Thanks to Poorvi's notes on Faiz, after a long time I was able to in some way do "poetry'. I haven't been able to find the devnagri version of the poem online. However I went ahead and did a "reworking" of it by taking ample liberties with the the versions at hand. So here is the 'crudity':

Down the dusk's ladder night descends scattering astonished stars. From the west, breeze brings echoes of erased love song. In the prison courtyard the exiled trees stand, threading into the sky their intent silhouettes. On the rooftop moon pours heaven's wine: stardust into light -- in these verdant corners blue bodied shadows writhe and leap to my separation's ache.

And my heart sings: How sweet it seems, to live tonight! The petty tyrants who break into wedding chambers just as brides unveil and smash the lamps, can never but mask this luminous moon!

onwards... Sashi

Coming to the issue of language and adding more noise on the topic, this review titled "'Doing Our Own Thing': Talk Is Cheap" from the NYT should prove to be interesting to other CAers who have pet peeves about the state of language/slang-uage:

www.nytimes.com

Some choice cuttings that should trigger debate here:

[I]

"At some point in the 1960's, Americans lost faith in their written language, and settled for reproducing a less demanding (but more ''real'') oral variant on the page and in public. The result, McWhorter asserts, has been a steep and steady decline in the quality of political oratory, poetry, musical theater, preaching and -- ultimately -- thinking."

[II]

"...charts certain dire cultural consequences of a mounting distrust of written English. With its repertory of constructions and its bonanza of vocabulary, formal English is the natural idiom for conveying nuance, respect and logical argument. When it goes, they go."

[III]

"Those Americans who still write poetry defer to spoken language, rather than stretching the limits of the written one. McWhorter admires the descriptive powers of the former poet laureate Billy Collins, but finds that his poems ultimately ''read a lot like someone running their mouth.''"

[IV]

"Similarly, the ''spoken word'' poetry that one hears at poetry slams strikes McWhorter as superior to ''the doggedly flat rainy-day poems one sees in venues like The Atlantic.'' But spoken word offers only a narrow poetic universe of ''alienation and scolding.'' Its subject matter is limited to the few angry obsessions that can move an audience viscerally. '' The vast weight of human artistic achievement was not created in indignation,'' McWhorter writes, ''and few of us would wish that it had been.''"

(to this point I find myself in large agreement. Since I had claimed interest in poetry, I had been asked a couple of times what I think of spoken word. The best thing I like about it is its underlying democratic principle: if you can't move the "mob", the "mob" will boo you out. The question however remains: how "good" is the aesthetic sense of the "mob". When I say "mob", I think of the Roman dictum of providing "bread and circuses" to keep the mob happy.)

Also if anyone here has read Percival Everett's "Erasure" ( books.guardian.co.uk ) write about what you think here.

I am listening to Police’s Greatest Hits, after a long time and find that my pleasure in this tape is as strong as it had been when I heard it first, some years ago. Sting, I think, is one of those rare and natural musicians who in his music managed to capture the ambivalence of the Gen X. I know we are now into Gen Y and perhaps Gen Z is in the works (I wonder what they will call the generations after Z? I would suggest we adopt the Donald Knuth’s numbering scheme of pi; 3.0, 3.1, 3.14 and so forth) but I can only write about my generation.

The songs on this tape; Roxanne, So Lonely, Every Breath You Take etc are full of mixed messages; both fascination and revulsion served up in the same pill. Take “Every Breath You Take” with its stalker’s obsessions. Passion seems to drive the singer to declaim that he will watching “you”: every breath you take/ every move you make/ every bond you break. However beneath such earnest lines regarding “being lost with a trace” there seem to be hints of revulsion in the song, especially, in lines such as “every smile you fake”.

This then is wrong woman to be obsessed about obviously. But rarely do we get to choose our obsessions. Obsessions choose us.

--

On reading an essay by David Lehman (DL is the chap who edits the Best American Poetry series) on “postmodernism”, I am stuck by the fact why the contemporary American novel seems to hold no attraction for me. The thesis of DL posits that irony and the tools of irony (puns, hoaxes, parodies, false bottomed stories etc) form the main part of a post modernist’s literary arsenal.

The reasons he gives to justify this (over?) use of irony are: “reality in the United States so far outstrips the inventive capacity of any satirist”, “there is something fundamentally unserious (equals immaturity?, the mythical “innocence” of the American?, the culture of “denial”?) about our culture” and “because you can’t write a love scene the same way when the divorce rate approaches 50%”.

Is the last one of those reasons behind the disappearance of the rare beast of love poetry from the American Poetry Scene? It now sounds quite possible because after Theodore Rotheke and Edna St Vincent Millay, I haven’t recent come upon one of those dazzling love poems that can, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson “take the top off my head”.

Also speaking personally, while some of my poems have tended to taste of bitterness and anger, there is only one specific case (Nursery Rhyme Opera) where I had used, failingly, irony. To be an effective ironist, one has to be effective cynic a la Bogart in Casablanca. And I suppose I am too much of an idealist to turn cynic, at least quite this soon. One recent poet who manages the cynicism to a great effect is Mark Doty.