Nothing is Outside the Framework of Poetry
An Interview with Mukesh Williams
By Rohit Wanchoo
Nothing is outside the framework of poetry but it all depends what a writer wishes to include in it. Poetry is not a single message to the world but multiple messages that escape the intention and control of the poet. Each epoch, century and generation must reinterpret its own world, represent its own reality and create its own priorities. Within these reinterpretations, representations and priorities poetry must find its original telos.
—Mukesh Williams
Rohit Wanchoo: Do you think the Aristotelian idea of poetry has lost its meaning today?
Mukesh Williams: During the time of Aristotle there was no clear separation between the principles of rhetoric and poetry. This is one reason that his Rhetoric was far more popular than his Poetics. It is only later, during the Enlightenment period that his theory of poetry, especially his pronouncements on tragedy, became popular and influenced many writers and their representations of the world. For Aristotle poetry included a wide range of genres such as the lyric, epic and drama. Of these he gave greater importance to drama and especially to one aspect of drama that is tragedy. By and large Aristotle rejected the domain of comedy, which he equated to the orgiastic phallic tradition, which was quite popular in some of the Greek towns during his time. Even today this tradition survives in Japan in the kanamara matsuri enjoyed by young and old alike. Perhaps that could be one reason that serious poetry journals today caution poets not to submit scurrilous or prurient content in poetry. It is quite difficult to explain most of the things Aristotle says and its relevance today in such a short span of time, but out of his key concepts of mimesis, catharsis, peripeteia, mythos, ethos, dianoia, anagonrisis, hamartia, melos and opsis it is the first that is mimesis which has acquired great significance in modern times especially through the Auerbach’s writings and later through the historical investigations of Michel Foucault and Hayden White and Clifford Geertz. Aristotle understood mimesis as both imitation and representation but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries things were so grossly misrepresented that the postmodern thinkers began to interrogate concepts related to practically everything modern—nation, political boundaries, national literatures, dictionaries, history, cartography, identities, and social sciences. The shift has brought into focus the fixing/unfixing of the narrative and the history of representation both in creative writing and academic research. Other aspects of Aristotle such as purgation, reversal, and miscalculation, what the Romantics called a tragic flaw in character, have lost their importance. Lexis and melos are still quite important but spectacle has lost its power. Modern predicament itself is a spectacle and we poets cannot do better than the television, Internet or the newspaper in creating awesome spectacles. When we were in college we studied Aristotelian notion of tragedy and we still remember by heart its definition,
Tragedy then is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play, in the form of action, not of narrative, through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions.
I remember we had to explain the word catharsis as the purgation of the excess of emotions of pity and sympathy as our drama teacher would think we were complete idiots if we could not recite these lines. However, in modern times, life itself is so tragic that talking about tragedy is rather meaningless.
R.W.: Do you think poetry should communicate emotions recollected in tranquilly, should possess negative capability, use objective correlative or escape from emotion?
M.W.: Yes, the ideas of Wordsworth, Keats and Eliot have partial validity today, but these ideas also create hegemony of sorts, literary theories that tend to be dictatorial in nature. Aesthetics and literary theories have limited validity and sometimes none beyond a framework. Look who reads The Sacred Wood today? Who reads Keats’ letters to understand his concept of negative capability, the uncertainties of the poetic endeavor? Who reads Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads to understand the “spontaneous overflow of emotions” or “emotions recollected in tranquility?” Poetic theories are expressions of the philosophical, political and social thinking of the times and cannot be therefore separated from them. Today these theories about poetry have little value.
R.W.: I would like to ask you about the kind of emotions that should be represented in poetry. Should they be happy or sad?
M.W.: Here I want to make a point, which Henry Derozio also made one and a half century ago, the Eurasian poet who initiated Indian writing in English. Derozio felt that the poetry of English writers from Shakespeare to Burns was rather melancholic and depressing. He felt that poetry should be optimistic and should give hope. This was the new Indian aesthetics Derozio was enunciating about one hundred and fifty years ago. I am not saying that you do not write about depressing aspects of life like Mathew Arnold or Pablo Neruda but to lose sight of hope and joy would be to give in to the excesses of reality and then it would be impossible to change anything in the world. Obviously Aristotle laid greater emphasis on language, rhythm and harmony something that has survived even today in good poetic expression. Since Aristotle was quite popular in the Arabic speaking countries, and commentaries on him in Arabic were available right through the Middle Ages, especially commentaries by Al-Farabi and Averroes, the Arabic literary sphere was able to imbibe the Aristotelian tradition quite well.
