I find people finding pleasure in this. I do not.
I have been studying something I keep safe distance from generally. Poetry. English poetry, to be specific. Indian English poetry, to be even more specific. I have been studying it for my M.A. exam. As I am going through my course material (prepared by the JNU professor and littérateur in his own right, Makarand Paranjape), I am pausing, thinking, wondering. Time and again he stresses on how open poetry is to meanings and interpretations. When he goes a little further along the making-sense path, he inserts the “at least to me” qualifier. He openly admits that many of the famed, esteemed, popular even, poets can often be very vague. You see the symbolism but try as you might it can prove hard to find a coherent meaning behind it. Connecting lines, finding out how one idea progresses into another from stanza to stanza and how they relate in the process can be quite a task too, and not always a fruitful one. So in the absence of that coherence, the reader is supposed to have full freedom at interpretation. THIS is what bothers me. I understand that words, thoughts, ideas cannot be straitjacketed but isn't there a line, a line of reason, one should not (ideally) cross?! How fanciful can our fancy really be! Imagination is the food of art (or in more un-Shakespearean lingo, the life-blood) but can it have any real sense or be wholly satisfying if "reason" totally departed from the scene?
I can see what a volatile field of argument this is and how fuzzy the boundaries, but I have always had a compulsive need to “understand” things before I can truly appreciate them, even if my senses lead me on. So it bothers me. This ambiguity, this unsettled state of affairs, these contradictions.
In the end, I can only cling to very basic and very personal lines, which do not suit me, but which is all I have. And those lines do not let me indulge in fancyweaving. They barely let me reach down to the subcutaneous layer. Beyond that, I like not to go. My universe asks for some definiteness. And this is why “context” is not nought for me. For me, it is that which can help me in sifting through this... umbrella of meanings, and follow the one that the poet might have intended to convey. It does not follow that what the poet tried to convey is the ultimate in meaning. Because what was tried might not have been as successfully achieved. But that is another debate altogether. The intended meaning, successful or not, can yet light my path of interpretation.
A friend of mine writes poetry very seriously. She must have her own literary ambitions but “ambition” is less in her case. It is more a way of self-expression for her, a deeply personal exercise, almost a similar outlet as diary-writing is for some of us. So her circle of readers is small and private. She sometimes urges me to read some of her compositions. My deadened-to-poetry mind does not always get her imageries and symbolic representations, but sometimes I do, and when I do, I try to think as she might have thought. Knowing her and her style in writing poems, I can direct my analystic beam of light (*poker face*) accordingly. I need not fear that I will produce far-fetched stuff.
In a similar way, when made to read poetry, it helps in finding a pattern of the poet's thoughts and expressions. I need not distrust myself so much then in making sensible sense.
