Lounge
The benefits of reading poetry in a world of muddled meanings
Summary
The world we live in is a wasteland of words, but reading poetry reminds us that language can be used with precision and intention
By the time you are reading this, most of us would have entered into a death struggle with our new year resolutions. The hard numbers from our blood tests would have softened around the edges. The airy bounce acquired during a few days of vacation would have dissipated. What remains is our familiar selves and our tanhai (loneliness). The tanhai may even seem worse given how even last week our selves seemed nicer, cooler, more relaxed.
And about now a portion of you would be transferring your annoyance with life to this foolish Malayali columnist who has borrowed this Hindi/Urdu word fecklessly. Here is the thing though. As soon as I used this word from a language I may have learnt in school (and from TV) in that sentence, I was immediately cheered up.
The word actually came to me, a child of the 1980s, via the movies with its light modern irony. With it I am dressed appropriately for the modern condition, any modern condition. If you love fashion YouTube like I do, you already know the advice to wear your good clothes now. Using the good words from the same language I had to mug essays to pass makes me feel like I am in a party frock on a Monday afternoon (slightly dressed down of course).
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We live in a time when the muddling of meaning is a global weapon of destruction. The Russian-American writer Masha Gessen has written about the leaching of meaning from language over decades of political tyranny in Russia. Living in the US, Gessen has had plenty of opportunity to discuss the damage to political language closer home. Or as Gessen wrote in their book Surviving Autocracy (2020), “when something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality".
This brings me to my very slowly coalescing new year resolution—to read more poetry. Edward Hirsch once wrote, “We ought to speak more often of the precision of poetry, which restores the innocence of language, which makes the language visible again." I spend so many of my days in a word-wasteland—listening to podcasts by people who are wonderful but should not be allowed to own a microphone, reading only the warmest, fuzziest fiction that won’t make me give up on life, reading the tasty but forgettable feuds online and of course, reading the news.
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Perhaps it is my brain, but even after reading 20 different pieces of reporting on the Saif Ali Khan assault, I still haven’t understood a single thing. The only fact that seems stable is that Khan was wounded in an attack and even that I expect someone to challenge next week. It is as if I have eaten and eaten and but I am still hungry and don’t remember anything I ate. Or as American poet Chen Chen writes, “Can’t stop eating you, movie-style extra butter microwave popcorn." Something about reading poetry reminds you about folks who still use language with intention—with the purposefulness of someone planting a sapling rather than buying a bouquet.
I long to read more poetry. In the same way that you long for a walk after a day of meals at an aunt’s home. I long to wake up from my food coma. I want a casual engagement with precise language, words placed as precisely as a gem in a necklace in Amrapali Museum in Jaipur. Precise does not necessarily have to mean the spareness of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra or Kay Ryan. It could be as extravagant as a Chen Chen poem, as cheeky and winking as a necklace Dali made.
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Poetry puts you in a spacesuit to zip about the universe in. I read that scoldy letter Gandhi sent Annie Mascarene, (lawyer, activist, member of the Constituent Assembly and later Kerala’s first MP) when she gave a political speech in Bombay in 1946—“I know that you have no control over your tongue and when you stand up to speak, you blab anything that comes to your mind." I read that and I imagine Mascarene responding in American writer Lucille Clifton’s words, arguing that people are mad at her because “they ask me to remember/ but they want me to remember/ their memories/ and i keep on remembering/ mine".What Constitution would we have had if people held their tongues and remembered only what other people wanted them to remember.
I wish I could announce like my fellow resolving, irresolute humans that I commit! That I commit to reading more poetry in 2025. Instead like someone taking a new gym membership on 1 January, I wonder whether I will be just gobbling whatever Netflix offers every night. I will never again be the woman who spent an outsized portion of her income on an outsized A.K. Ramanujan collection. But perhaps, even I could read a poem a day?
Like the now popular advice to just move your body every day and not be too fussed about how, perhaps I could read a poem online from the hundreds of well-curated sites and magazines. Perhaps I could look in my shelves. Despite myself, I am sure to find the book equivalent of what Mehrotra called “the mocking youth who paid the first premium" for my 45-year-old reading self. As with our other new year resolutions, I know success lies in finding others who have made the same resolution. Others who believe, as poet Richard Wilbur wrote, “Ask us, prophet,/ how we shall call/Our natures forth when that live tongue is all/Dispelled?"
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb.
