Telugu Chandamaama raave, jaabilli raave Kondekki raave, koti poolu theve Bandekki raave, banti poolu theve Theru meeda raave, thene pattu theve Pallaki lo raave paalu perugu theve Parugetti raave, panasa pandu theve Naa maata vinave, nattinta pettave Annee theve Kuttiki iyyave!

Trans Come moon, come sweet moon Come over the hill, bring a million flowers Come on a chariot, bring a bunch of Marigolds Come over the brook, bring a comb of honey Come on a palanquin, bring milk and curd Come on running, bring a Jackfruit Now listen to me and keep them here right Bring them all for baby's delight

There are too many populists, amateur versifiers and obscurantists. Don Paterson urges us to leave poetry to the professionals

Don Paterson Saturday November 6, 2004

Guardian

Poetry is a dark art, a form of magic, because it tries to change the way we perceive the world. That is to say that it aims to make the texture of our perception malleable. It does so by surreptitious and devious means, by seeding and planting things in the memory and imagination of the reader with such force and insidious originality that they cannot be deprogrammed. A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself; a poem makes a fetish of its memorability. It does this because the one unique thing about our art is that it can be carried in your head in its original state, intact and perfect. We merely recall a string quartet or a film or a painting - actually, at a neurological level, we're only recalling a memory of it; but our memory of the poem is the poem. Its most primitive (and so we can probably assume its earliest) function is as a system for the simple storage and retrieval of information, and sometimes its concealment; the poets of certain nomadic Saharan tribes memorise the location of the waterholes, in way that will not betray them to others. No wonder that poetry, so deeply connected to the world and our own survival in it, was quickly invested with magical properties, and soon took the form of the spell, the riddle, the curse, the blessing, the prayer. They are - and poems remain - invocatory forms. Prose evokes; the well-chosen word describes the thing. But poetry invokes; the memorable word conjures its subject from the air.

Poetry is also an occult science but I think the language of our science, verse composition, has been lost - or at least disfigured to the point of uselessness. Poets no longer feel confidently expert in their own subject. The language of academic versification studies and "poetics" is only appropriate for something that describes the result, not the working practice; the noun, not the living verb. This language always makes the error of talking about the messy, insane process of verse-making as if it were a clean operation. Our business is not with rhyme, but with rhyming; not with metaphor but with metaphorising, the active transformation of the image; there is as much difference between the two as there is between checking a watch and building one.

Such description as exists of the real composing process is couched in the language of the beginner's workshop, with its nonsensical talk of "show-not-tell" and "good subject matter" - or the language of self-help. (Incidentally, the systematic interrogation of the unconscious, which is part of the serious practice of poetry, is the worst form of self-help you could possibly devise. There is a reason why poets enjoy the highest statistical incidence of mental illness among all the professions. Your unconscious is your unconscious for an awfully good reason. If you want to help yourself, read a poem, but don't write one.)

Only plumbers can plumb, roofers roof and drummers drum; only poets can write poetry. Restoring the science of verse-making would restore our self-certainty in this matter; the main result of such an empowerment would be the rediscovery of our ambition, our risk, and our relevance, through the confidence to insist on the poem as possessing an intrinsic cultural value, of absolutely no use other than for its simple reading .

"Risk" needs some redefinition. To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how dreadful the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world's greatest living playwright. This kind of poetry is really nothing but a kind of inverse sentimentalism - that's to say by the time it reaches the page, it's less real anger than a celebration of one's own strength of feeling. Since it tries to provoke an emotion of which its target readers are already in high possession, it will change no one's mind about anything; more to the point, anyone can do it. Neither is "risk" the deployment of disjunctive syntax, crazy punctuation or wee allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan; because anyone can do that, too. Risk, of the sort that makes readers feel genuinely uncomfortable, excited, open to suggestion, vulnerable to reprogramming, complicit in the creative business of their self-transformation - is quite different.

Real danger flirts with the things we most dread as poets. Real risk is writing with real feeling, as Frost did, while somehow avoiding sentimentality, or simplicity, as Cavafy did, and somehow avoiding artlessness; or daring to be prophetic, as Rilke did, and miraculously avoiding pretentiousness; or writing with real originality, as Dickinson did, while somehow avoiding cliché (since for a reader to be astonished by the original phrase it must already be partly familiar to them, if they are to register the transformation; a point fatally misunderstood by every generation of the avant-garde, which is one reason they often seem stylistically interchangeable). The narrowest of these paths, though, the poets' beautiful tightrope-walk, is the one between sense and mystery - to make one, while revealing the other. As our friend Michael Donaghy did.

