How is poetry born?
Is it created by persons? Or does it have a life of its own, trickling into our reality from another plane, the voices of our poets merely portals for their passage? Surely, once produced, they have an existence of their own, independent of the person who penned them. Do they exist before their apparent creation? Maybe they float about the world all the time, invisible and intangible, till the moment they are sublimated on to paper – or a mind – by a person’s ‘poetic instinct’.
No poem is penned by two persons in exactly the same way. This could be because no two persons are exactly the same. Like identical droplets of water that coalesce and form snowflakes, evanescent poetry comes together for a person, taking form as a poem, and no two poems ever to be exactly the same.
And when the poem is found by a reader, it undergoes an efflorescence, unfolding into a mind again, dissolving into droplets of feeling, and the reader finds herself one with her discovery. Every time a poem is read, there is a new mingling of selves, like yet another sliver of rainbow on that flying spray, and hence the poem never gets old.
As time goes by, one day the reader might find thoughts coming together in her mind, something trying to emerge therefrom. Then she will hearken, and as poetry drips onto her palate from somewhere, she will coax forth with her brushes what she sees – and we will have a poem born.
Numberless droplets rain down and float about the world all the time. Many times, countless crystals find their way to the earth, never to send roots into a mind of a reader. Notes that find resonance are rare. And also sometimes, a crudity of some sort may be picked up by someone, and the reflection it casts on that someone’s mirror might be art. In this world of such stuff as dreams are made on, truth and beauty hide in strange nooks.
And if all poetry is similar to water afloat in the atmosphere, what then stands as the atmosphere to poetry? This world that we say sustains poetry – is it a world created in our minds? Is this world real only because we make it real, like perhaps everything is?