R.W.: Thank you for the comment on Aristotle. My next question arises from what you have said earlier. Do you think modern writers are still quite influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics?
M.W.: Well, not directly but through received ideas of order, symmetry and form. But then there are novelists like Umberto Eco who would go on to write books like The Name of the Rose and directly incorporate some of the ingredients of Aristotelian Poetics in his work. And mind you Eco’s Rose is a masterpiece thriller. Once you pick it up you cannot put it down till you unravel the mystery it creates. And everything has to do with words. The referential meaning that goes beyond the text must have surprised Eco too.
R.W.: Do your childhood memories shape your sensibilities and your poems?
M.W.: Let me admit that the lyrical and cynical aspects of my poetry has to do in large measure with my childhood experiences in the sylvan surroundings of Allahabad, India and my expatriate experiences in urban Tokyo, New York, Santa Barbara and other places. I was born in an Indian Christian family in Allahabad, and grew up in the multi-religious environment of Civil Lines and George Town. Early in life I developed a syncretistic approach to culture and civilization that allowed me to incorporate the mythical liquefaction of the Ganga River, the shehnai of Bismillah Khan and the ethos of cathedrals and churches. My desire to synthesize disparate cultural and religious traditions finds expression in my choice of words, themes, metaphors and symbols. I get into any subject from the inside whether I am composing in free verse, satire, rhyme or haiku. Some of my symbols relating to life, energy, death and moksha are drawn from the philosophies and mythologies of both the Asian and European worlds. It is possible to see in my oeuvres the influence of philosophers like Nietzsche, Foucault, MacIntyre, Derrida, Krishnamurti, Feyerabend, Rorty, Hayden White and others. Some of my European critics have seen flowing rhythms, mellifluous sounds and intellectual sophistication in my poetry. My poems deal with the native traditions of India and the diasporic experiences of people living in the United Kingdom, Lebanon, United States and Japan capturing the essence of their lonely human existence and their conflict and cooperation with social systems and institutions.
R.W.: Do you think you are an Allahabadi at large or an Indian in Tokyo? Is location important in shaping your sentiments and moods or are you now a global citizen contributing to a cosmopolitan culture?
M.W.: It all depends on the subject I’m writing about and the emotion I wish to capture. Also there are times when I imagine Allahabad in Tokyo. But I’m an Allahabadi at heart. The intensity and immediacy of my language is Hindustani, the khari boli of UP and the Jesuit discipline of St. Joseph’s School, Allahabad. The Ganga to me is one of the most beautiful rivers in the world, its magic is eternal and 7 Mayo Road, the house I once lived in as a child the most fascinating place, which shaped my imagination and love of my surroundings.
R.W.: Do you think there is something in particular that you want to express in your poems or are they random reflections?
M.W.: My poems begin as random reflections but as these reflections grow they acquire shape and coalesce into a representation of language, culture, belief, or identities. Soon the tone and structure begin to interrogate all or some of these representations, unhinge them, and collapse them into metaphors and then deconstruct them. And finally put them all back together. I wish to capture a mood, a tone of voice, then introduce some words, not battered by time and overuse, to strike a counterpoise between their intention and meaning. I am not after the fact as some anthropologists might like to do, but after a new hermeneutical area of reference, a new hermetic meaning collapsing ontology itself. The poet must know to some extent what he is trying to do with his material and then expose or unravel the hegemony of the material, in his case the hegemony of words. Intentions in both life and poetry are diverse and multifarious. Sometimes I wish to capture one thing and sometimes another. There are times when I wish to capture nothing and just play with words. Even then if I string words together they do convey a meaning, often profound. I play with most poetic forms but many editors shy away from rhyme or complicated metrical forms like the terza rima or Pindaric or Horatian odes. I do not write in Middle English as nobody speaks it anymore and editors don’t want it.
