T Wignesan Poet Villanelle

Notes About The Poem

 

Villanelle: Nothing So Upturns Creative Cauldrons As Retching Up Art

Villanelle: Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art

Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art
As the craft not art of constructing poetry for expediency
Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart

Isn’t each word a brick a stone a rock in the poet’s craft
That simple folk through the ages filed sans hypocrisy
Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art

What representation of experience can by craft be wrought
To distill meanings imbricated in sensuous mosaic artistry
Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart

Do English words sound the same in a loud Indlish mart
Or evoke the connotations of a Shakespearean century 
Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art

A South Asian voice reading Pope must sound like fart*
To a Dryden stunned by a Malawian’s Jacobean poesy 
Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart

The sense of sound divides Indlish poems from English craft
As galactic spaces loom in between Indlish pen and literacy
Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art
Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words set apart

* A reference to Eric Mottram’s comment on hearing Dom Moraes reading his poems on the BBC’s Third Programme
in the fifties, characterised as an imitation of an Oxford don farting…. Cf. Alive in Parts of this Century: Eric Mottram
at 70.  Twickenham & Wakefield: North and South, 1994, p. 17.


© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014

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