Poetry in Pyjamas - 11 Practices to Get Over the Fear of Poetry ✨
Be more 'you' around poems
Last week, I shared an essay with you all on the fear of poetry. Narayani wrote back, wondering why we worry about not ‘understanding’ poetry. For her, “conjuring of images in itself is a nice experience of poetry and that is enough” Another co-thinker, KS, reflected on the ‘hyper-rationality’ around him - “at a young age, for someone who couldn't handle ambiguity and uncertainty, poetry or even metaphor-filled prose was scary… The cold, ice-like, perfect symmetries and structures of mathematics are in contrast with the free-flowing, but also twisting and turning, water that is poetry.” Not only are these responses gorgeous and poetic, but they also touch my longstanding dream of writing with you, not at you.
Poetry in Pyjamas - 11 Practices to Get Over the Fear of Poetry ✨
Today’s essay is an invitation to rub our eyes and look at poetry differently, and while we are at it, to look at ourselves, our brains and bodies differently too. Let’s use everything from common sense to emerging neuroscience to rekindle our relationship with poetry. No matter our age, educational background, previous experience, language level, we are always one poem away from poetry. All we need is the openness of SRK’s arms towards a new poem, and trust in who we are, right now, in our enough-ness. Let’s go.
1. Know that we are hardwired for poetry.
Poetry is an ancient human lifestyle that predates literacy. Those who head nation-states, religions, politics, and corporations are well aware of poetry’s penetrative power, its memorable and musical impressions on us. Speeches, pitches, advertisements, scriptures, anthems, all exploit our subconscious attraction to rhyme, alliteration, parallelism, and other poetic devices. Wouldn’t it be better to get conscious and intentional about poetry? To use our in-built equipment for our own gain and delight?
2. Hold the poem with both hands, and both brains.
Imagine you have to hold a heavy, 15-inch laptop with our left/non-dominant hand for a long time. It will hurt, and you risk dropping the laptop. That’s what has happened with poetry. We have been asked to “appreciate” poems by analyzing them, writing comments, thinking and theorizing upon them, typical left-brain activities. Now imagine holding the same laptop with both hands. Gets easier instantly. In fact, the dominant hand can handle more load. What will happen if we allow our right-brain to take the lead with a poem? Isn’t it more skilled to notice the shape of the poem, the music of its words, the emotions of the poet, the synesthesia of its sensory details? Even Darwin regretted the atrophy of these parts of his brain that had the taste for poetry and music. Can we see, hear, eat, soak, sample, befriend, play with poems, instead of “appreciating” them intellectually?
3. Know that your brain gets LIT AF with metaphors alone.
Metaphors exist inside and outside poetry and make up 13% of all written and 6% of all spoken language. They make our brain ‘touchy feely’ and ‘carry the most truth in the least space’. When a student connected his mother’s love to Biryani, I could immediately feel the yumminess of her nourishing love, as well as the occasional, sharp bite of Elaichi. In fact, metaphors are so useful in making sense of the grey areas of our emotional life, they can be used in therapy!
4. Embody the Poem.
Now imagine, the laptop in #2 was not held by your hands, but rested on top of your lap, where laptops were always meant to be. So light, right? What will happen if we didn’t park a poem only in the brain, what if we let it ride our whole body? A study observed the heart rate, facial expressions, and skin hair of people enjoying poems. They literally got chills and goosebumps! Poems have more rhythm than prose, so they can literally sync with our breath and heartbeat, resembling other rhythmic activities like walking and sex. So next time you meet a poem, even if it is in Spanish, don’t freeze, read it out loud, sigh, vibrate, buzz with it. Embody it.
5. Meet Poetry in Pyjamas.
When I say let’s meet poetry in pyjamas, pyjamas is a symbol for being at home. Wherever you are right now — on the planet and in your life — you are, repeat after me, worthy of poetry. You are worthy of accessing beauty from anywhere, just as you are. You don’t have to chase poetry, wear kohl, have a PhD. You don’t even need a vast vocabulary, you might be better suited for poetry if you are a language learner, because you would be closer to innovation and farther from rules. Be selfish, fight for the custody of poetry from its gatekeepers, be an adult, reclaim it despite all the myths in social and educational spaces.
6. Feast on a Diversity of Poets.
I have to constantly bust myths around poetry in the classroom. In English education, poetry is instantly associated with classic Western poets, writing profound things with archaic words. Nope. It is okay if ‘The West Wind’ and the ‘Snowy Evenings’ didn’t make sense to you. You can travel in space and time to find the rebellious swag of Tupac and Arivu, photography of Basho and Kiarostami, devotion of Therigatha and Hafiz, politics of Dhasal and Faiz, feminism of Audre Lorde and Meena Kandasamy, and the playfulness of Shel Silverstein and Roger McGough. The world of poetry is as big as the world of humans themselves.
7. Discover Poems Online for Free.
The truth is, there was never a better time to pick up poetry again. Poems are the original #shorts and reels of literature. These shots of distilled life are more available than ever and for free. You no longer have to be in a big city, affiliated with a university library, to immerse in a vast range of poetic writing. Poems are not just compiled on websites like Poets.org and Rekhta, they are curated with much passion and creative fervour by projects like The Alipore Post and Poetly. They can be enjoyed in videos and podcasts.
8. Find Your Kinda Poems.
Now, having millions of poems at our fingertips is of no use if we don’t start flirting with them. A phobia is best cured with some exposure therapy. To pick a poem, let’s identify what we already like. We can leverage our established interests while searching for poems. While love, nature, social justice are overpowering themes, we can find poems charting unpopular emotions like anger and grief, we can find poems that touch math and science, sports and medicine, babies and cities, animation and filmmaking, mindfulness and journalism. Even if you are anti-poetry, there are anti-poetry poems, thanks to the Chilean physicist-poet Nicanor Parra.
9. Freely Dislike Most Poems
And yet, we can only read one poem at a time. We don’t need to love all poetry. In fact, I encourage myself and my students to scout only for a few lines that move us. I did not dig 19th century English poetry or Walt Whitman, but I got attracted to the idea “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” and began a small affair with Whitman ever so slowly. Instead of doubting ourselves when we don’t like a poem, we should be very choosy, say Thank U, Next and keep reading.
10. Trust the Process
Trust is everything. Trust that some poems will make more sense at another stage of life. Trust that if you smell hints of ego and self-importance, the poet seeming smarter than the poem, you could be very right. Get some poems printed, read them out loud, twice, thrice, scribble in the margins, some poems might make you sweat a bit, just like your favourite sport. Be patient when the poem seems cryptic, be inspired by the way poets guard their privacy, their chhedkhani of language rules, their refusal to spoonfeed the truth to us, their trust in our common human experiences. Motivated by their voice in our ears, we could write poems too. Writing a few ‘bad’ poems is still the fastest way to truly admire good poetry.
11. Do Poetry Together.
While we could keep this process slightly private initially, only to protect our delicate efforts from both judgement and validation, at some point we could do poetry together. We are not doomed to forever meet in cafes or watch Netflix and Swiggy in some food, we can read out poems to each other as well. We can gift poems. We can memorize a poem, make it our internal jewelry, and recite it on birthdays, weddings, or funerals.
At the end of it all, if we meet one poem, just one, in an authentic, full-brained, embodied way, and something ‘clicks’, it will be worth it.
Our First Event! Poetry in Pyjamas ✨
I thought we could give each other some company in this solitary act of reading poems. Stay tuned for details in the next post.
Help me grow as a writer.
For feedback, hit reply. For encouragement, like the post and
If you know someone who will resonate with this one,
If you know someone who might like these essays
Thanks and shukriya.