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| Wednesday, 21 January 2004 |
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A personal perspective : English poetry in Sri Lanka - the flourishing scene by Carl Muller You may look on this as an act of blameworthy audacity, because any consideration of the future of Sri Lankan poetry in English is chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectures. Perhaps I am being rash, even paradoxical, but what could be the probable course of Sri Lankan poetry in English in, say, the next hundred years? Who knows, after I have become a handful of dust, the younger poets in this country may still call me illuminating prophet (perish the thought!) and if I am wrong, there will be no one to remember - so why worry? Let's say that our poetry will continue, whatever the fluctuations, to be a living and abiding thing. There, that should please everybody! None of us look on poetry as an art that is finished or a harvest that has been fully reaped. Sadly, when a book of truly excellent verse comes out, people even rush to say that there is no more room to excel.
This really DOES happen and it did so in the literatures of Sweden, Norway and Denmark where, over a century ago, the practice of writing verse was deliberately abandoned. In the middle of the 15th century, it almost died out in England and ran very low in France in the Middle Ages. It was even declared that prose was a sufficient medium for all expressions of human thought. Now that is a load of bull! In Sri Lanka today, it is very evident that more poetry is being produced than ever before. It's a sort of phenomenon of the time, actually, but there are truck-loads of starry-eyed hopefuls with one thought: Write verse. Let the thought-streams flow. In 1574, George Gascoigne, in his "Epistle to the Reverend Divine" remarked: "It seemeth unto me that in all ages, Poetry hath been not only Permitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing." Fluctuation After all, poetry has occupied the purest and fieriest minds in all ages. Yet we see that even Plato, who was an exquisite writer of lyrical verse, excluded the poets from his "Utopia".
The thought does stray into my mind, and it continues to nag: Many like to write poetry - but how many like to read it? Yet, we can be sure of one thing. Poetry will continue to be written and published in Sri Lanka. Can we form any idea of the probably character of it? After all, there are no difficulties in the way of believing that verse will continue to be written in this country for a quite indefinite period. The principal danger to the future of poetry, as I see it, rests in the necessity of freshness of expression. Each school of verse is like a rising and breaking wave. The wave rises when the poet has become capable of new forms of attractive expression. The crest is where some or several poets combine fire and skill at the moment of opportunity. The wave breaks when later poets cannot support that grand ecstasy and tend to repeat the formulae which have lost their attractiveness. What many writing poetry in English do not recognize is that there will always be this fluctuation - a rise and fall in value. It is the instinctive demand for freshness of expression that starts each new wave. It reminds me of that old cry of youth: "Cantate Domino" - Sing a NEW song unto the Lord! Sadly, in Sri Lanka, the possibilities of freshness are growing rare. All the obvious, simple, poignant things are being said over and over again. I look at the stack of local verse and try to classify. First, the "wave-makers". Take Jean Arasanayagam and daughter Parvathi, Anne Ranasinghe, Eva Ranaweera, Ashley Halpe, Richard de Zoysa, Yvonne Gunawardena, Sita Kulatunga, Wilfrid Jayasuriya, Gamini Seneviratne, Lakdasa Wikkremasinha, Alfreda de Silva, Patrick Fernando, George Keyt, Regi Siriwardena, Bill McAlpine, Basil Fernando, Yasmine Gooneratne, Premini Amerasinghe, Suresh Canagarajah, Reggie Chrysostom, Rienzi Crusz, Michael Ondaatje, Renton de Alwis, Wilhelm Ephraums, Angelo Fernando, Siromi Fernando, Siri Gunasinghe, Ivor Jansz, Patrick Jayasuriya, Lal Manawadu, Gaston Perera, Sumathy Sivamohan, R. B. Tammitta, Kaiser Haq, Maithri White, Aparna Halpe.... I must say of these and so many others that they HAVE to be placed apart, out of the general stack, stand separate and proud. They are the wave-makers. Mind, I say "so many others" because I couldn't possibly list them all! How does one decide? Let us look at some excerpts: Monsoon winds have felled the Thuparama crystal - malefic omen? My tongue lift clods of earth to build When we devoured each other Guilt. A word respectable, indeed a word Miss Lucy glances out at the townscape I can readily sympathise No one who slept under the cross 'Ay'ay'yo' - now resonating Our world Manipulation In everyone of the excerpts above is seen the rising of the waves. But what of the stack that remains? This is where so many, moving insistently to be published, get into that sad business of manipulation. I name no names. That would be a criminal act, to say the least, but reading them in their "larval stage" tells me so well of how their outpourings are put to such pedestrian uses. The poems are like well-rubbed coins, the features of what has been minted effaced. It is not that they do not speak with simplicity, or that their poetry does not produce pleasure with their limpid language, but they lack magnetism - they simply do not pull! They are not wave-causers and there remains a sameness that