Our problem is that the roles of poet and reader have become blurred; on the one hand we have the populists, who have made the fatal error of thinking that feeling and practice form a continuum. They infantilise our art: chicken-soup anthologies full of lousy poems; silly workshop exercises where you write a poem in the voice of your socks; ultra-"accessible" poetry programs, where the general public text-in poems to be read out on the show.

On the other hand we have the Postmoderns, who have made the fatal error of thinking that theory and practice form a continuum. They don't: this foolish levelling of the playing field in favour of the merely clever has led to an art-practice with no effective internal critique. Genuine talents such as, say, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley, working recognisably within the English and European lyric traditions, are drowned by the chorus of articulate but fundamentally talentless poet-commentators. Their situation is analogous to British free improvisation in the 80s, where one could hear great jazz virtuosi like Evan Parker and Derek Bailey sharing a stage with people who had barely mastered the rudiments of their instruments - simply because the valorisation of talent itself was felt to be elitist and undemocratic.

The populists, on one side, purvey a kind of straight-faced recognition comedy, and have no need either for originality or epiphany. On the other side we have the avant-garde so desperate for transcendence they see it everywhere: they are fatally in the grip of an adolescent sublime, where absolutely anything will blow your mind, as your mind, in its state of recrudescent virginity, is permanently desperate to be blown. The Norwich phone book or a set of log tables would serve them as well as their Prynne, in whom they seem able to detect as many shades of mindblowing confusion as Buddhists do the absolute.

At the end of the day, you cannot use the designation "poet" without introducing the highly undemocratic idea of Natural Talent. Poets are people with an unusual gift for the composition of verses. End of definition. Our disagreement, of course, is over what constitutes good verse.

But if you want true "access" to poetry ... remove all the mediators! Those self-appointed popularisers, who, by insisting on nothing but dumb sense, have alienated poetry's natural intelligent and literate constituency; and those exegetes in whose self-interest it is to keep poetry as incomprehensible as possible, that they might project nothing into it but their own wholly novel and ingenious interpretations.

It's important that poets remember that our first perception of the world is already a misinterpretation. Incarnated souls all get off to variations on much the same bad start (especially boys, those sobbing vessels of karma, whose first act is to penetrate their mother) and are given only the perceptual equivalent of a pinhole camera through which they are supposed to experience the universe. We are born, then, into a condition of metaphor, a metaphor really being a contextual restriction of sense. We are attuned only to a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the universe our senses conjure up for us is not the universe. We know that the ears of the bat, the eyes of the bee, the nose of the dog, the sensitivity of the bird to magnetic field (to say nothing of the bird's infinite angles of approach to what it beholds, unlike the three ways we have to walk home) shape a perception of the world wholly different from our own, yet no more or less true.

But having fallen into a mammalian dream of the universe, we fall slowly into a much deeper human dream. The human dream is one of all things first recognised, and then named, in accordance with their human utility, translated and metaphorised into the human realm. It is just as flimsy a consensual reality as money.

I'm an admirer of the Post-Freudian theorist Ignacio Matte Blanco, and a travesty of his position is this: when we were born, everything was pretty much everything else. The breast was you, your mother the breast, and the back garden your mother, the world was an absolute and indivisible unity. There was nothing to tell you otherwise. This perception is atemporal, since the perception of the passing of time is dependent first on the perception of difference, of an asymmetrical and consecutive series of events, which we did not then know.

This sense of unity was gradually overlayed with the perception of discrete, causally successive and asymmetrical things and events. With the acquisition of language, this goes into overdrive. Now here's the important part; this new perception does not refute the observations of the first, but is necessary accommodation of the fact of our consciousness. That is to say in the fall into language, asymmetry, the observation that we are other than the breast, the mother and the back garden, the moon, the sea, does not occur at the expense of that first knowledge, of everything as everything else, of a unity; this continues running, mostly under the limen of our consciousness, as a kind of spiritual DOS programme. Why? Because it was true .

This is easy enough to verify. Stripped of their human presence and meaning, we can see in the cup, the bath, the shoe, the bicycle, how many strange, lonely and often ugly things we make for the world. The category-instability of the thing is easily made apparent: a chair suddenly looks like firewood when it gets cold enough. If a chair were in an art exhibit, you would be disinclined to sit on it; if it were persistently referred to as a bed it will start to look like something to sleep in. To a man with terrible piles, certain chairs will look like a reproach, and to an alien with no arse ... it would be an incomprehensible object.