R.W.: Is there any connection between your religious and political beliefs and your poetry?
M.W.: My poetry is not rooted in but transcends my religious and political beliefs. I do not write to convey truth, or convince others but to represent phenomena, emotions, the universe and above all language itself. I do not communicate a message but represent the changing nature of messages. I celebrate the idea of the universe with others, whatever their religious or political beliefs might be, whatever language they may speak. My poems are here for a moment and then gone taking away an ism, representation or an idea. You come back to them and they convey different things or have just vanished like dewdrops in the sun.
R.W.: Do you think it is easier to communicate your ideas in poetic form?
M.W.: Well, yes I do. The modern world is impatient and wants everything in a moment without making much effort. Once it gets hooked to an interesting idea it will spend time to unravel its mysteries. So the poem is the best poetic genre of postmodern times.
R.W.: Painters often paint in order to relax not just to express themselves: do you write poems to unwind and relax or to release pent up emotions?
M.W.: Yes I also write to relax. Poetry comes naturally to me and I enjoy playing with words, formulating idea and juxtaposing different levels of reality, mingling a new image of the cosmos and somewhere along the way I go to sleep. The world wakes up to read what I had written. In the morning I read their responses on the Internet and feel a genuine sense of surprise at the way they understand my linguistic world through theirs. It’s an amazing thing the way the world is connected linguistically. It always tries to locate a purpose and a meaning to any and everything that is represented linguistically.
R.W.: Has living in Japan influenced your poetic style and sensibility?
M.W.: Yes it has, especially the collapsing of metaphors, phrases and sentences in daily life and poetic representations. See everyone in Japan is involved in miniaturizing or abbreviating reality, representing experience through suggestions, kenjogo, cultural conventions that are more deeply rooted and shared here than in any other country. Who could have given the brevity and subtlety of the haiku genre other than the Japanese poets? See the Japanese manga, ketai and messages; they are all small and compact. Japanese stock phrases like osaki-ni, gomenasai, arigato or gambatte kudasai might have lost their uniqueness but are short and pithy statements expressing a wider cultural code that has shared connotations. Japanese also use kanji for brevity and precision. Kanji is a precise representation of the world. What can be expressed in many sentences in English can be written through a few Kanji characters quite easily. Some of my haiku in English may sometimes reflect these aspects.
R.W.: You have published a lot on the Internet and also brought out books of poetry. Which do you prefer: A printed book or e-journal publishing?
M.W.: Well, both. Old style print books and modern style e-journal publishing have their strengths and weaknesses. I belong to the old world when it was considered worthwhile to publish a chapbook or a small book of poems even at one’s own cost and distribute to friends gratis, but that kind of publishing did not have a large readership unless you were Rabindranath Tagore or Nissim Ezekiel. In the last two decades the publishing world has seen the Internet revolution that has altered our priorities and expectations. Chapbooks and print poetry are still there but they are losing ground to the Internet. The challenge of e-journals is immense and quite insurmountable. Writers expect to see their works immediately online and do not wish to wait six months for their book to hit the stores. And anyway nobody ever made a living out of writing poetry. So poets don’t publish a book because they want to become rich; they publish to reach out to a larger audience. Even a great writer like T.S. Eliot feared that nobody would read him after he was dead and wrote the following lines,
Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fulfilled best shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
R.W.: Where are these lines from?
M.W.: From the Four Quartets, from Little Gidding. I remember as I had a special paper on TSE in my MA. And that year I topped the university as I remembered most of the moderns. This comes in the second section of Little Gidding, which begins with the haunting lines,
Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
And Little Gidding ends with these equally haunting lines,
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
But then Eliot is fond of being absurdly philosophical and can be quite boring even in a poem like this. Add all the Christian allusions and references from the Bhagvadgita and Frazer’s The Golden Bough and you have an impossibly difficult poet to read and understand. It is not that other poets have not made references to The Golden Bough. Yeats did it in “Sailing to Byzantium.” William Carlos Williams, D.H. Laurence, Ezra Pound, Thomas Pynchon and a host of other writers have done it too. Eco alluded to The Golden Bough in his book Foucault’s Pendulum. But Eliot chose to be quite exhaustive in his allusions to The Golden Bough. We have to read The Golden Bough to understand Eliot. Today, with Internet publishing, the day for writing long Eliotic poems or even long Aristotelian narratives are over. Editors want short pithy pieces, which can stand on their own, which can be published on a single page on the screen. Also readers do not have the patience to keep up with a long poem. Long poems do not work anymore.