denies the very desire for novelty of expression. Reading such is like listening to the old, old piping of some tone-deaf cowherd under a kumbuk tree! Yet, I see future as a bright one. The sense of originality that is demanded from every new school will certainly force our poets of the future to cast aside all recognized impressions; and the originality of those who do continue to write strongly and clearly will be more vigorously evident. Poetry, I am happy to believe, will soon wipe out the conventionalized coinage of the English language. There will also be less description of plain, material objects. After all, the aspect of these has already received obvious tribute. There was a time when it was satisfying to write: The rose is red, the violet blue, And both are sweet, and so are you. Such reflections, at that time, were even said to be exquisite! But to return to such is impossible. Our future poets will seek to analyse the redness of the rose and debunk the fallacy that the violet is blue! Today, lines as above can be written by any third-grader in an autograph book! Today, poets invariably display their vitality by attacking accepted forms of expression. They will continue to look about for novelties and cultivate them with extravagance. Also, we must not imagine that poetry in the future will be a repetition of what is now produced. There will always be those who look forward and those who live in the past. I, for one, expect to find the modern poet accepting an ever-increasing symbolic subtlety of expression. Many of the newcomers today have no clue about the achieving of effect, of wrapping truth in darkness or darkness in truth. They stick to the trite and superficial - the same old inkstand-and-G-nib epithets and adjectives. There is little attempt to find paralled expressions that would startle even by their oddity. They keep plodding away at a sort of patent artificiality that forces the notes until they cease to rouse an echo. Style Another problem is that many of our new-on-the-scene: housewives, staid matrons, clerks, government servants, women with money and not enough to do, inflict us with a tortured and affected style. They are prosodical pedants and their numbers keep swelling. What is worse, they have their following - friends, cliques who give them praise, bunches of irresponsible disciples to describe the commonplace as something divine! This sort of rubbish actually threatens the permanence of the art. This may be also why much of this stuff is self-published. At least publishers react with sanity and lucidity! If we examine the whole of history, we find that poetry had it all its own way at the dawn of civilization. This is why the Hesiod comes first, then Homer. Let me recall what Words-worth said in his famous "Preface" of 1800". "If the labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man." Wordsworth believed that the poetry of the future would deal with the discoveries of science. He was far out. Even a century later, where was the poetry that dealt with mineralogy, botany or chemistry? Algebra, maybe - and that was Coleridge; and Tennyson did drag in analogies to geological discoveries in "In Memoriam". What I see, however, with some confidence, is the rising of many new waves, while our wave-makers will raise something positively tidal! There will be less and less themes of intrepid social character and there will rise, as Hazlitt once said, "(an) effusion of natural sensibility". The sphere of interest occupied by poets of the imagination is sure to grow wider, to embrace the land, to immortalize events, be as public as possible. There will be less cultivation of the ego, less self-analysis, less romanticism and less of this unhealthy living in ivory towers. Protection There will soon come the day when our poets will sacrifice their plainer human responsibilities for the production of the finest artistic effects. Also, it need be expected that our poets will seek mutual protection against a reasonable world, their singing robes wrapped round them and with none to dictate to them the nature and form of their lyric messages. To hell with these so-called "schools of poetry". These only attract the charlatans and the refuse and wreckage of other arts. Rather, poetry in Sri Lanka will begin to protect itself against the invasion of commonsense and fight against the fungal growths on the face of a godless world. I am also certain that sexual love will cease to be the predominant in the lyrics of the future. In the 19th century, poets were interested to excess in love. It was as if life presented no other phenomenon worthy of a poet's attention. All this soon became like the constant persistence of a stale perfume. If one examines the development of poetry in England, one sees how it moves more and more in the direction of the dramatic and towards the increased study of life in its energetic exhibitions. Our poets, too, will denounce the stereotyped surfaces of life and penetrate to what lies under the surface; into the solid earth of human character. After all, poetry MUST be full of human life. Let art remain formal, history abstract and science inhuman - it is poetry that will give us the security, for humanity will always be with us. As Bacon once said: ".... poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things." Poetry in English in Sri Lanka will flourish. Its future is assured - even if it will remain tough going separating the grain from the chaff! **** Back **** |
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