Dear all,

How exciting to have written a letter every week for the last three months. If I keep going like this, I’ll hit 100 in just 88 more!

(This is my idea of a joke).

My first brush with poetry was as a young child, when my grandfather engaged a teacher who made me memorise Telugu poetry. I learnt and then over the years forgot these poems, which were composed by Bammera Pothana in the 15th century. I re-learnt them as an adolescent in school.

Telugu metrical poetry is classified in a way that I would call Linnean if it didn’t predate Linneaus by hundreds if not thousands of years. ఛందస్సు (chandassu) specifies a set of grammatical and metrical classes, based on line length, the use of light and heavy syllables, and the combinations thereof.

Poetry in this tradition often lacks rhyme. It is far more concerned with meter and alliteration. A famous poem by Pothana describes a fight between the elephant king Gajendra and a crocodile he angers by bathing in its lake. Two words for crocodile and elephant - మకరి (makari) and కరి (kari) respectively - sound nearly the same, and the poem repeatedly uses the sounds in those words, combining and re-combining them.

There is something so satisfying about reading it out loud, difficult though it is. As if you are exercising your mind and your tongue at once. As if you are fighting the poem in the same way that the crocodile fights the elephant.

Why is a poem beautiful? It cannot just be that it is technically proficient. There are many bad sonnets that are in perfect iambic pentameter. I have written some of them. Nor can it be that the simple joy of writing without reference to rhyme or meter is enough. I’ve written some of those, too.

Nor is it that Telugu poetry is confined to such specific process. The greatest poet of the 20th century, Sri Sri, wrote verse of impossible power and grace, breaking convention whenever he decided to. The title of this letter comes from the ending of one of his most famous poems, in which he says:

ప్రపంచం ఒక పద్మవ్యూహం,
కవిత్వం ఒక తీరని దాహం

(The world an inescapable maze
Poetry an unquenchable thirst)

Often when I read poetry, I am forced to ask myself - do I actually feel anything? Or do I think I must? What is a feeling, and how is it elicited by the written word? What is my feeling, and where does it come from? I can rarely tell.

Sometimes it’s easy. When I read Ogden Nash, I can see both feeling and craft so easily. Consider a section from the first stanza of The Adventures of Isabel, in which she’s being attacked by a bear:

Isabel, Isabel didn’t worry.
Isabel didn’t scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up, Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.

Perhaps what strikes me most about this is the choice to repeat the name - Isabel, Isabel. It works so well. How did he decide to do this? That this would be the thing that makes it work? Did it just strike him? Did he worry at it until he realised? I’ll never know.

And it’s so funny! She ate the bear up! The whole poem is like this - Isabel meets a witch, a giant, even a doctor. Each time we get the refrain. Isabel, Isabel didn’t worry. Isabel didn’t scream or scurry.

I love formalist poetry because it helps me identify the craft. Noticing when Pothana uses alliteration and meter helps me to understand why he’s writing in the way he is. But in a way it’s because I find it easy to love what I understand. It’s much harder to love poetry that I don’t understand, though that happens, too.

William Carlos Williams has become such a meme because of his use of stark, spare language. I cannot tell you why his poetry works for me. What can I say, for example, about Between Walls? It’s hardly a few lines. Yet I read it for the first time and thought - wow.

When I was quite a young child, my grandfather wanted to instill in me that same wonder. When I re-learnt Pothana as an adolescent, it was not really wonder that I was seeing. I see it now, more than 15 years later.

Next week, some thoughts about the word ‘designer’.

Cheers,

mvs