The poet, according to the late Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, is one who, tossing a bomb into the city, takes notes. That’s how his poem ‘The Poet,’ begins. Violent. Callous. But then, it is a poem and as such there’s poetic license as well as the play of metaphor. Lakdasa, in this poem, details what he believes to be the task or obligation of a poet.
A bomb is a destructive device. It can be indiscriminate. It certainly unsettles landscapes and perhaps what Lakdasa proposes is exactly that — cause a rupture that facilitates deeper cuts to force a consideration of complacency. He moves quickly to the source of agitation, the creator of things that require conscious and decisive intervention: the enemy.
He leaves ‘enemy’ undefined and rightly so. ‘Enemy’ can take innumerable forms. He hints at the enemy that preoccupies him or, put another way, ought to agitate all poets and therefore all readers; it is ‘the speaker on the platform’ and therefore ‘politician’. Again, it’s a catch-all. What kind of politician and of what ideological persuasion are questions he does not address. He is more specific when he describes the target of this gun-toting preparer of ambush. The poet, he insists, sets traps and awaits an enemy who arrives in a car, seated in the backseat. Thus does Lakdasa work ‘class’ into the story.
Pablo Neruda had a different understanding of the poet’s task. In ‘The poet’s obligation,’ Neruda proposes an empathetic, sharing and healing role.
So. Drawn on by my destiny, I ceaselessly must listen to and keep the sea’s lamenting in my consciousness, I must feel the crash of the hard water and gather it up in a perpetual cup so that, wherever those in prison may be, wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn, I may be present with an errant wave, I may move in and out of the windows, and hearing me, eyes may lift themselves, asking “How can I reach the sea?” And I will pass to them, saying nothing, the starry echoes of the wave, a breaking up of foam and quicksand, a rustling of salt withdrawing itself, the gray cry of sea birds on the coast.
So, though me, freedom and the sea will call in answer to the shrouded heart.
Neruda goes ‘to whoever is not listening to the sea/ this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up/ in house or office, factory or woman/ or street or mine or dry prison cell.’ He takes to them the seas denied them by life’s numerous incarcerations. Poetry is the vessel that contains the waves, foam, sand, salt, bird calls, the music and everything else that is ‘ocean.’
Empowers.
Similarly, Lakdasa’s poem and the call of the poem are empowering and advocate empowerment respectively. It’s different, though. They were both political but in different ways. Being political, they were analytical and often prescriptive; these are occasions when they spoke to their tribe even as they explained why they write and for whom.
Lakdasa describes a role, Neruda an obligation. A kind reading of the former where the metaphorical worth of agitational elements is privileged, would yield a broad field of engagement for the poetic community. Lakdasa, however, despite the broad strokes, offers a very personal testimony. It is not a task or obligation; the business of bomb-throwing and taking notes is something he has to do, he just cannot help it.
The poet is the bomb in the city,
Unable to bear the circle of the
Seconds in his heart,
Waiting to burst.
So, the poet Lakdasa is forced to do two things: hurl himself into a crowd and, once exploded, take notes. Neruda was explosive in his own right, but it was a choice and one that was made at his discretion. However, if ‘enemy’ and ‘city’ are metaphors then both poets were bombs and both carried in their pockets representatives grains of oceans and their naturally tremendous dimensions so they could share with those who found themselves in unhappy lands far away from the surging waters.
There are enemies. They need to be engaged. Therefore there are battles. It would be a stretch to say all art is about enemies, friends, battles, defeats and victories, but there’s heart always; something that is subliminal or intangible and therefore has to be expressed through signs, the play of light and shadow, the twisting of words, colors, lines and spaces into metaphors.
In the end, I am happy Lakdasa took notes. I am happy that Neruda unclenched his poetic fist and gifted the world the oceans he intimately knew. What tasks they assigned themselves, what they considered to be obligations, in this sense, aren’t important. I don’t know the names of the enemies they targeted and slew, but there are enemies whose names and ways I learned thanks to poets like Lakdasa and Neruda. And I fight my battles in my own right. As do we all.
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