My Thoughts on Poetry
The world that lies beneath the feet of the universe is not an epic. In the end, its stories are very small. Yet it is within those small, seemingly insignificant stories that life moves, breathes, and carries on.If we think of a poem as a living being, it is its soul that keeps it moving. If we think of a poem as a vehicle, it needs an engine to propel it forward.
A poem does not necessarily need a conventional narrative. It does not necessarily need a plot either. What it needs is movement. And with that movement comes internal disruption. Just as the poem’s inner movement carries it from one place to another, disruption repeatedly creates turns, deviations, and moments of surprise within that very movement.
The subject of a poem is perhaps less important than the way it moves. What matters is how the poem travels from one place to another, touching upon different points of the world and of life that may, at first glance, seem entirely disconnected.
One image calls forth another. One word opens itself towards another word. One feeling suddenly finds itself connected to an entirely different world. And just when the reader begins to grow accustomed to that connection, the poem creates a disruption within itself.
As a result, the movement of a poem is never a straight line. It is a wayward line. It moves forward, but not along a path of its own making; rather, it moves by making its path as it goes.
It is in the tension between this inner movement and disruption that the poem comes alive. One pushes it forward; the other turns inward, questioning itself, breaking itself, bending itself.
And so the poem does not move towards the resolution of a story. It moves instead through a succession of connections, deviations, and discoveries.
In the end, the life of a poem lies as much in its movement as it does in its subject matter, perhaps even more so. And the beauty of that movement lies not merely in its momentum, but also in the disruptions that interrupt, redirect, and remake it from within.
Essay by sinha murari
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Written on 2026-09-02 at 14:52
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