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.

I was pointed to this Willy D's latest essay in Outlook India, which is basically a preview of a soon to be published book on Bhadhur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal.

I had actually come upon a version of it as a word document (thanks to Google) a couple of months ago when I was trying write about poetry jams across Indian languages in the good old days, and for this trying to trace some background information on the final, and perhaps mythical, mushiara (gathering of poets) in Delhi as the flames of the 1857 Mutiny engulfed the city. All I could find then were a review of a performance of Kaifi Azmi's play called Aakhri Shama, and another essay of Willy D that appeared in the Guardian. Also if any kind reader can point me to an online source where I can find more information on this final gathering of the great Delhi poets, I will be much obliged.

In the Willy D's essay, writing about the casual destruction and disappearance of old buildings in Delhi, he comments, "Occasionally there is an outcry as the tomb of the Mughal poet Zauq is discovered to have disappeared under a municipal urinal or the haveli courtyard house of his great rival Ghalib is revealed to have been turned into a coal store; but most of the losses go unrecorded." While this is sad, I think the souls of the poets must take a perverse pleasure in what fate, or more precisely the great Indian Indifference, had in mind regarding their houses, and then, perhaps, would have come up with a suitable ghazal (as I am tempted to) to sum up these matters.

Ghalib's Delhi was a fascinating place, where it appears that everyone from the old emperor to a young wrestler were turning out shers and nazams, as they drank French wine in 24x7 taverns, and visited courtesans. But what of Ghalib's Ballimaran ki Gali and his haveli today?

Google brings up a couple of interesting articles (a, b, c) about visiting the haveli after it had been somewhat prettified by the Government. Flickr also has <a href=flickr.com">few photos of the interiors as they can be seen today. So go take a virtual look, and then read a sher or two of Ghalib. You may also view clips from the movie "Mirza Ghalib" (1954) (scripted by mad Manto!) to get a filmi feel of Ghalib's Delhi.

Way back in 1950s, Saadat Hasan Manto, the mad father of Toba Tek Singh, as he drank himself to death, wrote a bunch of letters to his uncle, who had the name Sam, i.e., Uncle Sam. With lines like the following:

"If a piece of mine appears in a newspaper and I earn twenty to twenty-five rupees at the rate of seven rupees a column, I hire a tonga and go buy locally distilled whiskey. Had this whiskey been distilled in your country, you would have destroyed that distillery with an atom bomb because it is the sort of stuff guaranteed to send its user to kingdom come within one year." ...

How I wish he had been born in your country. He would have been carried to his grave with great fanfare and over his resting place a skyscraper would have been built. Or were his own wish to be granted, his dead body would have been placed in a pool of glass and people would have gone to view it as they go to a zoo."

they make for wonderful reading.