R.W.: This brings me to the next question. Do you have any personal experience with editors who do not like long poems?
M.W.: Yes a couple of times. Let me tell you an interesting incident. I once wrote long poem in two parts, about four pages on Bharatvarsha that is India. I thought it was a nice poem and I wanted it to be the central poem of a collection that I wanted to bring out. But before that I thought I should get it published as an independent poem on the Internet. I sent the poem to three e journals but no one wanted to publish it. Then I reduced it to half its length. Still there were no takers. Finally I threw the poem out, lock stock and barrel. I sat down and wrote a three-stanza poem of seven lines each and called it “Representing India” and it got published. Here is the poem,
Conceive her in any way you wish to
In any language you want to,
You may choose Persian, Arabic or
Any of the modern European languages
To locate the hypostasis of Al Hind, Hindustan, or India,
You may dig into its geological, linguistic or technological warrens
And come up with religious conflict, squalor and disease,
You may as an Indian envision her
As an iconographic matryabhumi,
Mythologize her to serve a nationalist cause,
Even transform her into a male entity of King Bharata
And call her Bharatvarsha
Or eulogize her rectitude and aesthetic
Through the lyrics of Tarana-e-Hind,
You may imagine her as Mother India or Mother Teresa,
Privileging social justice over family revenge,
Serving irrefragable bahujan hitye,
You may try to contain her
Through your imagination, literatures,
Myths, celluloid representation, but
India will always have something more to prefigure.
R.W.: We wrote an academic book together on a Mori grant called Representing India which was published from OUP in 2008. Would you like to talk about it?
M.W.: Thank you for your kind question. You know better than I do, as you were a coauthor. Yes the book traces the history of the ways in which India and its various institutions have been represented in the last two hundred years ranging from its politics, language, literature, identity, and media to its caste, religion and Diaspora. In that sense it certainly has a postmodern flavor drawing from and synthesizing diverse intellectual traditions. The book seemingly has been quite popular amongst the readers, as Oxford University Press has brought out another edition within less than a year of its publication. The book also talks about the ways upper caste Indian literary critics marginalized Muslim and Christian writers of the early nineteenth century like Din Muhammad and Henry Derozio in order to create a pure Indian tradition of writing in English.
R.W.: Poetry is finally words in action, words creating their own little universes. What do you think of constructing an experience, a poem, through words? What is the significance, or in a Kantian sense, their validity?
M.W.: If you are talking about their universal validity, well none. Let me put it this way. The desire for poetic representation may be hermeneutic in nature but its linguistic construction and genealogical references are hermetic in representation. By hermeneutics I mean the total interpretative process including the hermeneutic circle which refers to the complex and ever-changing relationship between the writer, reader and the text, and by hermetic I imply writing as a sealed process and words in writing as free floating entities possessing multiple references. The poem is not a medium for some message but a site for differance. Perhaps both Foucault and Derrida would have disagreed with me here or perhaps not. But let me explain. The modern state endorses a biological power structure, constantly legitimizing itself by nurturing individual lives and desires.
