For better and for verse

Since prose was not getting me very far, friends advised me to switch to Plan B — poetry. I was hesitant, wondering if I could express myself as eloquently. My friends — dear souls whom I’ve known for years — assured me there was nothing to worry since I would only be moving from bad to verse. Helpfully, encouragement came my way with the realisation that once I began flying high on the wings of the iambic pentameter or maybe even the trochaic tetrameter, I could bid a grateful goodbye to the birth pangs involved in conjuring an insightful essay or intriguing short story.

Also, it’s a fact universally acknowledged that poets walk a metre above mean sea level and stand higher up the pecking order than the garden variety of writers.

I already had under my belt what I believed were impressive professional credentials. In my salad days, I used to be a sought-after cocktail-party balladeer thanks to my ability to deftly pair words with a common end-rhyme. The way I saw it then, it was only rhyme that helped mankind distinguish a poem from, say, a menu card or shopping list. So I promptly set off on a spree, rhyming ‘beginning’ with ‘tingling’, ‘strife’ with ‘wife’, and ‘distant star’ with ‘idli sambar’. Too late, I was told by experts that rhymes were out of fashion — in fact, they had gone out with bell-bottoms. As per current thought, it’s a crime to rhyme.

The next stumbling block was meter — that perplexing pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables — which is the platform on which poetry runs. I did my best to put iambic pentameter and all the rest of it into play. Experts chipped in to advise that good poetry is “read” by the ears and that saying the lines out loud would help with the meter. I did as bid only to find myself out of depth and also out of breath. Despite strenuous efforts, the best I could muster was a weak imitation of Descartes — “I think, therefore iamb.”

Next, the million-dollar question: what could I wax lyrical about? Daffodils, nightingales, and Grecian urns have all been taken. What was left was the depressing stuff that makes today’s newspaper headlines. A clear case, you could say, of poetic injustice. But there’s no court of appeal, not even a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Poets.

I recalled a French poet saying the first line in every poem is given by God, and the poet supplies the rest. Well, at the risk of blasphemy, I must say that He … well, we’ll let that pass. Obviously, He has more pressing things to attend to than the writer’s block of a fledgling poet. No wonder, Dylan Thomas called poetry his “sullen art”.

Desperate situations call for desperate measures. I began scouting for poetry clubs across the land. These groups comprise poets who, believing in safety in numbers, congregate at exotic places far from the madding crowd. Here, they spend fruitful hours listening to and learning from each other’s poems. I had hoped that I too would gain inspiration through osmosis. Alas! My muse had blown a fuse.

There I lay, like Eliot’s evening sky, like a patient etherised upon a table. There I would have lain had my old friends not returned making conciliatory noises, offering sometimes sympathy and sometimes tea. They told me even established poets experience self-doubt of Hamletian proportions. Who was I to expect better luck? Also, though my venture into verse had met with a lack of success as spectacular as the Charge of the Light Brigade, the enterprise had not entirely been in vain. It was character-building, and I had learnt something of value: poetry is not for those weak in art or faint of heart.

So, to all practising poets, young and old, my hats off!

jairam.menon@gmail.com