Who killed poetry?

There is a certain sadness attached to the passing of all things beautiful. When it is something as delicate as poetry, the end seems that much more poignant. But are we in the final throes of an art that gave us Ghalib and Ginsberg, Tagore and Tennyson, Neruda and Nirala? Yes, say publishers across the country, citing the 0. 04 per cent readership for verse. Tamil poets now look to movie lyrics to survive and Marathi poets are taking recourse to technology and multi-media;Urdu poets are a despondent lot and in Bengal there is proliferation without profit. Another problem is the unimaginative teaching of it in our classrooms. But there is hope, and adaptation to a rapidly changing world is the key. Gulzar says he'll still recommend poetry as a profession. Shall we remember Auden then, who wrote, ‘May I, composed like them/Of Eros and of dust/Beleaguered by the same/Negation and despair/Show an affirming flame’ , before we write poetry’s epitaph?

When normal-looking people ask me why poetry is dead, I laugh so much I drop my belly button: poetry is dead because normal-looking people killed it with their shopping. When I look around again, they are missing because the season's sale has just started. In a world full of discount deals, poetry is on the back shelf. Simply because you can't wear it, or eat it. And if you can't wear a thing or eat it, or, at least, sleep with it, what good is it? The bottom line is that poetry doesn't develop your personality. A course in public speaking does. Good words are what you get when you wed the deep violence of thoughts with lyricism of feelings. This doesn't have to be necessarily in terza rima or iambic pentameter. As Auden said, poetry is a way of happening, a mouth. The bitterest life has a beauty to it. There is affirmation to be exacted from the ravages man inflicts on himself. Poetry brings it out. Think of Auden's blinding lines of beauty, of hope and humility, born out of World War II, for instance: May I, composed like them/Of Eros and of dust, /Beleaguered by the same/Negation and despair, /Show an affirming flame.

But we have sidestepped that beauty, found with our compulsive buying sprees and interminable celebrations a way out of what was a civilisational need to reflect on both pleasure and pain. This is especially true of the English Speaking Republic of India which, unlike the regional cultures rooted in literary and cultural traditions, is peopled largely by philistines.

The English Republicans have no real sensibility of their own. Their values and judgements are derivative. Which is why they will wait for foreign endorsements before they accept an author. We are talking about writers, not pulp purveyors, of course. The Republicans don't know. They don't even want to know. The good word is not about cosmetics, it is about surgery. A scalpel for the soul.

The English Republican's soul has been missing for some time now. May be he was born without one. And to think that the freak show has just begun! Which is also why close to 150 million people with purchasing powers comparable to that of the Western middle class do not convert to a critical mass in India's cultural world: the bestselling novel in India does a little over 5, 000 copies.
Poetry the world over is in decline though. But, unlike India, the institutional support for a dying art in, say, the UK or the US is much more forthcoming in terms of fellowships, residencies and other foundational funding. Perhaps more importantly, poets, like good policemen, are seen as doing a service to society. The word is, after all, light, and the world is the brighter for it - if only you take off your Gucci glares.

India, for all its professed religiosity, is a shockingly crass monument to materialism. A bit like Shiv Raj Puri, the brain behind last fortnight's Citibank scam worth Rs 300 crore. Puri, according to reports, is a god-fearing man;but that hasn't stopped him from reaching out for other people's wealth. God is who we pray to, greed is how we live.

In the West, unlike the English speaking India, there is a history of logo-centric culture preceding the neurosis of the credit card - whose logical conclusion must be to transform man to an ATM machine. Who knows, in future all of us will be born with a slot to swipe the card in. Perhaps as a direct consequence of the lack of anything approximating to the Renaissance, the English speaking India will cultivate second rate artists, laugh heartily at third rate stand-up comedians, and worship flop film actors, but they will avoid first rate poets, though they themselves don't mind giving a shot at it. All you need to do is to check the blogs. Just about everybody is a poet. You write two crappy lines and there are four gents giving their thumbs up sign.

It's not just the blogs either. You go for a poetry reading session, and you see with a sinking heart that the audience is mostly made up of aspiring poets, spelling-mistake poets and other assorted unpublished poets who haven't read any real poetry. Not one of them is likely even to know the year, for example, when Dom Moraes gave up his troubled ghost in a small flat in Bandra. Or the name of his last collection.

Personally, I stopped writing poetry in 2006, and switched to prose. The practice of poetry doesn't kill. But in this country, poetry guarantees you death by neglect. Clearly then, poetry is a suicidal wish. Unless, of course, you are a film lyricist, the man who makes you feel mushy with pretty words, and you can say "Wah, Wah" while sipping someone else's wine.

Surely, an art as exacting as poetry must ensure for its practitioner a basic dignity? It must provide him with the means to buy a cake of soap, a shirt, a meal? Poetry here fails to do that, and so I said to hell with it. I haven't written a line since the last four years. No one has skipped a meal. That's because no one gives a damn. Which brings us back to the question: who killed poetry?
Hey, I know who. You.