About a month ago, a friend had emailed me this article from the NYT that details the QuickMuse project. And very unusually, my brother-in-law later emailed me the link to QuickMuse too.

The basic premise of this project is to square off two well known poets against each other in Cyberia, and thus provide an online spectacle for the interested public as they watch each of the poets' improvisatory process unravel in pixels, as they hopefully travel towards a poem starting from the mediator provided poetic inspiration. For the first duel, a line of Elizabeth Bishop, "Writing poetry is an unnatural act", was the starting point.

While this is all nice and good, being a desi, even if I am admittedly semi frigani-fied, when I read this, I immediately was taken to the memory of reading in a n online article detailing a mushiara featuring all the great Urdu poets during the final days of the Mughal empire. My Google skills must not be as great as I thought they are, and hence I came up empty. But yesterday dhoomketu left a comment pointing me to this excellent article on the art of ghazal, which was where I had first encountered a description of this mushiara. To quote from it:

"Because the expression of genius within tight boundaries can become a theatrical enterprise, ghazal poets were historically a social lot. They gathered often to recite before their fellows in competitive symposia called musha'arahs, which reached their peak in the Mughal court, although they are still held today wherever Urdu poets are active. In these sophisticated and ceremonial occasions, the poets in attendance were given a misra'-i tara, a half-line in the meter and rhyme in which each then had to compose his ghazal. In order, from the lesser poets to the masters, each participant recited his work for the appreciation of his peers and the audience. A lighted candle was placed before the poet whose turn it was to recite.

The account goes on to follow the highs and lows of both magisterial and pedestrian versifying in ghazals, and all of it—from grudge matches and artistic slights to the flare-ups of past feuds, tactical alliances between rivals and catty asides—speak to the passionate vitality of the form. It is the master Ustad Zauq who ends the musha'arah as dawn breaks: His recitation of a wistful elegy—pointedly not a ghazal—serves to bring the evening to a close and with it, unbeknownst to him, an era." ...

I, for one, think it is much more of poetic to hold a poetry face-off with candles rather than glow of computer monitors. And the above description of this last mushiara in Delhi makes me even more want to go back to that night in a time machine, and to be one of the audience 'waah waahing' those master poets.

While one can attend various poetry conferences, and even fairly large poetry festivals such as the Dodge Poetry Festival here in the United States, the closest one comes to competitive poetry is the poetry slam movement. This movement, however, is nearly divorced from literary, i.e., academic poetry, and if David Lehman, the ever constant promoter and salesman of "Best American Poetry" series, writing in a humorous essay included in his book, "The Big Question" (these are two other essays included in this book), seems to indicate that most poetry produced for slams, and in slams, has little or no artistic and literary merit. And based on the miniscule experience I have had with slams I think I would concur with Mr. Lehman. To win a slam, I think, you need to be more of a dramatic performer or actor than a poet. Besides some great poems - I am thinking of Emily Dickinson's oeuvre - are simply meant to be read alone, in a quiet room.