Teesta Review: A Journal of
Poetry, Volume 5, Number 2. November
2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
The Quiet of the Sky: a conversation about poetry across and within time and place
-- Dr. Cameron Hindrum and D C Chambial
‘Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.’
(William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey)
Introduction:
This article
explores the dialogue between two poets: DC Chambial, who lives in the northern
Indian state of Himachal Pradesh and myself — Cameron Hindrum — living on the
island state of Australia, Tasmania. This dialogue has been occurring broadly
over the last couple of years, across which we have been swapping poems,
responses to each other’s poems, and snippets of our lives and histories. For
the specific purposes of this chapter, I have focused on the emergence of the
poetic muse in each of us, and how — in different cultures, at different times,
on different continents — the impulse of poetry has driven us both to explore
our environments, our histories and the parameters of our knowledge of the
world — or at least, our respective local areas within it. When asked about the
constant of his island home (St Lucia) in his work, Derek Walcott replied that
“What we can do as poets in terms of our honesty is simply to write within the
immediate perimeter of not more than twenty miles really.” (Holland-Batt, 2021,
196) Consequently, in what follows I will be navigating the intersection of
history, inspiration, context and creativity in providing a concise
illustration of two poets in their place and time, as contrasting as they are,
utilising poetic craft to examine respective environs that could not be more
distinct from one another. To focalise this navigation further, I draw on two
specific individual influences that have emerged: the work of William
Wordsworth, and that of Philip Larkin. The contrasting poetics of these two giants
of the canon provide illuminating and provocative punctuation for the aesthetic
conversation between two poets on different sides of the planet, and their
reflections on the craft of poetry.
Background
and Context
D C Chambial and
I established contact with each other during 2019, to share our work and its contours
with a view to crafting a paper, and have since remained in touch. DC was kind
enough to publish some of my poems in the journal he edits, Poetcrit,
and I was also able to contribute to an anthology of poems from Australia and
India, Dancing the Light, edited by Jaydeep Sarangi and Robert Maddox
Harle. The purpose of our communications, other than to establish a connection
between our respective cultures, was (to my mind) explore the notion of poetry
as a mirror — and the extent to which we reflect ourselves and our sense of
place in it.
In doing so we
might play a small part in a much larger and more broad-ranging conversation,
to redefine perceived notions of world literary knowledge — as Revathi Krishnaswamy
suggests, to “uncover cultural differences as well as common (possibly
"universal") features of our shared aesthetic nature by placing
different conceptualizations of literature/literariness side by side”
(Krishnaswamy, 2010, 401). Despite the diversity of our linguistic and cultural
backgrounds, it is entirely possible that DC Chambial and I have some shared
beliefs in the value and place of poetry; such common ground is infinitely
worthy of exploration and scrutiny.
William
Wordsworth found in nature the very essence of life and creativity. In his new
biography Radical Wordsworth, Jonathan Bate notes that “One of his
controlling metaphors … is that of the river or stream, flowing onwards but
sometimes looping back on itself, sometimes meandering while at other times
rushing in a torrent.” (Bate, 2020, xxi) It is well known that Wordsworth used
the rhythm of his constant walking to inform the metre of his verse and in this
simple fact alone, we find the most intimate connection between man, environment
and verse. Furthermore, Singh & Mishra state that “It was William
Wordsworth who revealed the inner soul of nature in his poems and to make it a
better teacher than moral philosopher of the present and past” (Singh, J. &
Mishra, S.K., 2019, 1). Given this universal reach into the consequences of
nature’s meaning for man, it can be surmised with little effort that
Wordsworth’s influence would extend beyond the time and place of his own
existence and catalyse inspiration and craft in the poetry of others who are
living a century later and many thousands of kilometres away.
