In Another Country: The Location of Poetry

The poet’s struggle to adhere to difficult forms—like the ghazal, sestina and villainelle—is a metaphor for a larger greater struggle to reconcile himself to the world. The completion of poetry is the triumph of mind over matter. Yet ultimately the rough rhythms, parenthetical statements or juxtapositions that manifests within the lines show the difficulty of using art as a plane for resolution.

In Bruce William’s “End Without World,” the speaker aims to find worldly meaning through the lover, despite the deformities and bleakness of a materialistic and exploitative world. But the enjambments highlight the difficulty of reconciliation. The enjambment in between the verses “We shall be God/for forgiveness” highlights the difficulty of displaying magnanimity and acceptance of the order of things.

In Rafiq Kathwari’s “In Another Country,” we see the speaker’s attempt to conjure his mother and possibly, regain a lost faith? The successive lines “in the rain” become a desperate chant or prayer to reach the mother. But the line that “In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain” juxtaposes absence and presence, memory and present, art and reality. The poem becomes the emotional space that transcends the boundaries of geography and the physical landscape. The progression through the poem records the speaker’s increasing proximity to his mother. If the first stanza sharply delineates the different physical locations of the mother and son, “In Kashmir, half asleep, Mother listens to the rain. / In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain,” the last few stanza’s confuse the locations of mother and son and depict a landscape where spatial boundaries do not matter, “I hear her call over the city din.” The title “Another Country” aptly reinforces the idea that poetry is the opening of another space where imagined realities and desires, needs are fulfilled.

In Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”, the poem seems to execute a sort of intervention with memory. Immediate, daily routines and rituals force their way into the poem. The repetition of “stove” and “child” points to the duties that the old grandmother has to attend to, distracting her from loss. The repetition of “almanac” shows a valiant attempt to see loss as an event intrinsically intertwined with fate and inevitable. The last stanza is the beginning of a new sestina, and possibly marks a change in heart. Yet the sestina has the effect of repeating words like “tears”, “grandmother”, seem to arrest the poem in a type of melancholia, accentuating and prolonging grief. Time seems to stand still in the hypnotic world of the sestina. The title of the poem “Sestina” suggests the recovery is only a process enacted in the realm of art.

Each poem seems a sort of speech-act, an attempt to interfere with immediate reality. Ultimately, despite how each poem seeks to open up a new space, outside reality, the tensions in the poems show how loss, poverty and distance still interfere with the poetic project. Each work is still suspended between its ideal and reality.