If you have been following this blog with a rigor, it must be pretty easy for you to guess my daily schedule for last month or so. And for those who are wondering (don’t ask me why you should wonder!) what it could be, have a look-

Breakfast:

Eat poha, drink tea, and think about the topic for a poem.

Lunch:

Escape into the dungeon (my food court) munch on mysterious things that they christened thali and think about the poem.

Tea:

Drink tea with some samosa and think about the poem.

 Dinner:

Eat Aloo paratha, drink lassi and think about the poem. Write it and publish it in your god forbidden blog, tweet it, update the link on facebook and orkut and voila! I am done!

I would then sleep and dream about the poems. And if insomnia supervenes read the poems that I had written so far and then risk sleeping forever. 

Believe me my reader, I have made it look awfully simple for your cause, but writing poetry is pain in the . The problem with poetry, and the reason why my otherwise kind and broad minded people wait in the corner just to hit it on the head with huge club the moment poem pops out, is the presumption that writing poetry is as easy as laying eggs.

If you think that poetry

Means breaking the prose

Into many small lines and

Forcing that darned stuff

to Rhyme; then you know

That you are mistaken.

Poetry for many people is verses that rhyme, that has metrification, that looks good and that which sounds blissfully soul liberating.

But the problem is that English, the language which I chose to write poetry, is a very funny language. There would be many a time where your pronunciation would force you to rhyme ‘east’ with ‘paste’ or ‘breaks’ with ‘snacks’ and then shamelessly publish the miserable doggerel hoping that it would be instant passport to the country of poets.

 Now if you are among those who have cursed an upcoming poet for nincompoopery please think again as I quote P.G Wodehouse here- “Whoever invented the English language must have been a prose-writer, not a versifier; for he has made meager provision for the poets.”

He is indeed true in his being frustrated because English leaves us with very few options. Take for example my previous poem where a line ends with ‘answers’ now there are not many sensible words that rhymes with ‘answers’ like ‘helicopters‘ and may be ‘tractors‘. Now tell me my dear reader, do you really appreciate the lines if they look like this

She couldn’t stay calm, she owes him answers

He is the rich one who has many helicopters

Or

She couldn’t stay calm, she owes him answers

He is a farmer and he owns three tractors

The chances are that you once for all abandon the faith on literature or you would call me if you are practicing psychiatrist struggling to survive.

Now speaking about complicating things further, the ELDT (The English Language Design Team), I confidently speculate , should be biased against poets for it to use a vowel ending monosyllable word to define the world’s most manipulated and commercially used emotion- Love. I mean why should they use Love for the emotion man? They should have used lantern or puchuk or may be other sounds which could easily rhyme with other sensible words.

Love, as you know rhymes with now, how, dove, bow and arrow, cow, crow, plough. How could a poet possibly write sensible poetry using love and still rhyme it with the possible rhymes it has.

But even then, poets survived the ordeal, they evolved and continued rhyming love with ‘now and how’ and  still made sense, while others chucked the rhyming and made sense while others stuck to rhyming and never made sense.