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THOR KAH HOONG interviews Malaysian poet Raja Ahmad Aminullah, resulting in gentle observations of Raja Ahmad's newly published book of poetry.To: soulship@rumahykp.org.mySubject: Menyarung Jiwa Soulship
Dear Raja Ahmad,
In the conversation we had in my bookstore last week, you made a point of noting the e-mail address (the one above) printed on the last page of your collection of poems. That and a postal address were there because you sought opinions, views, feedback
When you made that point, my mind took an unexpected quirky leap and landed on a humorous observation that I had read decades ago (possibly one of those one-liners that padded space at the end of a feature in the Readers’ Digest), something that I had forgotten until you expressed your wish for a response.
Don Marquis, the humorist: “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo.”
Or to use an analogy from a world I am intimate with, poetry is like reciting Dylan Thomas’ great tone-poem/script Under Milk Wood to an audience of the deaf.
By and large poetry doesn’t sell, isn’t read. The Nobel Prize must help the circulation of those occasional poets who are honoured. Without his adoption in syllabi all over the English-speaking world, would T.S. Eliot have been read voluntarily by the thousands who have done so?
And I can remember an episode in Neruda’s memoirs when he read his poems to hundreds of striking miners in the rain. I remember putting myself in his shoes, and imagining the electric charge he must have felt when the miners (one would have expected them to be illiterate) recited his lines with him.
And I remember in the 1960s, when I was going through a Gregory Samsa experience and metamorphosing into a flower, Rod McKuen was a bestseller. Even then, I didn’t think McKuen was much of a poet. Soppy, soggy sentiments that appealed to those readers whose otherwise favourite reading were greeting cards. Some of his lines were turned into pop hits. Remember Seasons in the Sun with its profound chorus: “We had joy/We had fun/We had seasons in the sun?”?
But for every Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or Rendra who can strike a resonant echo in thousands of people with the sound and meaning of their words, there are hundred of others whose work are known only to a coterie (and thousands of aspiring others who, frankly, deserve the oblivion that greets their gushing sentiments).
To quote an early poem of Adrian Mitchell:
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.That is one charge that cannot be raised against your poems. Even when they are looking into a personal interior, there is a connection to a wider world, as in the poem Loss:
Menyarung Jiwa/Soulship is a collection of three decades of poems, and a common thread running through all of them, from the lines written in the 1970s when you were a student to the ones scribbled last year, is the strong commitment to social (not political) justice.
In our conversation, you made the distinction between social and political concerns, not wanting your poems to be linked to the political arena in which you are now engaged. And I accepted your explanation.
Some of the poems written in the 70s may have had battlegrounds like Pretoria and the Mekong Delta and the Middle East planted like red flags and banners amidst the lines, but your concerns are largely for the suffering many, seldom, if ever, for political cant. As for the latter, that is understandable because most juvenile writers are vulnerable to sloganeering sentiments until the infiltration of maturity sets.
(Though I must say you are a far braver man than I. I have had an auto-da-fé of much of my juvenile scribblings. Thank God, none of them made it to publication, except for one derivative non-script that was published in a university literary journal, and I am hopeful most copies of that journal have been re-cycled or are part of a landfill.)
To quote two lines of a poet who was my first master/guide to the elements of poetry, ArchibaldMacLeish:
A poem should not mean but be.
If there is an imbalance in some of your poems, I feel it is that – too much thought. When I asked you for the genesis of your poems, whether it be image or phrase or thought, you picked thought. When I asked you whether the humanistic concerns/content of the poems were meant to convert or preach, you chose the phrase, “a sharing of thoughts”.
That issue interestingly diverted us into talking about the art of people like Diego Rivera and whether one could separate the beautiful and the decorative elements of their work from the political content.
And from there we diverted into talk about the music and the art that is now germinating in the younger generations of Malaysians.
That is a remarkable feature in you, that for all your years moving in the rarefied circles of corporate boardrooms, you have not only maintained a continuing interest in the arts – that could have been just translated into a knowledge of established masters like Latiff or Ib or Mozart – but you still stay tuned to grunge bands and indie filmmakers and graffiti artists.
That wealth of references, including the reading of people like Neruda, Ferlinghetti, Havel and Hamka, have contributed to the resonance and echoes of your poems.
Near the end of our afternoon together, you noted that any mature society should have the infrastructure, the occasions, the avenues to promote intellectual, artistic discourse. Numbers don’t count. It’s sufficient that a society has individuals/intellectuals who can give meaning to our lives.
I read poetry. I can teach an appreciation of poetry. But I can’t write poetry. I’m just prosaic. Remembering the point made at the beginning of this piece about your desire to evoke a response, I thought I would end with a number of quotations, besides the Don Marquis one, that nudged my memory while we were talking, so that you will have a variety of responses:
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
–
W.H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. YeatsIf there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
–
Robert Graves For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date.
–
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn MauberleyWhen power leads man to arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When poetry narrows the areas of man’s concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment. –
John F. KennedyRaja Ahmad Aminullah’s Menyarung Jiwa/Soulship, published by Pustaka Cipta, RM99 hardback, RM45 paper, is available at bookstores. Thor Kah Hoong's Skoob Books (closed on Tuesdays) is at Lot 122, Menara Mutiara Majestic, Jalan Othman, Old Town Petaling Jaya ( 03-77702500; e-mail: skoobkl@pd.jaring.my).
