Gunjan Pant Pande
It’s with broken wings that I learnt to fly…
Read that again. Sends a chill down the spine. Just an interplay of a few alphabets, but a glimpse into a story of a lifetime. Interpret it as you wish. The writer’s said what they said. It’s only words, but as Boyzone immortalised them, sometimes words are all you have. To express deep desires, unspoken urges, sublime secrets, hidden hopes, or persistent personal pain.
Fourteen-year-old Sonam Jha, who has been writing poems since she was in fifth grade, knows that all too well. “My poem ‘Alter Ego’ resonates with teen angst and the struggle to do what is right. It speaks about an alter-ego that keeps influencing you to make the wrong decisions and the importance of fighting it and doing what is right.”
Calling it her own struggle against “falling into the rabbit hole of peer pressure, something we teenagers face on a day-to-day basis,” Sonam is happy to have a creative outlet to battle such “negative effects on one’s confidence and self-esteem.”
Writing poetry, she says, “had a positive impact on my mental health as it gave me clarity of thought. I am able to share my personal experiences with others who may be struggling with similar issues. This has made me believe in the ideology that the most one can do is to be honest with themselves.”
Fourteen, did you say? Yes, barely into double digits, Sonam seems to have already discovered the therapeutic power of poetry.
POETRY THERAPY
Poetry therapy is an actual treatment in conjunction with other aids to help make “a person get the hang of feelings by channelling emotion, especially the sad bits, into a web of words.”
“I truly believe that poetry is one of the best ways to let out feelings. It has allowed me to face issues directly,” smiles Sonam, who counts Maya Angelou and Emily Dickinson among her favourites. Recently though, she’s been hooked to Edgar Allen Poe’s “mournful, never-ending remembrance”, ‘The Raven’, “which I enjoyed analysing” at school in Gurgaon.
Sitting a few continents away in Canada, Manmeet Narang echoes the sentiments. “Every poem of mine left me feeling lighter, more self-aware, a little more healed.”
As an immigrant, from September 2019 to March 2020, “I only had poetry as my companion. I read, and I wrote, and I healed myself. I cannot imagine how I would have sailed through that period without poetry. The appreciation that my poems got made the pain of being uprooted bearable.”
Every little thing counts when one is transplanted into a foreign environment, and who else can relate to that better than Manmeet? “I remember in March, everyone in India was posting pictures of flowers, of spring, and it was snowing here. And I wrote a poem. I love getting drenched in the rain, and I could not do that here because it was perpetually cold. I wrote more than 10 poems on pain till I was exhausted.”
The regular Haiku Jam sessions that happen in some Mumbai cafes harness just this kind of sentiment, tracing one’s encounters with pain and darkness. Something on the lines of: “Pain maybe the way your spirit communicates its desire to be free.” However, there’s always hope… “Despite the darkness in me, there is twice as much light further inside.”
Poetry, Manmeet also realised “creates a distance where you can observe your own thoughts. So much so that pain begins to appear beautiful on paper, it is that bittersweet moment.”
Wow, Manmeet sure has a way with words, and why not, for it is greats like Amrita Pritam, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Gulzar’s expressive creativity that ‘speak to me’.
Ensconced in the lush greens of her surroundings in Pune, Prastish K “enjoys writing poetry that relates to nature and my journey in life.”
CONFRONTING EMOTIONS POETICALLY
Inspired by her friend Colonel Rajeev Bhargava’s amazing photography, especially his ‘Same Place, Different Seasons’ series, “I explore my own, personal experiences in my poem by the same name that talks of finding my theme in the gallery of life in a wonderous tapestry of moments. How bursts of natural hues chase away the gloom and the world awakens to a warm embrace.”
“When I wrote ‘Same Place, Different Seasons’,” recalls Prastish, “my thoughts were immersed in the metaphorical connection between nature’s cyclical changes and the stages of our personal journeys. I aimed to capture the essence of growth, resilience, and the beauty found in life’s evolving landscapes.”
It was therapeutic during challenging times for her as “poetry allowed me to articulate and confront my emotions, fostering a sense of clarity and acceptance.”
Poetry, it is said, can “arouse profound emotions” and lead to transformation through what is called “attentive curiosity”. That’s why writing poems has become a constant in Prastish’s life, what she calls “a mindful exploration of my inner landscape”. A daily ritual offering introspection. Quite like her favourite Mary Oliver in The Summer Day.
Talking of poetic expression, Professor of Creative Writing Saikat Majumdar adds, “though I don’t write poems, I love reading them. I’m a novelist and a writer of non-fictional prose. I think the fictional character created by me that resonates most with a non-normative state of mental health would be Ahin Mullick in my novel The Firebird.” Focussing on a young boy’s relationship with his mother’s life as a theatre actress, the novel is about the different ways people confuse art and life.
“Ahin is an extreme, pathological instance of this confusion. He is a schizophrenic playwright and playhouse owner who sometimes has trouble telling the difference between theatre and real life, with some dangerous consequences.” As an author, Saikat reveals that “when striking experiences hit me, I sometimes process them through writing, often years, sometimes decades after they happened. Such tragic events get a kind of closure when I turn them into fiction or essays of a narrative/fictional quality.”
These days, such closures can take any form, from odes to sonnets to prose or blank verse; all that you need sometimes is “fridge magnet poetry” to align to your here and now in the most endearingly lyrical fashion.
POETRY TO EXPRESS ANGST
The creative canvas of emotional expression is infinite.
“Mental health is something that has not been talked about openly, not only in India but abroad as well,” according to Dr Nandini Sen, Prof of English, Delhi University. “We have seen several writers, particularly women, grapple with mental health and seek an outlet and very often poetry has been that outlet through which they express their angst. The two poets who immediately come to my mind in this context, who dared to talk about it in the amazing poetry they left behind,” she points out, “are Silvya Plath and Kamala Das.”
“When one thinks about a woman trapped in her head, Plath immediately comes to mind. She was one remarkably intelligent woman who was extremely sensitive and very cognisant of her surroundings. She tragically succumbed to her mental state but her entire journey through poetry is one of trying to make sense of a world that is discriminatory in so many ways. Some of her very seminal works came from that space.”
Kamala Das on the other hand, “wrote poems that emanated from her deep within herself merging the personal with the political as she talked about the world that she saw around her. She was a complex person, very sensitive to the time that she lived in and was known for the infinite controversies that her poetry and her lived entity stirred.”
What sets them apart is their sheer honesty in laying bare their most intimate thoughts before a very judgmental world, which is at once very forward and poignant.
So yes writers, particularly poets, says Dr Sen, “took recourse to poetry to deal with the situations around them when they felt trapped in social confines of patriarchy. It was in a way their act of resistance fraught as it was with personal pain and extreme mental trauma.”