Volume 4 | Issue 2 | April - May
2010 |
Interview with Joneve
C P Aboobaker
C.P- We know each otherand have never met. I am blessed byyour unexpected kindnesses. If we met, touchedwould it meet our expectations? In the celebrated Internet poems you lament the friends not having met each other. At the same time, you console by telling that this touching by spirit is the best. Are we all not touching by spirit the poets and philosophers that have so far come across our attention? What is your feeling when you get a book of the never seen poet? Either of the past or of the present?
Ans:- Dear CP, Thank you for your profound point and question -- yes, it is by spirit that the poets and philosophers, past and present, who come to our attention, touch us. This may begin in fact before we read their words, a kind of intuitive attraction manifesting. The poet William Butler Yeats compared contact with spirit and contact with the body in his poem about the wild old wicked man - he compares his poet's power with that of a young man infatuated: "I have words that can pierce the heart/What can he do but touch?"
When I approach a poem new to me, it is like opening the gate to a magic garden. I don't know what is behind the gate, but I expect to be enchanted. Poetry can create effects ordinary language cannot. It can pierce the heart, as the poet said. It has also been said that poetry makes one's hairs stand on end. The spirit is immortal, the body is not, and that is why we need poetry, to remind us of who we are. The truth of poetry cannot be proven in material ways. We know if it is poetry for us by the experience of spirit touched. We are more alive, bigger for the experience, and enchanted.
C.P- When I approach a poem new to me, it is like opening the gate to a magic garden. I don't know what is behind the gate, but I expect to be enchanted. - What do you expect to see beyond the gate?
Ans:- I expect to be enchanted with unique imagery, rhythms and perspectives, singly or in multiples, and by combinations of these elements. Poetry is distinctive, impactful, never trite or stale. Alexenander Pope said that the greatest crime against art is dullness.
C.P- Joneve, Pope is a seventeeth- eighteenth century poet. Why do you follow his example while our own era has got a number of great writers like Whitman and T. S. Eliot?
Ans:-Art is timeless. What Alexander Pope said is just as good today as it was when he said it. I also refer to Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot. For example, here are two quotes I've chosen to put on Soul to Soul:
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. - T.S. Eliot
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. - Walt Whitman
C.P- - Perhaps Pope is the only poet that wrote a poem on Criticism, namely his "Essay On Criticism". It seems he speaks about the diversity of poets' nature in the following lines.
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. In Poets as true Genius is but rare, True Taste as seldom is the Critic's share; Both must alike from Heav'n derive their light, These born to judge, as well as those to write. Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely who have written well; Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not Critics to their judgment too?
Do you agree with Pope?
Ans:-His argument is fair and reasonable, as might be expected from a luminary from 'The Age of Reason'. It has been said that critics are failed artists. It has also been said that a statue has never been built to a critic. There is an opinion, which I share, that there is a proper relationship between critic and artist; the role of the critic is to build bridges between artist and public, to make a work of art, its range and quality, more accessible and appreciated. If we lived in a well-educated society, the critic might not be necessary. As the poet Randall Jarrell put it, "I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry."
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C P Aboobaker - C.P. ABOOBACKER, editor of thanalonline, belongs to Calicut in Kerala. His interests include writing, publishing poems, essays, and many more literary things. Latest writing is about Channels and Globalizations. He is a retired professor of history.
e-mail: cpaboobacker@gmail.com