All this, for the poet, is much more than a little perceptual game. When we allow silence to reclaim those objects and things of the world, when we allow the words to fall away from them - they reassume their own genius, and repossess something of their mystery and infinite possibility. Then we awaken a little to the realm of the symmetries again, and of no-time, of eternity. And when the things of the world that we have contemplated in this wordless silence reenter the world of discrete concept, of speech and language - they return as strangers; and then they declare wholly unexpected allegiances, reveal wholly unsuspected valencies. We see the nerve in the bare tree; we hear the applause in the rain. These things are, in other words, redreamt, reimagined, remade. This I think is the deepest meaning of our etymology as maker.

Poetry then, remystifies, allows the Edenic, unified view to be made briefly conscious - and re-entered via the most perverse (but perhaps only) tool for the job: language. Poetry is the paradox of language turned against its own declared purpose, that of nailing down the human dream. Poets are therefore experts in the failure of language. Words fail us continually, as we search for them beyond the borders of speech, or drive them to the limit of their meaning and then beyond it.

So what's the nature of this secret language we would need to restore amongst ourselves? Well, it would consist mainly of arcana. Arcana are things as small, specific, useful and horrible as the Horseman's Word. Actually the horseman's word - which gives the apprentice ploughman power over horses and women when it's whispered in their ears - is also the secret formula for all poems. It was unwisely published in F Marian MacNeill's The Silver Bough , so now it's in the public domain you might as well hear it. In Scots it's twa-in-yin ; two-in-one.

Or to put it with mind-numbing dullness: the process of the poem is that of a single unifying new idea being driven through the productive resistance of the form proposed by the marriage of two previously estranged or unrelated things. As readers, we usually have the sense of a new thing unfolding, with an argument or a story quietly but insistently proposed in the first lines. Listen to these of Donaghy's: "Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron"; "Not in the sense that this snapshot, a girl in a garden /is named for its subject, or saves her from aging ..."; "Hair oil, boiled sweets, chalk dust, squid's ink ... /Bear with me. I'm trying to conjure my father, aged fourteen / as Caliban ..." You feel instinctively there will be a journey, that the poem possesses a dramatic teleology, and are immediately intrigued.

But there's a deeper unifying force at work. Our defining heresy as poets is that we know that sound and sense are the same thing. Everyone else thinks them merely related. The acoustic and semantic properties of the word are not even interchangeable for us; they are wholly consubstantial. They arose together, and to talk of one is to talk of the other. We allow our ear to think for us.

Like the musical note, the word is an event in time; and like notes, words can be recalled into one another's presence, and connected in their sense and mystery by the careful repetition and arrangement of their sounds. This repetition therefore introduces a real perceptual distortion: it offers a small stay against the passage of time. Just as rhyme not only has the knack of consolidating sense, but finding sense where previously there was none - unifying the music of the line is, in good poets, an unconscious default. When we sing something, we make a little sense of it; and when we want to make the deepest possible sense, we always make a song. Now more than ever, we need to keep singing, and singing together.

· This is an abridged version of last week's TS Eliot lecture, commissioned by the South Bank Centre. Don Paterson's latest work is The Book of Shadows (Picador), a collection of his aphorisms.

These are some lines from a novel of ‘variations’, Milan Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. What follows these lines, occasionally, is my inchoate humming, going a little beyond the last note of the variation preceding it.

One of life’s great secrets: women don’t look for handsome men; they look for men with handsome women.

The truth: he’d taken an ugly mistress because he didn’t dare go after beautiful women. Zdena was as high as he rated himself them. A weak will and utter poverty – these were the secrets he had hoped to hide.

He had to absolutely prove to himself that it was love that bound him to her, not weakness or poverty. And only a larger-than-life kind of passion could justify an affair with so ugly a girl.

Yes, and why not? Can’t a weak man feel true love for an ugly woman?

Be wary of those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!

He was well aware that of the two or three thousand time he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.

Whereas the Devil’s laughter pointed up the meaningless of things, the angel’s shot rejoiced in how rationally organized, well conceived, beautiful, good, and sensible everything on earth was.

There are two kinds of laughter, and we lack the words to distinguish them.

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory.

$ Most old world folk/communal dances, and tribal dances are hinged on circle dancing. The most magnificat: Masai lion hunt dance. As is that children’s play rhyme ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses’.

She loved him too much to admit that what she thought of as unforgettable could ever be forgotten.

His tenderness was like a machine for churning out terms of endearment.

My talk with the taxi driver ($who wanted to write a novel too) gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer’s concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.

In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself.

Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where three things happen:

a) a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; b) an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; c) a radical absence of significant change in the internal development of the nation.

In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surround himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

$ The wondrous technology of cyberia has already ushered in this era of graphomania. We know this disease by another name: blogerrhea. And this ‘page’, kind reader, is the evidence.

