Free Verse and a New Year...

I would admit that the title is obscure and conveys no information, just like titles are wont to. But this sudden coming-back-to-life after shaking the shackles of procrastination is catalysed by an 18-year young girl, more correctly a woman. But to be precise, she is somewhere between the two frames of being a giggly girl and a graceful woman. She, is in transit, very much like the blur of the verdant landscape between the dark eyes that peer from the inside the barred windows of a moving train and the stabler slower mountains in the distance.

She sent me a poem today. More than the words, it was the form that set me thinking. You see, 18 is a wonderful age. It is the time when there is courage and the optimism of youth, unbeaten and unconditioned by the ravages of happenstance. When almost everything pales in comparison to the expectation. And it is the time when expression invariably finds its utterance in poetry. The form always free.

Free Verse revolutionized the concept of poetry. It brought the esoteric to the masses, but stopped just short of making the arcane inane. Anyone who had the idea, the inspiration and the words to freeze the feeling could take a dip in this ocean and bring out his own oyster. Sometimes with pearls and most of the times with dirt. But the quest is not for the pearls, it isn't even for the oysters, but for just one moment within the folds of the muse, sorrounded by her watery arms and fluid fingers. It is for the satisfaction of creating something that has residual beauty. Even if only its creator could behold and witness that.

Some argue, free verse is too similar to prose. I myself found it insane to break sentences into fragments, and split it into different lines, for the effect of creating a poem. But then with time I started distinguishing between the two, and realizing at the same time that a poem is a very personal experience put out to share with others. It is an attempt to say the unsaid, to talk the unheard. Sometimes the original thought is lost in translation, and reader reads his own version. This is the ability of poetry. To transcend from one personal perspective to the other, sometimes retaining its form, at other times melting into the other self.

She had raised the same question, about what demarcates the poem from the prose and where does the muse figure in. And so I told her that a poem is a poem, and prose is all that is not. And a muse is aah... the hardest to define, but she is the one who touches your soul and leaves behind an inspiration that somehow bursts free in the form of words. Poetry is when long suppressed solitudes of the soul find utterance.

And when the verse runs free without limits or boundaries like a flooded river into the great plains, then my dear reader, is the free verse born. Free to touch the limits of your skies, or perhaps the writer's.

All this while the New Year has crawled into our lives. The last digit of the dates have changed, and I am yet to practice the '07 figure in places where I have to sign. Alas the calendar dates dont work like free verse. And some rules are yet to be followed, even if each day is a long poem in itself.

Note: For you Vipz