The child version of me, upon learning of the existence of poetry, had always thought that poetry was a puzzle. I’d always thought that a poem was something a person wrote to aesthetically wrap a secret message in a box, wait for someone to find it, unwrap it, and decode the gift inside.
A part of me sometimes still thinks of poetry as just that: a secret message. To look for clues and solve the mystery that is the author’s mind. (This particular attitude towards poetry may have stemmed from the process of poetry analysis consistently hammered into high school students in English class.) You may say, and rightfully so, that poetry is about rhythm, a harmony of words, both minor and major. You may say that sometimes poems are written for the explicit purpose of making the reader understand. And you may ask, then, “why would a poet want to hide a secret message if they ultimately want to express themselves and be understood?” But I believe that poetry can be anything we want it to be – anything you choose it to be.
Writing, including poetry, is built on sessile pillars of truth. Stories, poetry, screen plays, and virtually every form of writing has a fiery core of feelings, emotions, and thoughts, all neatly embellished with the wisely chosen words of the writer.
We often ‘hide’ those things within our works of art, hoping for someone to find it and understand that message in the way we intended it to be understood. And by hide, I mean using words or mediums of art as our allies – to mold a message in whatever way we want to. (There is of course no guarantee the reader would interpret it that way. But there is sometimes an ideal way we hope they would perceive our message.)
It is with this rationale and attitude that I write poetry. When there are surges of emotions, ideas, passion – anything! – I express it in poems in such a way that only I, the writer, can understand where the poem’s destination is – what it really means. That’s sort of the fun of it, really: being able to be in the “club” of your own imagination. However, I don’t write poems with the intention of deceptively ensuring that no one will ever understand, for that would undermine one of the fundamental maxims of art and writing itself.
(Okay, I can feel your skepticism and confusion diffusing from my computer screen, but hold on to it for just one more minute.)
I guess my ultimate question is: what is poetry, and therefore art, to me, despite all the unorganized ramblings of sorts you may have read above?
I believe it’s when we synthesize our innermost reflections and portions of humanity into a coherent message, and surround it with the medium of art we choose. It’s a message that, when coated with thick layers of metaphors in a poem or tones of acrylic colours in a painting, becomes a journey that the reader must go through to reach into the soul (assuming there exists such a thing) of the artist. And the best part is that we, the artists, are the clever creators of that journey. We are the people conjuring and controlling, to an extent, what is then and there the reality of that reader.
That right there is what inspires me about art, especially writing. Great writers like Fitzgerald in “The Great Gatsby”, or poets like Robert Frost in “The Road Not Taken” are the masterminds behind the curtains we know we cannot surpass. So instead, we surrender to the rules of the art and take our seat for a performance by geniuses like Hemingway or Flaubert. We give ourselves to the art, the artist, and the world they engulf us in.
So, it can be a secret message for me, or it can be a symphony of musical rhythms and melodies for you. The one thing is that you, the artist, are the soul bearer of burdens in the work that you do, which is to create, and create something worthwhile and fulfilling.
It is this very power that we as artists hold that is the one inexorable force enabling us to create the immortal.
Artistic Peregrination 