Today, one of my old students in a casual conversation around poetry over breakfast, said, “I learned poetry from you.” While I think he was being generous in saying that (I didn’t really teach poetry to him, and I will tell you why I feel so soon), the conversation opened up my own reflections on how poems have brought life to my ways of being.
While I don't remember some of the earliest poems I was introduced to, I do remember that Maa and I had a poetic relationship. She would sing some lovely poems to me as a kid when and if she would get a chance. This particular poem about an old man was my favorite and I would ask her to recite it for me again and again.
When I went to the English Boarding school, my first year in grade 6 was a mess. Not that the rest of the six years were glorious, but then they were better indeed. And why? I found poetry. Just like that, in one of the school events, our house captain, Nigam Bhaisaheb, asked our class to volunteer for a poetry recitation. Remember, I was still in the messy-first-year spell. Hell, I was not going to volunteer myself for an event that required me to go in front of over 800 students and say something for 4-5 minutes! But then, he asked us to read a piece of the poem for that year’s competition, Makhan Lal Chaturvedi’s Prem. I still remember that feeling of wanting to run away from that room. But then in an army school, you don't run away from your seniors unless you are ordered to. So I stayed. After all of us were done reading the piece aloud, he chose me and my friend Saurabh to do this. I so badly wanted to say no. But then, in an army school, you don't really say no to your seniors unless you are ordered to. But here, Nigam Bhaisaheb, instead of an order, gave a really motivational speech, which I of course don't remember. But I remember the feeling. For it had made me feel seen. Made me feel that someone believes that I can do something and can do it well. So I did.
That was my first time, in front of an audience, reciting hai kaun sa wah tatv jo saare bhuvan me vyapt hai… and that was my formal introduction to poetry. (Sidenote: I won that competition with a historical score, which was more than Nigam bhaisaheb’s own score several years ago when he was in my grade. And his was the highest! So basically I had created a new record. Not that I am a scorekeeper now, but it mattered to me then.) I am sure he doesn't even know what impact his speech and his identification of me for that poetry recitation had on my life. And thus began my love story with poems.
I started reading a lot of poems. I realised there was something that was coming to me. It felt like a poem to me. My words would have their own rhythm that I could feel. But then when I read what my syllabus was, it would not really fit the format. And then, Geeta mam, my Hindi teacher, taught us the chhandmukt Kavita (Free verse / Vers libre). Boy, I can’t even tell you how happy I was!
My first poem was a chhand-mukt kavita. I called it, Wo jala sulga chand, That burnt moon (Pretty dark for a seventh-grader, isn't it? But then, why not?) As I continued my academic journey, I read many poems as part of my syllabus, and I am so grateful for all my language teachers - Geeta mam, Anju mam, Tripathi sir, Michael sir, and Vikram sir ( Vikram sir actually taught us all the tenses in poems he had created out of sentence examples - I can never forget his - I am going to Bombay…. You are going to Bombay… damn! The way we laughed then, but he continued to sing and sing, class after class!)
I think we don’t learn poetry. A poem is with us, all of us. It needs that fertile space to sprout through us. And so I say, my student - him or any other - didn't really learn poetry from me. They had it in them. I may have possibly contributed my bit to the fertility of their environment for poetry to sprout out, the way Maa, Nigam bhaisaheb, Geeta mam, and all my other teachers did. And so did all the poets whose poems I had the opportunity to read, celebrate, engage and reflect with - with or without chhands!
My red book of poems became that place where I could go and let my poems flow. Ok, to be more correct, my rough notebooks/loose papers were the places where the poems actually flew first, and then when they shaped up in the ways I found closest to what I wanted to say, that's when they would to the red book.
Later, in my graduation days, I found a poet friend, Tulika ( I mostly called her Tuli or Donald, but that’s another story). Tuli and I would write our poems, me in Hindi and She in English, and would read them to each other. We were our only audience and the only critics. We would give each other feedback, and celebrate what we could bring out from within us. We continued this practice even after we graduated from college for a long time until life took its own course. And then we returned to it, once in a while when the poem needed its audience.
When I became a teacher and needed to create a space for my students to be able to bring their stories out, poetry found its way to my classroom. While it was indeed lovely to bring the joy of poems to my students, it only then occurred to me how most of the poems that I had access to in my childhood were from certain dominant groups. For example, I read so much from Hindu upper-caste poets but rarely the poetry that came from Dalit writers. I rarely read romantic love poems that spoke about diverse ways of loving. My students came from such diverse life experiences that the poems I read would no longer serve them. Rafeef Ziadah’s We Teach Life, Sir, Pash’s Sabse Khatarnak, Steven Boyle’s I Hit Send, and Allen Ginsberg’s, Footnote to Howl, and Salma - the poet’s biography became part of the initial curriculum. In later years, my older students’ poems, such as Shahid's Land, Jeesu's Education and Raksha's poem for her grandparents came into the curriculum for my new students.
In the last eight years with so many students from Akanksha, American School of Bombay, and Apni Shala, my life has been enriched with what all these amazing young people have written about. They have written about land, gender, violence, and love and loss. They have written about their joys, their sorrows, their anger, and celebrations. They have written about why they hate me or love their mom. They have written, recited, and cried and laughed in their sharings. And all of this has happened because they chose to see (in some cases coaxed, and yet in others forced into ;) ) their poems within them, and bring them out. In the rawness of umpteen number of torn pages thrown in the dustbin, and still getting back to it. And when done, sharing it, a part of their beings, with people out there.
And no, I don't think they learned poetry from me. We indeed worked together on many of their poems. But they found the poems they wanted to be written - rather those that needed to be written out of them - and brought them to our workshops for us to be able to work together. and that's how we all became poets.
So, hey! Let your poems flow. Start with what you have. A word, a phrase, an image. Whatever. Begin, and come back to it when it comes back to you. But begin.
#WorldPoetryDay #Poetry #Poems
