I wanted to express my thanks for your poetry and fragments by really engaging the text in an intimate and serious way. So I have begun a “Blogging Neha Viswanathan’s poetry and fragments” series over at Crazyfinger.org blog. Please come on over, and bring your readers along! I will try to write as frequently as my time allows me. But I hope it won’t cause too much intrusion into your poetics (actually it should not cause ANY intrusion, if I do it right).

Regards, Crazyfinger

Crazyfinger: First off, I hope this isn’t your last comment. Frankly speaking, I had no lofty ideas of recollection when I wrote it. But I write in the way that it comes to me – in its essence – devoid of a form. An idea is better expressed without the binding forces of prose in my head.

Sometimes, I think I write poetry because I am too lazy to add the details that make it a work of prose. But that laziness – makes me yank out that idea and put it (very quickly) into words. Before it disappears entirely.

Thank you – your comment made my day.

Anand: Kundera has a significant impact on me to this day. It’s impossible not to lapse into the sheer beauty of his ideas now and then.

“This deeply engraved alphabet.
Does it belong to the one whose
name it is. Or to the hand that
left the impression.”

Verses like these are bound to expand the market for poetry. As “unpoetic,” as that previous phrase sounds, it is true that the audience for art – especially an art that packs such charged simplicity as this – is laity. So, speaking from one of the back pews, I am saying…

For a longest time I didn’t like poetry, because it all came across as compressed ideation to me. I didn’t relate to the hidden coded meanings that pointed only to one another, and not to me. Yes, at a general level I like re-reading a few of them, (Yeats’ “Second Coming,” for example) but it was always a conceptual meaning at a distance. Nothing innermost.

But when I read your poems on this blog (came here through Desipundit), I forgot I didn’t like poetry. I forgot my awareness of the form. And then I forgot to notice that these words are how the world would be, if it were uncompressed, uncoded, laid out from one end to another end, sprinkled with time, shown in full frontal mosaic. As if a quilt made out of patches of our recollections. Not as memories, but as re-collections, the only way longing soaks us. That means, I forgot to notice in a self-conscious way, but felt in a way of belonging. A precious gift to laity, in this fast fragmenting world. For this, I thank you.

Anyone can put address labels to memories and recall them at will. That is not poetry. That is not re-collection. As E.M. Forster said, our inspiration to write should not solely be driven by, “a reminder of early happiness.” I now understand a bit more, not only about what was blocking me to read poetry, but also the undeniable power of verses in lifting our spirits, even while we lament, even while we bitch and moan. And for this too, I thank you. Please keep writing. Don’t change a thing.

Regards,
Crazyfinger