Conversely,
Philip Larkin was not by any measure a nature poet — rather, he turned the Muse
inwards and reflected on experience and its vicissitudes, often with a note of
barely restrained cynicism. He is famous for his assertion that despair was for
him, what daffodils were for Wordsworth — thus we find ourselves at that
intersection again, where poetry can allow us to look outward to observe and
rejoice in what physically shapes us, and inward at how our memories and
experiences infiltrate our perceptions of nature. Larkin was not, of course,
beyond drawing on geography for metaphorical impact though, as the last verse
of his famous ‘This be the Verse’ attests:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
(Larkin,
1974)
Significantly, Larkin eschewed Modernism; he
considered the James Joyce a “textbook case of declension from talent to
absurdity”. He explained that “I dislike such things … because they are
irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we
know it” (Larkin, 1970). In such a phrase we find two points of
interest--Larkin striving for a moral honesty, to delineate in his work a truth
about the human condition, and also a point of connection with Wordsworth —
seeking to examine the humanity in what one found reflected when one gazed
outside of the self.
Meeting the Muse: DC Chambial
In response to an interview question posed to him in
an email, DC Chambial reflected on the first moment he could recall being
inspired to write poetry, or what is was that poetry could specifically
express:
In 1962, when I was a student of sixth standard,
while going to school on a fine momentous morning on the hilly path, with my
satchel hung on my shoulder, I happened to see some yellow flowers very bright
in colour. This occurred to me about a kilometre off my home at Bajrol, in
erstwhile Kangra district of Punjab, but [which is now] in Hamirpur District of
Himachal Pradesh. There were no roads, only a narrow path led to school
wriggling in a serpentine way.
These [flowers] captured my fancy and I started
humming an unknown tune and then suddenly the following lines from William Blake’s
poem reverberated in my mind and I was lured by their melody:
Tiger,
Tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(‘The Tiger’)
At that time these lines fascinated me musically,
for I wasn’t mature enough to understand the philosophy behind these words,
lines and the poem; yet they cast a spell on me and that day I scribbled some
lines. Later, Keats’ lines from ‘Endymion’ almost captivated my imagination:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will
never
Pass into nothingness
Then, Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and ‘Solitary Reaper’
also became my favourites. Thereafter, I don’t know, even today, whether I
followed the Muse or Muse enticed me and since then I have continued writing
poems without looking back. It reveals the influence of English Romantic poets
and Wordsworth’s Nature-poetry.
(Chambial, personal comm, 2021)
The universality of poetry as an art form is
enshrined in the humble evocation of this memory. Firstly, it has transcended
memory and thrived in the recollection of the poet across some six decades;
secondly, it reflects with some precision the Wordsworthian ideal of beauty and
revelation in a simple and unadorned image — by the side of a roughly formed
track, in a region of the world that has known conflict and separation, a
growth of resilient yellow flowers, bright and hardy, ephemeral and constant as
reminders of the intricate strength of the natural world. Intricate strengths
are also required of poetry, the lacing together of words — borne of the
unformed pathways of our hearts — to create something more resilient and viable
than themselves.
While I am not in a position to offer generalised
comments regarding Chambial’s body of work over the ensuing decades, his recent
poetry that I have read reflects a clear Wordsworthian influence, one that has
most likely been at work in the ongoing development and refinement of
Chambial’s craft.
Slumbering city once again
steadily begins to wake up
shifting sides sluggishly like young
bride on a carefree honey-moon.
Dim lights, as if drowsy with sleep,
gradually diffuse into
growing brightness at dawn like smoke
in the silent air.
(From ‘Trivandrum at Dawn’)
The moment of transition here is caught deftly, and
there are clear echoes of Wordsworth’s famous sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster
Bridge, September 3, 1802’:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Chambial has, like Wordsworth, relied only on simple
language — slumbering, dim lights, silent air — to infuse poem with stillness
that both activates and captures reflection. There is also a sense of music at
play — note the softly repetitive ‘slumbering/steadily/shifting/sluggishly’ in
the first verse. Wordsworth relies on open vowel sounds to achieve a similar
effect — it is worth saying the line ‘Open unto the fields, and to the sky’ to
hear the space and promise of each of those open sounds. This is cleverly
contrasted with the tighter confines of ‘bright and glittering’ in the
following line, which is arguably Wordsworth subtly reinforcing the thematic
point of his poem — a vast and lovely city, captured at the point of waking:
slumber suggested by the open vowel sounds, the business and duty of the day
perhaps foretold by the shorter, more staccato sounds that follow.
