What I’d like to say is that we internalised ideas and elements of poetry since we’re just kids.
Hi, there! Greetings from the other side of your screen! I know the title of this blog sounds earnest, but trust me it doesn’t. Really. Actually, this is kind of a personal voyager between poetry and I, which I suppose you can relate.
Unconscious Learning
As a Thai born and bred (and if you are Thai, you may relate to this), like other students from generations to generations, I’d practised reciting lots of things since I could talk. For instance:
- Something students need to say before singing the national anthem—I’m not sure whether it’s a pledge—which is, “Tong Chad Lae Pleng Chad Thai…” (National flag and national anthem…)
- A rhyme like “Phu Yai Ha Pha Mai Hai Sapai Chai Klong Kor…” to help us remember 20 words that are written with a specific vowel
When it came to bedtime, some of our parents would read several bedtime stories.
As we grew up a little more, we read the story of ‘Kaew and Kla’, a boy and a girl living with their family in a suburb with a black, naughty dog. Some were taught to read ‘Mana, Mani, Piti, and Choojai’. (FYI: There’s also a Facebook page of ‘Kaew and Kla’ which you can check whether you read ‘Kaew and Kla’ or else.)
After that, we had to read ‘Wannakhadee Lumnam’ in elementary school and ‘Wannakhadee Wijak’ in high school. We were exposed with many stories from an easy-reading level to canonical pieces of literature.
What I’d like to say is that we internalised ideas and elements of poetry since we’re just kids.
Poetry is Boring
Despite being taught to recite many poems since childhood, it could be said that many Thai people barely have ideas of what the poetry is—and I was that kind of person, too. Moreover, for the worst-case scenario, some people may eventually hate it as they found nothing they could relate to.
To be honest, I don’t blame them for that. For generations, we all know how many Thai language teachers teach Literature. Not to mention that most of the literary works we were taught were merely from those nobles whose writings were always regarded as ‘masterpiece’. There’s no chance for us to read poems written by typical people in school. (Seriously, it has to do with our curriculum and it would be a never-ending discussion for this topic.)
They let you read poems, told you some superficial background of the works—without providing any socio-historical context or literary movements—, translated almost every stanza so you would know what they were talking about without having a chance to analyse and discuss them, and ultimately assigned you to recite different poems every year and mark your scores. That’s what happened and is still happening in Thailand.
Looking back to those days, it was so absurd that we had studied them, but we almost learnt nothing from them. We just let them in and, as you finished your multiple-choice tests, we just let it evaporate.
And that’s the finale episode of ’How We’ve Met Poetry’ season 1.
What Is Poetry, Anyway?
It took me two years to come back and meet my old pal when I majored in English in my sophomore year. I have to say that’s a whole new season of How We’ve Met Poetry.
In the second term of that year, my friends and I had to study Introduction to Poetry and that made me completely blank. Truth be told, I hadn’t got a clue what English poetry would be. I hadn’t even read it that much that I could at least be familiar with it.
I remembered, in the first week of the course, my teacher asked us what poetry was, and we had to dig out our knowledge about it amongst the silence spreading all over the classroom. She then opened a video of ‘Room on the Broom’ and a book of ‘The Gruffalo’ afterwards, and we discussed it whether it’s poetry or not.
And class after class, we had exposed lots of poems—regardless of genres, periods, and techniques—, learnt and discussed them as they were supposed to. We examined each aspect contributing to the poems: historical, societal, political, autobiographical, artistic, etc. We read William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper, Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro, Carl Sandburg’s Chicago, W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Kenneth Goldsmith’s No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, etc. We did explore a lot!
Poetry and I, we got along much more when I had to study Literary Movements courses in my junior year. We read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Donne’s The Flea, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, etc.
It’s like I had met and reconciled with this old friend for the second time after we ended up terribly in high school. Even though I might not know about my friend completely, at least I have befriended this mate in many aspects. And it really broadened my horizon.
After all, if you ask me who my friend really is, I might not be able to answer that question—it’s like when you ask what is life. I just know that it is so vibrant and versatile. Furthermore, maybe all of us cannot fully encapsulate it. It is what it is. (You might want to kill me after reading the previous sentence. Haha.)
How Far Can Poetry Be?
I don’t know how come I have been writing poetry until now. Maybe those ideas have always been inside me for a long time, but I just don’t know how to express them. Like all students, I used to write poems in Thai in school as an assignment, and it’s just that. I once used to write with Thai and English in the same poem. I wrote them and handled them to the teachers and there’s no response from them at all. Just follow the prosody of each genre. There’s no point doing that except for the scores you were marked.
However, since the Introduction to Poetry course, I continued writing poems, but this time in English. (Disclaimer: It doesn’t mean I am so pretentious; I just find my voice and feel more comfortable when writing things in English. That’s all.) And questions came to my mind, how should I write?, Do I have to follow the structure or the prosody?, and if I have to, which one should I need to?
I’d tried writing them, but every time I’d come up with my own structure or no structure at all. And then I realised that it doesn’t matter whether you write poems (or any other genres of writings) in a conventional approach or not. You can write them in any approach, be it a sonnet, acrostic, ode, lament, riddle, haiku, or free verse, as you wish. But what matters is that you have to find your own voice and key messages in them. That’s the point.
Again, the question about to what extent that poetry can be is somehow elusive as it’s fragmented and has its characteristics. One might accept something to be poetry while others might not. For instance:
You might take Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro as just a two-line sentence. (I have to admit that his economical style of writing is so powerful and vividly depicted.)
- You might not regard Bob Dylan’s songs as poetic while he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
- Some people might take Nicki Minaj’s electrifying-and-scandalous lyrics, “My anaconda don’t want none unless you buns, hun” in Anaconda as another piece of poetic works. (Below is a video of a guy reading and appreciating Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda—even though we know this is quite a parody to the song, we may not deny that this song has poetic elements.)
- You might not take Taylor Swift’s, Florence + the Machine’s, FKA Twigs’s, Lady Gaga’s, or even Lana Del Rey’s poetic songs and other forms of art as poetry as I do.
- Someone might think of Rupi Kaur’s collections of poetry as collections of a cliché, shallow writing.
- Most of my friends might not take Kenneth Goldsmith’s No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, which is a 606-page poem full of scattered, gibberish and phrases.
I Just Write
Concerning my approach or style, I’d say it’s kind of spontaneous, or you might say it’s spontaneous poetry as William Wordsworth defined poetry as _“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” _ I write them out of my feelings in those particular moments. I just let them out in a written form or in a countless combination between 1 and 0 that would be visualised on my screen as well as yours.
After all these long passages, I just want to say that poetry is what you give your meaning(s) into it and, like any other genres of writings, I just write. I’m writing to introspect myself and things around me, no matter if I find anything or not. I just keep going on my adventure with my pal, the poetry.
