::"I Don't Like Poetry"::

In the past two weeks, I have heard from two (no, three) young friends of mine, "I don't like poetry." I should have felt defensive, I guess. But I didn't. Probably because I could relate to that feeling. I loved to read, and by the time I was college-age, I was fairly well-read. Yet, I didn't sign up for an English major, inspite of getting in at Jadavpur's famous program, because I couldn't stand the thought of going through pages and pages of Romantic poetry. But then, it wasn't that I didn't like any poetry-- I spend all my allowance to buy collections by Pablo Neruda. This was in eleventh grade. I liked Mayakovosky, and a lot of the Bengali poetry I found in my parents' bookshelves. But it's also true, there were a huge number of poets whose work I didn't necessarily like or understand. The funny thing is, now I LOVE Romantic poets. A lot of the poets I dismissed then, I now love. Or, think of as plain problematic. I mean, there is no middle-ground here. Now, when I think back on the process of what brought me back to poetry, I would say, it's a combination of my increasing politicization, my conviction that art plays an extremely important role in building up a liberated world (and not just in a propagandist kind of a way), and my last twelve years of serious engagement with literature. A lot of that engagement did happen within academic spaces, but not all of it. For example, I have never studied poetry academically. But I do think, the kind of academic work I have done with prose, has helped me to think about poetry in more complex terms. The thing is, I understand the world of the Romantics much better now precisely because I am more familiar with the Euro-American social histories of those times. I have a better idea about the ideological, political, aesthetic, philosophical forces the Romantics were engaging with. Yes, it's precisely a better grasp of the social, cultural and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that leads me to appreciate Romantic poetry better. But the kind of poetry-teaching I encountered when I was a teenager, excluded precisely these complexities. Consequently, I had no yardstick or context to think through the poems. I guess, this is precisely the kind of literature pedagogy that Gauri Vishwanathan writes about in her book Masks of Conquest. The pedagogy that came about from the cultural/education/ideological projects of the empire. So, I would say, at the cost of sounding reductionist, one of the ways in which poetry can be democratized is by engaging more and more with the sociology and social history of the form itself. By showing how poetry is not something that stands apart from the rest of the society and world, but is one way of writing that world. And therefore, inextricably related to the social, political, other art forms of its times.