Editorial: November 2009

October 27, 2009 . . . once
on a bus
I had an unhappy poetry reading experience
because poetry
is written in lines
the people round me thought
I had got my hands on some
weird gobbledegook
to turn their looks of astonishment
back to a dullness so like that of reality
I had no choice but to close the book
and any poems that had spread their wings

(from ‘The Birds Are Dead Now’ by Fang Xianhai)

In his 1917 essay ‘Art as Technique’, Russian writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky developed the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarisation in literature. “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” he wrote. The process of defamiliarisation forces us to reconsider the familiar world around us with fresh eyes, to “[remove] objects from the automatism of perception” so that we perceive anew their magnificence, or, as may be the case, their awfulness.

Literary language, and particularly the language of poetry, the Russian Formalists argued, achieves this perceptual defamiliarisation through linguistic defamiliarisation: ‘foregrounded’ devices such as repetition, rhyme, rhythm, line and stanza breaks, metaphor, symbols, ambiguity and imagery defamiliarise language itself, so that altered perception comes through the slowed down, attentive process of reading. “The technique of art,” Shklovsky wrote, “is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.”

This linguistic defamiliarisation is the cause of the bus passengers’ astonishment in Fang Xianhai’s poem ‘The Birds Are Dead Now’. His description of their perception of poetry as “weird gobbledegook” in turn defamiliarises poetry itself to the seasoned poetry reader: Fang Xianhai reminds us that poetry is strange and potentially subversive in its attack on ‘dullness’.

The world as perceived and described by the poets in this month’s issue of PIW is far from dull. Various techniques of defamiliarisation enable the reader to look anew at familiar objects and places, and at the act of writing itself.

For example, in Belgium poet Geert van Istendael’s ‘Lullaby for the Sleepless’, “the stars you know, you think, so far, up there” are in fact “holes from which threads hang”, and in van Istedael’s imagination, sleep is not an action but an entity, a “dark-blue” balm that “glides along the threads into the chimneys”. Similarly, Portuguese poet Daniel Jonas, whom Osvaldo Silvestre describes as being “in the lineage of poets for whom the poetic word ‘lends unlikeness/ to the common usage’”, also wakes the reader out of “the automatism of perception”. In ‘The electric lights, it may well be that the electric lights . . .’, a “bird call at the window” is described as being (after a line break which foregrounds the surprising and yet autumnally apt simile) “grey as an overcoat”.

PIW India editor Arundhathi Subramaniam notes in Giriraj Kiradoo’s poems “a recurrent perspective of aeriality” which “seems to be the poet’s chosen strategy to defamiliarise the immediate world”. This defamiliarisation is achieved not only through metaphor and unusual perspectives, however, but also through repetition and unconventional syntactic structures which create a sense of bewilderment. The reader of his poems is propelled forwards by the lack of punctuation and clear sentence breaks and yet also forced to slow down in order to make sense of the text in poems such as ‘Rooftop’:

a voice that could be a rooftop and sitting on the rooftop of the
house under it listening to the world that sounds like being fired
upon we were slowly losing the basement from under us which we
saw being created sitting alone on the rooftop

Oxford University Professor of Poetry nominee Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poems employ more conventional syntax but he too portrays a world viewed from a unique perspective, and in which imagination and reality are intertwined. ‘Two Lakes’ challenges the ‘ordinary’, automatic conception of what a lake is in its description of one lake that is “completely /Artificial”, its surroundings inferred from the reflections in it, and one lake, haunted by ghosts of colonialism relegated now to imagination and folklore, which is “clean / To the point of invisibility”.

In her political poems of resistance, Zimbabwean Freedom Nyamubaya defamiliarises the body through metaphor and simile, highlighting it as a locus of oppression and suffering as well as marvels: her brain is “ a cold room /That stores torturous secrets”; her flesh is “like a football /Kicked all the way round”, the skin on her “amazing stomach” is “slippery . . . like a puff-adder”. The revolutionary Telugu poet Varavara Rao uses imagery of a beaten, dead body as a metaphorical device in his politically charged portrait of a pillaged forest in ‘When the Moonlight Moves Into The Dark’: the forest has a “broken back and blown-out belly”; “robes” are “stitched in the hide of skinned forest”; death sentences are written “on the intestinal pages of the woods”.

But perhaps the most striking defamiliarisation in this issue occurs in Belgian Ruth Lasters’ poem ‘Bite’, a surreal love poem which plays on the associations of apples with original sin through startling imagery. After reading it, you may never look at a stack of apples again without imagining them packed inside someone’s “legs, skull [and] chest” – nor at someone’s body without picturing apples nestling just under their skin.