When poetry becomes painting

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” wrote T.S. Eliot, the renowned modern poet and critic. This means that the task of poetry, unlike what is often portrayed in pop culture, is to express cerebral verses that are innovative, insightful, and mind-boggling; rather than merely blurting out visceral emotions, feelings, and moods. Frankly, it is frustrating even to make this distinction when in the South Asian tradition, we had genius minds like Mir and Ghalib. Yet, contrary to the foregoing, we see in mushairas, in the case of Urdu, and on social media and magazines, in the case of English, emotionally charged poetry, bereft of the craft's virtuosity.

This personality-driven sentimentality works in opposition to the very function of poems -- an intellectual pursuit meant to arouse the layers of consciousness and, by extension, cater to the aesthetic sensibility. This exercise, unlike prose, is compressed and so relies on different poetic devices to convey and create meanings. While the tools might be limited, their application is subjective, with every poet transposing their own style for the readers to relish and resonate with.

I recently read Afshan Shafi’s Quiet Women, published by Newline in 2019. She is one of the editors of Pakistan’s Premier literary magazine, The Aleph Review, and inherited her love for poetry and books in general from the library of her maternal grandmother Farhat Attiqur Rehman, where she discovered Tennyson and Byron, which helped her to taste the poetic world and develop a sensibility for it.

She, right at the start of the book, mentioned the painter and sculptor Joan Miro, who said: “I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.” By mentioning this, Afshan revealed her own methodology of versifying. She does the same, just the direction is opposite: in every poem of her book, she paints but with words – that is, her poems, like a painting, are made up of variegated colours (diction), compositions (form and configuration), concepts (theme), and techniques (expression).

It is called ekphrastic poetry, where a poet describes a work of art through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture; the poet may amplify and expand its meaning, trying to create complex images to somehow close the hiatus between verses and the art being expressed. Afshan follows the same modus operandi. However, by reading the poems, one might sense that it is not describing a single picture; rather, it is focused on a diversified range of images conjured up in the mind of the poet.

Some poems also offer art pieces complementarily. In a way, the poems are interpreting those smeared pages, and at the same time, the latter is the visual representation of the former. Isn’t this – the two media of expression abreast of each other – beautiful? This can help someone like me who is illiterate in appreciating paintings see through them by reading the verses accompanying them.

And as the relation of a painter with their painting is personal and universal at the same time, Afshan’s poems feel the same: on the one hand, a reader can feel the expressions as her own with her own distinct voice, like a stream of consciousness, and then, she depersonalises it and makes it universal, and even that without any identarian/collective tilt. Any reader, despite the geographical and national cartography, can resonate with them. In the titular poem, Quiet Women, about the oppressions on women in a capitalist society, she writes:

“mirrors fell around me
melding into a single conduit
everywhere I looked,
a spark petal loosened
into tremulous flesh.”

Style

Unlike the romanticism or South Asian ghazal tradition, with pre-determined symbols, images, and diction, Afshan’s poems are dynamic, changing, moment by moment, line by line, and ergo, provide a totally innovative terrain, with each line, stanza, and poem expressing differently, like every stroke on a painting. Symbols, images with a host of associations, in her poems add to the completeness of thoughts and the picture affixed to it. She, contrary to traditional symbols or stock symbols, invents her own, and even exploits whole quotes as symbols; from Coco Chanel to Rumi, she divulges her taste for art and poetry simultaneously, while taking full advantage of poetic devices as a multipotential artisan.

Images, conveying pictures through words and appealing to the senses of the readers, through similes and metaphors, are employed. These images are intended to shock and startle the reader; they are compressed together, following a touch-and-go method: covering vast immensities in a small space. Further, Afshan is a poet of the present; she doesn’t extensively rely on mythology. Rather, her weltanschauung is our contemporary harsh, filthy, and dull urban world. We see problems that are pathetic and modern. Add the Freudian functionality of the unconscious (with neurosis and other pathological – sic – conditions) to this artistic mosaic, and we get a poetry which is very much constructed rather than free-floating, cerebral rather than visceral, psychological rather than physiological, and by extension, necessitates a close-reading rather than mindless chanting. She writes:

“in the world of sun and smoke
blows her sister’s small promise of persistence
off her fingers and into the hunting air.
each evening the world is a small
avalanche of birds.”

