15 - 21 November 2001
Issue No.560
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 15 - 21 November 2001 Issue No.560 |
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Plain talk
I am what you might call a poetry fiend; of all the arts I love poetry most. When I am in cheerful mood, I flick through my various anthologies and collections and lose myself in one of them. When I am sad or chagrined, I do the same. The only time I have no interest in poetry is when I am in a neutral mood: placid, quiet, neither happy nor upset.
At one time, in fact, with youthful hopes, I tried my hand at versification; I might add that my heart was in it, too. I was an English literature student then, at the Fouad Al-Awwal University, and for four years running I won first prize in the sonnet competition. The form and structure of the sonnet thrilled me, and I just wrote on, but only, as might be expected, in English.
It provided, in so many ways, a necessary discipline, this writing in such a strictly defined form. One needed to think, very carefully, what one wanted to say, and then organise those thoughts and feelings so precisely that they could be expressed within 14 decasyllabic lines. The sonnet is a demanding form. It brooks no sloppiness, demanding a concise expression of whatever the writer is seeking to say. I can think of few better ways to develop the skills necessary to express yourself in English than to become immersed in the writing of sonnets.
I never tried writing in Arabic, though, not for lack of knowledge of my mother tongue, which became my principal tool of expression in other contexts, but simply because in those formative years my readings were all in English. By the time I was a regular contributor to the Arabic press, as Schopenhauer would put it, I had passed the poetry writing phase. "One sees that poetry bears the character of youth;" the philosopher wrote in his World as Will and Idea, "and also the susceptibility for poetry is often passionate in youth; the youth delights in verse as such. This inclination gradually diminishes with years, and in old age," he adds, "one prefers prose."
Schopenhauer goes on to explain that the poetic tendencies of youth spoil a sense of the real, for poetry, he maintains, differs from reality "by the fact that in it life flows past us, interesting and yet painless; while reality, on the contrary, so long as it is painless, is uninteresting; and as soon as it becomes interesting, it does not remain without pain."
Schopenhauer's conclusion is remarkably applicable today. "The youth," he says, "...initiated into poetry earlier than into reality now derives from the latter what only the former can achieve; this is the principal source of the discomfort which oppresses the most gifted youths." He goes on to mention what I believe to be the holy grail of modern poets, in Arabic as well as other languages, namely rhyme and metre, debating, prophetically, whether they are a veil that prevents the poet from speaking as he otherwise would. It is this veil, Schopenhauer asserts, that generates our pleasure.
I do not want to go on to explain Schopenhauer's theory at length here, but I am surprised that he is no longer studied at colleges and universities, having found no place in the midst of the cryptic, poorly articulated lit crit of construction, deconstruction and whatever else of those discourses, that appear as incomprehensible as, to me at least, they are unconvincing.
But to return to the original idea, the love of poetry: reading poetry, in old age, is a form of enjoyment and therapy. Yet Margaret Atwood's recent shift to poetry would suggest that, with regard to writing it, Schopenhauer's dictum does not always hold true. Even in old age, it seems, and with the benefit of experience and pain, poetry can still engage our hearts. I am not claiming that I might start writing poetry again myself, but it is cheering, even heart warming, to know that it is still possible. And in that -- the continued expansion of possibility -- lies one of the great solaces of poetry. It is a necessary solace, and one I could not imagine being without.
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