A Quick Note on Poetics || Azfar Hussain

The Latin American revolutionary poet Roque Dalton's "Ars Poetica" is a poem of three lines--"Poetry/ Forgive me for having helped you understand/ You're not made of words alone." As Claire Gebeyli, a Lebanese writer, puts it: "Of what use is the pen if it forgets to press down on people's chests? If the words it pours forth are mere particles sewn and resewn on the body of language?" On a somewhat different register, the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde underlines the task of a poet as being one "to name the nameless so it can be thought." Dalton, Gebeyli, and Lorde--their differences notwithstanding--converge at least around the idea that poetry is more than "word-making," more than even a clever play of words.

Is poetry, then, a kind of world-making? The worlding of the word and the wording of the world? Isn't the poet an Orphic singer who brings things into being for the first time? Isn't poetry also the letting go of language itself? And another, somewhat different question: What can thinking learn from poetry? These questions are not merely Heideggerian questions, as some of those Heideggerians would love to have us believe. Such questions, among many others, were already prompted by Lalon Fakir's own lyrical theories of the body and language, although in different contexts. This morning I was looking at the following "song-text" by Lalon, one that doesn't itself specifically ask the questions I ask above but one that surely prompted those questions for me:

দেহের খবর বলি শোন রে মন।
দেহের উত্তর দিকে আছে বেশি দক্ষিণেতে আছে কম।।
দেহের খবর না জানিলে
আপ্ততত্ত্ব কিসে মেলে
লাল জরদ ছিয়া ছফেদ
বাহান্ন বাজার এই চারিকোণ।।
আগে খুঁজে ধর তারে
নাসিকাতে চলে ফেরে
নাভিপদ্মের মূল দুয়ারে
বসে আছে সর্বক্ষণ।।
আঠারো মোকামে মানুষ
যে না জানে সেহি তো বেহুঁশ
লালন বলে থাকরে হুঁশ
আদ্য মোকামে তার আসন।।