His poem ‘Dhanushkodi’ offers a slightly different
perspective of Wordsworthian influence. The poem is a portrait of an abandoned
town on a spear of land jutting out from India’s south-east coast, pointing
towards Sri Lanka. It should be noted
that the town was abandoned due to a cyclone that struck in the early 1960s,
causing irreparable damage — hence Chambial’s reference to ‘nature’s ruthless
ire’ in the paragraph below.
The sand spreads, as goes the eye, far and wide:
tale of Nature’s ruthless ire.
The sobbing silence of ebb and tide
fills the human heart with helpless fire.
From
‘Dhanushkodi’
It’s Chambial’s distinctive use of imagery here that
is noteworthy, in particular the last line with its nearly-oxymoronic ‘helpless
fire.’ In this poem, we see man and nature crossing paths, as it were; and, with its unrelenting might, nature will win out every time such an
intersection occurs. This has concomitant notions of futility, of man
attempting perhaps to tame nature or the natural world; such attempts will, as
noted, usually come to nothing if they do not end in tragedy. So the human
heart, as captured in this poem, is a fragile thing — it can only operate in
consequence, not in catastrophe. This inward-looking external view of nature is
captured by Wordsworth repeatedly in his work but comes into focus in this
brief extract from ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ (from
1798):
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
The ‘eye made quiet’ is also present, it seems to
me, in the work of DC Chambial. There is a semantic difference, of course,
between sight and vision in the context of this poem and the last line of
this extract is perhaps accurately read in the context of vision. Nature
reveals itself to us and it reveals ourselves also, even in its danger, it is
compelling, and we are only observers.
It says much for the power of language that a single moment’s observation of some flowers, brief in time but lasting in significance, can have triggered a lifelong dedication to the craft, often tempered through possibly the greatest and most resilient voice in western nature poetry.
Meeting
the Muse: Dr Cameron Hindrum
In trading
interview questions by email, DC Chambial and I asked each other who we would
identify as our major influences or inspirations. Personally I never find this
an easy question to answer, but I can identify the poet whose work I often try
to emulate for its uncompromising honesty sitting side by side with perfectly
crafted metrical lines and structures: that poet is Philip Larkin. Since his
death in 1985, Larkin has been exposed as something of a racist and bigot and
so the argument has been made repeatedly since then that we should separate the
man from the Poet. This is an argument to which I wholly subscribe — indeed, I
have often reflected on the fact that if I’d had the chance to meet Larkin in
person, we would have very little in common. He was famously grumpy, something
of a loner, and serially unfaithful to the women with whom he formed romantic
relationships; these things aside, however, he was and is a masterful poet.
Here is one of his much later poems, ‘The Mower’, composed possibly only a few
years before his death.
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Larkin’s poetic voice benefits enormously here from
what (for want of a better phrase) might be termed ‘matter-of-factness’: ‘Next
morning I got up and it did not.’ An evocative web of complex emotions — grief,
acceptance, sadness, horrible realisation, pain — is enmeshed in those few
simple words. Music there too of course — unobtrusive/unmendably, and the
repetition of ‘should’ in the last several lines of the poem. The word
‘unmendably’ is a singular delight in this poem — it is a crafted word (usually
we might say ‘irreparably’, for example), soft in the mouth but very pointed
and uncompromising in its semantic power.
Unlike DC Chambial, I cannot divine a particular
moment or observation that triggered an encounter with the poetic muse; it
emerged slowly over time, sometimes reluctantly. I replied to one of Chambial’s
question on this matter that I often think I became a poet by osmosis; as
Director of the annual Tasmanian Poetry Festival from 2003-2019 I spent
considerable swathes of time either in direct contact with poets or in their
physical company and conversations routinely turned to questions of craft,
inspiration, the next book, favourite poems and so on. I have no doubt that
some of the essence of these conversations seeped into my literary soul, and
the emergence of my own poetry was the (arguably) inevitable result. However, I
can determine a moment — or a poem — where I believed I had crystallised the
voice and form of my inspiration into an original poem, ‘Morning Burial’-which,
quite coincidentally, also touches the spectre of death as its central impetus.
