|
I have just come back from being a part of my first mushairra, which is the
word in Urdu (at least I am assumingn it's Urdu) for a traditional gathering
of poets in Pakistan, and it is a very, very different experience from the
kinds of readings we have here in the US. The most significant difference is
not only the degree to which the audience responds to a poet as he or she
reads—calling out baah-baah, or vaah-vaah, after verses or images or rhymes
that have moved them—but also the way in which the poet responds, repeating
the verse that the audience has singled out sometimes two and three times.
With the exception of my poems and the poem read by the guy who invited me
to this event—Paul Catafago, executive director of Movement One—I understood
only a very few words of the other poems that were (Urdu is closely related
to Persian, which I understand and speak a little of), but I would be lying
if I said I appreciated any of it as poetry. What I appreciated was the
openness and sincerity and clear desire to support the people who got up to
read; there was in that room a genuine love for poetry, for language and the
way language can move you, the way language can change the way you see
things—and this was particularly evident in the way the audience would
themselves repeat along with the poet a verse that he or she had already
repeated two or three times—and it's not that audiences in the US don't feel
this, but we certainly don't express it during a reading. We may go up and
say something to the poet afterwards or we might clap at the end of a
particularly moving poem, but we do not, we are trained not to, there is
something in the culture here that prevents us from participating in the
poem as it is read, from giving voice to whatever it is that the poem makes
us feel. It's almost as if we are ashamed of it, which reminds of something
Sam Hamill said in one of his essays about how embarrassed we get as an
audience when the poem a poet is reading moves him or her to tears,
especially if it's a him.
And it is fitting that, as often as not, the responses of the people in the
mushairra were non-verbal, or they were quick, ejaculatory comments, like
the baah-baah I wrote about above. I remember taking a course with Hayden
Carruth when I was studying at Syracuse University and it was about
precisely that, the non-verbal aspects of poetry and how it is those aspects
that often give voice in the poem to the emotional energy that breaks the
bounds of words. Carruth's course was about rhythm and meter and rhyme, but
also about why it is that poets will often spell out the sounds "Ah!" or
"O!" in a line, and we talked a lot about how those things function
similarly to grace notes in music or the way horn players will sometimes
allow their high notes to crack a little bit. In fact, the participation of
the audience at this mushairra reminds me, now that I am writing this, not a
little of the way audiences at concerts will sometimes start spontaneously
to clap their hands to the music.
I read four pieces, two from my translation of the Gulistan and two ghazals
in English, which this audience especially appreciated—most of the poems
that people read, I think were ghazals in Urdu—and I don't think I have ever
felt more warmly received or more genuinely appreciated as a writer than
when I heard this audience express their appreciation and enjoyment right in
the middle of my reading.
_________________________________
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Associate Professor, English
Chair, International Education Committee
Nassau Community College
One Education Drive
Garden City, NY 11530
O: (516) 572-7612
F: (516) 572-8134
[log in to unmask]
www.ncc.edu
[log in to unmask]
www.richardjnewman.com
http://richardjeffreynewman.blogspot.com
|
