Three poems by Chandramohan S: Politics and Poetry

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Does poetry, as Auden wrote in In Memory of W, B Yeats, make nothing happen? It is frequently a bone of contention. Auden himself says far more in that great poem, such as that poetry is "raw towns that we believe and die in" to be dismissed on the basis of a line. In any case I don't think he was suggesting that poetry is naturally quietist, or that it has nothing to say about politics and public life. He was in reaction to the Spanish Civil War and the imminent outbreak of World War II. But as for making things happen, being an instrument of something else, he was sceptical and maybe more than sceptical, in fact morally distrustful as any believer in raw towns might be.

I had much sympathy for that view. Like Keats I distrusted and hated poems that had a palpable design upon us. Surely poetry did not instigate action: it was action. I am not so sure of that now, at least in this sense: that poetry addresses the human condition and that such a condition cannot exclude anything that is a part of it. I still have some difficulty with the idea that poetry should be partisan (surely poetry comes from a place of profound ambiguity) but if partisanship too is part of the human condition, or, rather, if we appeal to the human condition that embraces the partisan rather than renders itself a servant to it, the profundity, grace and precariousness thatn are the essential qualities of poetry can be maintained and explored.

That's a long introduction to give to three fine political poems by a young Indian poet, Chandramohan S, who sent them to me by email. They strike me as powerful, intelligent, witty and sharp. I asked if I could post them here and he said yes, so here they are.

Life has to go on

(For the Paris Terror Attack)

Who are the suicide bombers sneaking into a poem?

Maybe it was the vernacular river

Buried deep under a sign board

That had seceded from the poem

To become a landmine.

Maybe it is the tongue

Spoken by the vanquished minority

Bend like a question mark

To touch the feet of the despot

Before triggering a fireball.

Maybe the loud explosions were

The shrieks of vowels and consonants 

Perennially silenced in the national anthem.

More poems have to be written.

Life has to go on.

*

Surveillance poetic 

“In my rear view mirror is the motherfucking law” –Jay Z -99 problems

(1)

The camera tells us.

Keep your hands where I can see them.

Write your love letter.

(2)

You are under surveillance when chalk scrapes

On the black board,

When we walk in straight lines, march in tune

To the drum beats of uniformed discipline ,

While lip syncing to the national anthem.

(3)

A procession becomes a mime

Pretending its hands are tied,

Blank placards-invisible chains.

*

Elegy for the slain bloggers

(Also P.Murugan)

You see some people are afraid

of darkness

                        -Nyctophobia.

You heard what happened to him?

So we have decided to collectively

Scream against this darkness,

Our sound waves collide.

If we are in sync

The troughs bottom up

The crests add up

We are heard loud enough.

If our screams are

Not in sync

We cancel each other out

Our shadows intersect,

The void of the Umbra.

We become him.

Conform or perish.