What is the Purpose of Twilight?

On reading and writing poems

In the movie Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!¹, teenaged Lucky and his friends are beating up an 'English medium type' boy who had approached a girl he was not supposed to. Between his pleadings to be let go, the boy confesses that all he did was to give that girl a greeting card. Lucky then asks him in all earnestness, 'Greeting card mein likha kya hota hai jo ladkiyan itni khush ho jaati hai?' (what is printed in greeting cards that impresses the girls so much?).

While still getting slapped all round, the boy blurts out, 'East or west, my love is the best'. 

**

A childhood friend of mine remarked at a gathering, 'I don't understand why we had to read poems in school'. He is a successful entrepreneur and has recently started his second business venture. He wondered aloud if poetry has contributed to his life in anyway at all!

When they were organising stuff on Earth, it would have been an efficient system to fix a time for sunrise to say, 6 am and sunset to say, 6 pm. Twelve hours each for working and resting would have been orderly. Seasons should be occurring at specific months be set to a moderate level. Weather forecasts would then be accurate and we would not be fussing over what to wear for the day. 

Evenings are such utter nonsense! What is it even? Day time or night time? To make matters worse, people want to step out, meet up, or simply sit and stare outside their windows. What a waste of precious minutes!

During an episode on the podcast ‘On Being with Krista Tippett’², poet Jane Hirshfield shares her views on why some of us oddballs are into reading and writing poetry -

I think reading poems well makes a person not only wiser, but smarter, because the words are being used with such precision. They’re like a well-tuned racing car where every tiny jutting of the material in it is working towards the end of an understanding both what is being said and what is just outside the words. And so if you read a poem with your whole being and your whole attention, which is the only way to read poems, really, you will hear all the unsaid in the white space. It’s one reason why poems on the page look strange, why they don’t fill the page. They don’t fill the page because in that silence around the words, in the white space around the words, is the wisdom. And the completion of the poem is in the person reading it. Whether that’s the writer or the reader, someone else, a poem is nothing unless it is completed with all of the ingredients of the human heart and soul and spirit and language knowledge and the history that is embedded in every word — in its etymological roots, in its usages, in its tone, whether it’s colloquial and jolly or formal or, you know, skeptical.

All of that, when we engage in this way of language that we call poetry, I am able to think thoughts I am unable to have any other way, which is the only reason that I write a poem. I write a poem because I am unable to answer whatever the fracture or bewilderment or question or provocation or even radiance has come to me that I feel I do not completely yet understand or inhabit. And if I cannot figure it out, if I can’t feel — if something does not feel sufficient, if my understanding or my saturation of experience does not yet feel complete and it’s something that matters, that will send me to poetry.

On Being with Krista Tippett has episodes with Mary Oliver³, Naomi Shihab-Nye⁴, Ada Limon⁵ and other such contemporary greats that are totally worth your time!

**

I have been writing poems since I was in primary school. No one asked me to do it. Based on whatever I had read in the textbooks, I just thought that I could do it too.

It was play.

Even now, I approach writing a poem with that kind of eagerness. And I find the entire process to be hugely fulfilling.

Sometimes it’s the joy of word play, other times, it is the satisfaction of finding a wow metaphor, or some other times, it is the relief of putting on paper that which cannot be said.

There are times when I am in the middle of writing an essay and I start to think, ‘Oh wait, this could have been a poem’.

Sometimes, writing that essay feels like I am overexplaining myself. Whereas, I could have expressed myself in the few lines of a poem and got done with my day’s work.

The advantage of not having studied poetry formally is that I don’t feel the need to conform to a style; And the disadvantage is that I am not sure what I am doing is considered poetry.

Inspired by Raju Tai’s call to ‘reclaim it (poetry) despite all the myths in social and educational spaces’⁶, here is a poem from me -  

This is not a typical poem. I am usually mindful of maintaining some kind of symmetry. But I realized that editing this in any way will rob it of its voice.

The short lines and the line breaks help in pacing the narration which could not have been possible in an essay.

Only a poem provides the space to record a moment without having to offer a meaning. The details don’t seem necessary.  

**

Poetry is a medium of expression. Like essays, songs and films.   

But it also stands apart from all of them.

When we like a poem, we read it again and again. We share it with friends and it pleases us so much when they like it too. We pin it on a board, we memorize it. We quote our favourite lines now and then. It becomes a part of us.

There are poems that make us feel seen, poems that show us a way, and poems that save us. 

I wish poetry happens to all of you.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oye_Lucky!_Lucky_Oye!

2. https://onbeing.org/programs/jane-hirshfield-the-fullness-of-things/

3. https://onbeing.org/programs/mary-oliver-i-got-saved-by-the-beauty-of-the-world/

4. https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-before-you-know-kindness-as-the-deepest-thing-inside/

5. https://onbeing.org/programs/ada-limon-to-be-made-whole/

6. https://rajutai.substack.com/p/poetry-in-pyjamas-creative-ways-to