All these complexities want a reader who is already indulged in the poetry tradition; her poems are obscure – both in terms of craft and meaning. Even if one grasps her ever-changing diction with the help of a dictionary, the transformation of lineated words into a meaningful theme would require a reasonable effort at the reader’s end.

Ganesh, in a confectionary mill

What would a Hindu deity do in a confectionary mill? Afshan explores this eerie situation through her signature obscurities in the poem, Ganesh, in a confectionary mill. She writes:

“Last November’s basilica is crumbling,
The taffy foundry found to the char, the last scruff of meal
rotten.
still aerate masses dispense themselves
Onto the crud, and enter the extruder to be filled with
Shiny viscera,
Palm oil kidneys blossoming under the churn,
The winds percolating soft while
The clouds widen their tangerine irises…”

This modernist-lyrical poem positions the Hindu deity Ganesh, traditionally a remover of obstacles and God of beginnings, in an absurdly industrial, even grotesque setting, i.e., a confectionary mill. It layers Hindu symbolism with post-industrial imagery, a surrealist aesthetic, and socioeconomic subtext. The opening line juxtaposes Ganesh, a spiritual figure, with a confectionary mill, a symbol of capitalist ‘excess,’ mechanised desire, and sweetness-turned-sinister.

The “basilica” references crumbling sacred spaces, showing how religion itself is commodified or decaying in a consumerist age. The “taffy foundry” being burnt and the meal rotting suggest both spiritual and material entropy. Plus, it presents visceral industrial birth. A grotesque fusion of biology and production. “Palm oil kidneys” evoke cheap globalised ingredients, outsourced and mechanised labour. The clouds’ “tangerine irises” lend a psychedelic, possibly apocalyptic aura, where even nature gazes on in artificial hues.

Then Ganesh is awakened, but with synthetic, sterile parts: “Styrofoam lips,” “leather jowls,” “petroleum flora.” This re-engineering of divinity underscores how capitalism and mass production cannibalise the divine, reconfiguring joy as pre-packaged euphoria. “Glucose intaglio” suggests even meaning is etched in sugar, brittle and saccharine.

Further, we see an inversion of traditional religious iconography; Ganesh’s usual items (lotus, tusk) are now joined by industrial tools and “death ribbons.” Rococo -- an ornate, decadent European aesthetic -- is ironically placed in the deity’s hands, symbolising colonial residues and grotesque excess. His rage becomes a beautiful but hollow spectacle. Ganesh is reimagined as childlike and vulnerable, “galumphing” playfully, but in a world of “iliac metal” and “sacred sugars.” This mourns the death of sacred innocence in a world overrun by commodified spirituality and mechanical ritual. The “ancestral-star” falling suggests cosmic disinheritance.

There’s a paralysis of divine strength. Ganesh kneels before an industrial “woodbulb,” a bastardisation of enlightenment or throne. His adolescent gaze captures a mood of spiritual fatigue and confusion, as if divine power itself is exhausted in late capitalism. Even violence is rendered inert, “no gunpowder” to fuel change. Neither divine fury nor aesthetic contemplation is viable anymore. The “aesthete” and “shaman,” both archetypes of deep feeling and mystical insight, are absent, replaced by a numb spectator god. The poem ends on a note of withdrawal and loss of awareness. Ganesh remains, perhaps in form, but is disconnected from his own pleasure, joy, or purpose. This poem aptly criticises the antinomies of the post-industrialist society, where everything is commodified for the profiteering of elites; even deities cannot parry the sword of this lethal ailment.

Coda

Reading Afshan’s Quiet Women is to experience how a poet lets the art penetrate her mind; It is a study of the poet's consciousness, evaluating art through a multifaceted, multidimensional, yet deeply personal lens, expressed in a poetic medium. She writes in an innovatively intricate manner and consciously tries not to repeat her words, showcasing, like a painter, her obsession with novelty. Similar to many modern poets, she doesn’t disclose her themes easily, looking for the readers to read and appreciate the images erected on the fertile poetic grounds while exposing the barrenness of capitalist society.

The writer is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector. He can be reached at alifurqan647@gmail.com

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer