three-metre high stack for Rs. 50 a piece on a Calcutta road, I can properly call myself a poetaholic. Or at the very least, a poemaholic. I have struggled for some time now to prove this to myself, with nearly a hundred of my own poetic attempts to show for it, and I'm struggling now to explain it to a wider and less forgiving public. I remember someone once telling me about his own love for poetry. He said, and I quote,

"I love poetry, I love reading it, writing it, thinking about it, listening to it. I think it's the most addictive, maddening and exciting branch of literature. It's the one type everyone can attempt, but only a few can master..."

I couldn't hope to say it any better. From that giddy lightheadedness and rueful envy I feel when I read something by Margaret Atwood to the utter dispair that Emily Bronte can pull me into, those lines express exactly what poetry has, over the years, become to me.

-Mallika Leuzinger