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in a different universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it’s too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of deafness and lack of understanding

Litost is a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self. And one of the standard remedies for personal misery is love.

The absolute quality of love is actually a desire for absolute identification. We want the woman we love to swim as slowly as we do; we want her to have no past to look back on happily. But as soon as the illusion of absolute identity fall apart (the girl looks back happily on her past or picks up speed), love turns into a permanent source of great torment we call litost.

Litost works like a two stroke motor. First comes a feeling of torment, then the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one’s partner as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the woman cries when slapped. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love alive.

From time immemorial men have been divided into two large categories: idolizers – also know as poets – and misogynists – or, rather gyophobes. Idolizers or poets worship the traditional feminine values like feelings, house and home, motherhood, fertility, divine flashes of hysteria, and the divine force of nature in us; misogynists or gynophobes experience mild terror at the thought of them. The idolizer worships womankind in a woman; the gynophobe prefers the woman to womankind. And keep one thing is mind: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist… The idolizer or poet may give a woman drama, passion, tears and worries; he will never give her contentment.

$ Who am I? An idolizer or a gynophobe or the worst of both?

Idolizers or poets have always been prime booty for hysterics. Hysterics know that idolizers will never slap them. Idolizers are helpless when faced with a woman because they’ve never left their mother’s shadows. They see an envoy from their mothers in every woman and immediately give in. Their mothers’ skirts hang over them like the firmament.

He once read Pascal’s pensee about subtle minds and geometrical minds, and since then he had divided all mankind into those who are subtle and those who are not.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, and an exquisite mediocrity of the soul – those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or fashion magazines – the ones all women try to imitate these days – how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they are just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They are not born of human bodies; they hatch readymade from computers. Let me tell you friend, your small town butcher’s wife is the perfect woman for a poet.

$ Perfect articulation of one reason why I refused to put up posters or collages of various film actresses or fashion queens on my walls even in my heavily women deprived, nearly all male college life, in spite of that being quite common, a badge of identification and taste.

Not enough ass. The terrible litost that comes from not getting enough ass.

Time is Kafka’s novel (The Trial) is the time of a humanity that has lost all continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything or remembers anything, that lives in nameless cities with nameless streets or streets that had names different from the one’s they had yesterday, because a name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.

And all the time it was the same street; they just kept changing it’s name, trying to lobotomize it.

$ One reason why I refuse to call Bombay, Mumbai or Madras, Chennai.

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman’s genitals was through her sadness.

Love is a constant interrogation. In fact I don’t know of a better definition of love than that.

We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places.

Her sexuality had been occupied by love (I say “occupied” because sex is not love, it is merely the territory love marks out for itself) and therefore had a dramatic and serious component to it.

No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future.

$ Refer to Robert Bly’s brilliant treatise on this subject: “Sibling Society”

They think that pressing together is the be-all and end-all of love’s joys. They are aroused, their hearts are pounding, but they don’t know what it means to make love.

At the beginning of man’s erotic life, Jan said to himself, there is arousal without climax; at the end climax without arousal.

Human life – and herein lies the secret – takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a faction of an inch.

The woman who runs away to defend her honor. The woman who gives herself, the man who takes. The woman who veils herself, the man who tears off her clothes. Time honored images, every one of them and all a part of us.

But what if our desire for the female body is dependent on them? If we go ahead and root them ($time honored images above) out of ourselves, will a man still be able to make love to a woman?

• From the talk with Philip Roth +

Sterne and Diderot understood the novel as a great game.

$ Julio Cortzar took this literally in his novel ‘Hopscotch’

A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits… The synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voice of polyphonic music. The unity of a book need not stem from a plot, but can be provided by a theme.

$ Nice distinction between plot and theme

One the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In course of time this gulag grows even bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

$ MK was speaking of the paradise of Soviet totalitarianism. Don’t we now have the alternative (and competing) paradises & gulags of democracy (That mad Cuban poet, Reinaldo Arenas, in his autobiography ‘Before The Night Falls’, wrote that the only difference between socialism and capitalism was that where as in socialism one has to smile as one gets it, in capitalism one can fucking scream!) and those of messianic theocracies?

And yet certain erotic passages of George Bataille have made a lasting impression on me. Perhaps it is because they are not lyrical but philosophic… The erotic scene is the focus where all the themes of the story converge and where its deepest secrets are located.

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is a wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seem to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

$ Amen!

• Request in a bottle: Will somebody gift me a pen scanner, so that I can directly cull stuff from books, instead of first annotating them with a green pen and then typing them in. I am a two-finger typist and this takes me too long. This piece for example took me 2 + hours! +