Sufia Khatoon
To,
Roy, the Essayist
Living in the Steel Tube City
Dear Roy,
Hope you have been happy experiencing the slithering sky and steel tunnels leading to the Moon this monsoon.
I received your book and how could I not write to you for you wrote to me in your essays, a deep search for all that is chaotic and beautiful in poetry.
For years I have been digging feverishly, searching for new burrows and reading. In my library, buried deep under the soil and out of the blaring eyes, I found a cozy nest that is able to withstand passing Time and temperament patiently.
With now a -1.75 lens patched on my left eye and farsightedness, my specs are fatter and thicker from reading whatever I could rummage over the years.
To my surprise you are like an adventurer, spiraling around the poetry world in 365 days. I read the essays through a technicolour lens that you built for the readers in your book Write to Me. Your understanding of the texture, flavour, language and tone of the poems speak about your process of working with poets’ mind closely. You head into its enunciations with urgency and empathy, which might inflict pain, euphoria, unsettling feelings, loss, death and at times life moving in full force of metaphors glazed in fire and soil of the poet’s vulnerabilities and truths. Like chocolate is tempered over heat, you let the poems touch you head-on in indescribable ways to highlight the 35 authors’ fearless tongue and experiences to the readers in the essays.
You know, I desire to look at the sun someday and travel the world but my circumstances are against me. But books like yours have helped me travel inside the real and unreal world poetry is capable of creating. Such dexterity, vigour, fearlessness, pain, intense conflicts with the outside world, complexities and rigidity of thought, patterns of emotions lined with turbulence of ‘the self’ and the idea of belonging and the desire to be invisible. I have felt everything deeply.
They are all here – the books you read, the poets you met and the search for the effervescence of poetry.
As you stated, poetry is speaking from the margins, cracks and fault lines, the wounds, the pain, expressing emotions, inclusivity and acceptance, bearing witness to the conflicts and confrontations, converging the void with deflecting meanings, the metronome of words and poets’ imageries, encoding the inner and outer world.
To say one has understood what poetry means or largely defines is to say one has finished reading a book of poems like one reads through prose. Done and moved forward to another book, poetry books, unlike prose, always call you back to reread them and each time you find something new and entirely fresh, one is always in awe of poetry and its possibilities of surprising readers.
The criticism I realized is a double edged sword, you can’t but bleed when you touch it closely, like you pointed out in your various essays Journeying between worlds: Crowbite, Across Time, Poetry and Memory: First Contact, In a Burning Tongue: Masculinity Digs a Grave over My Body, The Art of Attention: The Real and Unreal, Agony of Speech: The Untouchable and Other Poems, Cartography of Identity: What’s Wrong with Us Kali Women?, Championing an Identity sans Signifiers: We are Not the Others: Reflection of a Transgender Artivist, Sufist Reconstruction of a Broken World: Evening with a Sufi, A Marginal Place in Poetry: letters in lower case, Grief as Vestibule: The Natural language of Grief, A Case for the Body: My Body didn’t come Before Me, The Multiplicity of Heritage: Mandalas of Time, The Seduction of Language: Meanwhile, Poetry as Pilgrimage: My Invented Land, Writing like a Woman: The Wild Weed, As Assertion of Sisterhood: Unbound, etc to name a few, neatly arranged on the book shelf of The Essayist.
The idea of criticism in poetry is to invite readers to the possibilities of questioning, researching, studying and working on the inclusivity of poetry in criticism. What is poetry then if not shared with the community and projected into a larger poetryscape to sustain its essence over the years in evolving the forms and poetic styles? Write to Me is a fine example of poetry in criticism which is possible if done with a microcosmic and macrocosmic focal point of view. So I did sit with binoculars to let in the light in my dark burrow and write on the walls, the paper, the shelves and the mirror, anything I could find to savour the experience of reading.
To those who seek, poetry reveals its mysticism and truth.
From your silent reader,
The Speckled Mole
Living in the shaking burrow
Holding on to the City’s weight