This poem accounts for the time during my son’s childhood when a beloved family
member — a rabbit, named Tinky — died during the night and my wife and I resolved
not to tell him. We believed he was too young at the time — he would have been
about four years old. Instead, this being at around Easter time that particular
year, we told our son that the Easter Bunny had asked for Tinky to accompany
him around the world, handing out easter eggs. She occupied him on the couch
inside, watching early morning cartoons, while I surreptitiously prepared a
grave in the back yard, with the deceased rabbit waiting in a small plastic bag
— the only convenient makeshift coffin we could find quietly.
A small plastic coffin, a small
Fragile body. Soft fur.
I carefully arrange the deceased
In this shallow grave.
The plastic bag sits bright
Like an insult.
Cold earth peppers the plastic;
The hole is quickly hidden.
I smooth it over, replace bark
chips.
No one will ever know,
except his mother and I, and we
will keep our burden.
Cartoons will keep him safe.
From
‘Morning Burial’
The moment of
parental angst is signified in the cynical last line, which is offered as a
final and confronting truth. Larkin’s famous despair has seeped in here, and
this poem emerges from the conflict between doing what one considers right and
the stark visceral reality of moral duplicity. The little details that are
offered--the fragile body, the plastic bag that “sits bright / like an insult”
and the grim artificial nature of plastic itself — each work to compound a
bitter truth — that occasionally, for the greater good, we choose to lie.
As an aside, I read this poem at a local reading at
which eminent Tasmanian poet, the late Tim Thorne, was also present. He
congratulated me on the poem afterwards but offered a compelling observation,
only partly in jest — he mentioned that that was how religions were started,
lying to people about death. It was a fitting thing to say for reasons Thorne
probably could not envisage in that particular moment — his comments bring to
mind lines from one of Larkin’s last major poems, ‘Aubade’:
This is a special way of being
afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to
try,
That vast moth-eaten musical
brocade
Created to pretend we never die…
Whether or not one agrees with Larkin, there is no
doubting his conviction, and a line like ‘vast moth-eaten musical brocade’ is
gloriously evocative. I make no claim to that degree of simple complication but
I do aspire to the qualities of the voice — emphatic, uncompromising and
unadorned by unnecessary verbiage.
I noted in my replies to the interview questions
sent to me by DC Chambial that above all I inspired to a Buddhist simplicity in
my work — a way of enabling deeper and more provocative questions with what
appears to be, on the surface, an aesthetic voice approaching the prosaic. This
approach might similarly be at home with the Imagist movement of the early
twentieth century, which also eschewed artifice or adornment in the composition
of poetry.
Conclusion
It has been fascinating to consider, reflect on,
investigate and respond to the concepts that have been explored in this
chapter. A great cycle of poetry, response and conversation has been
established between myself, in the relatively quiet regional city of Launceston
in Tasmania, and the far distant climes of Himachal Pradesh, in Northern India.
Significantly, in the cauldron of poetry and poetic craft, distance has come to
mean little; I hope that this chapter provides some insight into two poets who
remain singular in the pursuit of their craft, and in doing so are locked into
conversation with their respective influences, inspirations and the
always-evolving dramas of the place in which they reside. Within the course of
our lifetimes, the landscape may change little or shifts may be tectonic, but
the constant is that we will change — sometimes in response to our
environment, in the crucible of age or in response to significant changes. A
further constant is that, hopefully, we will always be in pursuit of poetry,
that quiet art with its choir of voices.
Works Cited
Holland-Batt, S. (2021). Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry. Queensland, Australia, UQP.
Krishnaswamy, R. (2010). "Toward world literary knowledges: Theory in the age of globalization." Comparative Literature 62(4): 399-419.
Singh, J. M., Sunil Kumar (2019). "William
Wordsworth as a Poet of Nature: an Overview." Think India Journal 22(10):
1-6.
Note on Copyright
Dr Cameron Hindrum and DC Chambial remain the
respective copyright owners of their individual poetic works directly quoted in
this chapter.