Remember the state fosters the capabilities, pleasures, comforts and desires of individuals in its governance and then integrates them within its political and economic goals. The modern state encourages the practice of acquiring self-knowledge through self-reflection. And this practice may be termed hermeneutical. A hermeneutical method gives greater emphasis to individual subjectivity such as self-discovery, self-expression, and self-fulfillment. Foucault showed that individual subjectivity was part of the Christian confessional mode that emphasized the seeking of spiritual and ethical knowledge. However he did not deny that pre-Christian philosophies and worldviews also laid emphasis on subjectivity. Poetry is therefore part of this hermeneutical activity, a hermeneutical desire of self-expression, representing inner subjectivity. I would also like to take a hermetic view of language like Derrida does. Words are not self-referential, independent entities but always tend to refer to other words, other roots and meanings. They have less of a denotative aspect and more of a connotative aspect to them. Derrida attacks the fallacious arguments of logocentrism that places a text within logos of word, reason or spirit and introduces a hermetic model calling it grammatology. There is no writer or speaker who can claim this is exactly what he wants to say or express. Words contain their own independence; texts tend to be free of the intention of the author. Words have their own unique histories and the author cannot separate such histories. In fact he inadvertently gets involved in them. Our understanding of a word or a text depends on other words and other texts and the infinite list or string of signifiers continues leaving behind traces of deferments, what Derrida calls differance. The writer just chooses a word in preference for the other. There is no clear justification or logic but just a suppression of words, other meanings. A writer can therefore function as a theorist, creator or subverter even at times a buffoon, but once he uses language he creates a indeterminate reality of words. Meaning does not exist in the mind of the writer it is created by a string of words. Words after all do not express ideas; they create a new linguistic reality. Therefore at times I am surprised by the uniqueness of my poems after I read them. I get surprised by the way the words are woven together, the way they involve a historical process, represent a tenuous stain of meaning, referring back and forth, escaping my manipulation.
R.W.: You seem to be too deeply involved in the processes of modern philosophy especially deconstruction, hermeneutics and post-foundationalism. Don’t you think that poetic activity is different from philosophizing?
M.W.: As I said earlier in the interview during Aristotle’s time there was no separation between logic and poetry. Even postmodern philosophers like Derrida do not tend to separate poetry from philosophical inquiry. Foucault, Lacan and Derrida were always trying to decenter, unhinge the hegemony of words; the way words were used for political and other purposes. I too attempt to understand the way certain sentiments, emotions, ideas, feelings share a history and pass through corridors of power, historical activity, literary coups and carry their own weight, damnations and freedoms.
R.W.: Do you have any advice for emerging writers?
M.W.: Well, I do not teach poetry, so I may not have any advice to give them. Every writer must find his own interest, develop his own ability and create his own niche audience. But poetry is life and to reject something from it would make it that much less. Nothing is outside the framework of poetry but it all depends what a writer wishes to include in it. Poetry is not a single message to the world but multiple messages that escape the intention and control of the poet. Each epoch, century and generation must reinterpret its own world, represent its own reality and create its own priorities. Within these reinterpretations, representations and priorities poetry must find its original telos.
R.W.: Thanks Mukesh for sharing your ideas with us on a wide range of topics that not only included writing and poetry but also philosophy, representation and aesthetics as well.
M.W.: Thank you for your sharp and incisive queries. It was my pleasure to think deeply and respond to your questions.
About the poet :
Mukesh Williams is an international poet, a distinguished literary critic and university teacher. He has a doctorate in Contemporary American Literature from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and has taught English and American Studies at IIT Madras. He has also taught English St. Stephen’s College, Delhi for nearly two decades. He now teaches English, American Studies and South Asia at Keio University-SFC and Soka University, Japan. He has published nearly fifty research papers and coauthored a book with Dr. Rohit Wanchoo entitled Representing India: Cultures, Politics, and Identities published from Oxford University Press in 2008 dealing with the representation of politics, language, literature, identity, media, religion, caste, and the Indian diaspora over the last two centuries. Both as a member and former international advisor to MELUS-India he has presented papers at its international conferences. He has also published dozens of analytical articles on political and social issues relating to India and Japan, over 150 poems in national and international journals, a book of poems entitled Nakasendo and Other Poems from Writers Workshop Calcutta, and articles on Hindu tradition and culture. He is also a short story writer and his short stories have been published in international journals including The Copperfield Review. He has won many academic awards including the Soka University Award of Highest Honour, 1999. He is listed in the World Poetry Directory, UNESCO 2008 and Marquis Who’s Who in the World. He can be contacted through his blog site.
About the interviewer:
Rohit Wanchoo has worked on modern South Asia at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and Cambridge University in Britain. He has taught history at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi for over two decades and now heads the department. He has presented over a dozen distinguished papers at various conferences in India. He is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious magazine The Stephanian published from St. Stephen’s College Delhi, which apart from other thing also publishes a wide range of poetry.