“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” wrote T.S. Eliot, the renowned modern poet and critic. This means that the task of poetry, unlike what is often portrayed in pop culture, is to express cerebral verses that are innovative, insightful, and mind-boggling; rather than merely blurting out visceral emotions, feelings, and moods.
Frankly, it is frustrating even to make this distinction when in the South Asian tradition, we had genius minds like Mir and Ghalib. Yet, contrary to the foregoing, we see in mushairas, in the case of Urdu, and on social media and magazines, in the case of English, emotionally charged poetry, bereft of the craft's virtuosity. This personality-driven sentimentality works in opposition to the very function of poems -- an intellectual pursuit meant to arouse the layers of consciousness and, by extension, cater to the aesthetic sensibility.
This exercise, unlike prose, is compressed and so relies on different poetic devices to convey and create meanings. While the tools might be limited, their application is subjective, with every poet transposing their own style for the readers to relish and resonate with. I recently read Afshan Shafi’s Quiet Women, published by Newline in 2019.
She is one of the editors of Pakistan’s Premier literary magazine, The Aleph Review, and inherited her love for poetry and books in general from the library of her maternal grandmother Farhat Attiqur Rehman, where she discovered Tennyson and Byron, which helped her to taste the poetic world and develop a sensibility for it. She, right at the start of the book, mentioned the painter and sculptor Joan Miro, who said: “I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.” By mentioning this, Afshan revealed her own methodology of versifying. She does the same, just the direction is opposite: in every poem of her book, she paints but with words – that is, her poems, like a painting, are made up of variegated colours (diction), compositions (form and configuration), concepts (theme), and techniques (expression).
It is called ekphrastic poetry, where a poet describes a work of art through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture; the poet may amplify and expand its meaning, trying to cr…
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