Make it Up, Make it Out: The Significance of the Title “What is Worth Knowing?”

Human beings exist as private entities as well as members of a social community. The poems that editors Dharwadker and Ramanujan compile under the subheading “What is Worth Knowing” are intersections of these two aspects of human experiences. They describe experiences that are recognized by the individual as important. The poems are written in subjective viewpoints, which allow for reconciliation between public and private identities. Things are worth knowing when they grant the individual a space in the public context. This essay will work to show how this rationale is worked out in the poems for study, referencing to a few for illustrations.

Sujata Bhatt’s poem, whose title is adopted as a subheading for the collection of poems, lists world events and personal familiarities. The poem is striking for the apparent disconnectedness in the information listed. Why put together a body of facts if nothing coherent results out of it? How, for example, must one relate the fact that “Spain has decided to help NATO” with the fact that “Spring is supposed to begin on the 21st of March”? (102)
Human beings do cocoon themselves in private, individual worlds, despite living in a common world. Individual worlds are built on personal ideologies, convictions, and experiences. Ten people will tell ten different stories about a city. Each will have an exclusive map, a specific geography. Characters in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography recognize Karachi this way, so that the public geography of official street names is substituted by corner teashops and places made memorable through experience.

The world of places, social norms and occurrences is no less than an unfamiliar map. Navigating through it, one eventually constructs one’s own map – made up of places of personal significance and memories. A private map is always distinct from a public one, even if the two overlap. In a public map, descriptions are prosaic and functional. The private map is created out of the necessity to remember – the necessity to preserve bits of the self that are left behind in experiences, places and memory as one travels, as one grows up.

Official street names are, in private maps, converted into the street where one receives a first kiss or the street where lives an extremely vicious dog. The communal turmeric too can be a touch more specific when featured in private maps: for the speaker in Bhatt’s poem turmeric is, along with chili powder, a disinfectant (99). Turmeric is, from this perspective, more than a variety of spice on the shelf of a shop. Who is to argue?

What is noteworthy about private maps is that they convert the general into specifics. Things mean so much more in private maps – and for exclusive reasons. Perspectives are like coloured spectacles that determine the colour of one’s view. The colour of the spectacles decides the colour of the things one sees. Everyone has a distinct interpretation of the world. In the process of interpretation, one creates an individual recess – a comprehensible space where everything is pared down into intelligible terms. A mind map, as it were.
Poems, perhaps all writings, are mind maps. They retell familiar stories in distinct terms. They draw on metaphors that are particular to individual minds and maps, bringing personal touches to collective experiences.

Pritam’s poem speaks of an impulse that provokes the creation of a poem – an impulse for something new, something unknown, like the feel of a male touch to a virgin. The process is exciting, since the poet – like the virgin – does not know what to expect: “…one part of her body burns, (a)nother melts…”. Yet when the speaker confesses the poem that results is “like pieces of a drawn-out scream” (102), her tone is one of pain. The process of creation is packed and provoked by unfamiliar sensations, but it’s over before one can acquire enough familiarity to comprehend it. When it’s over, the experience is something the poet can do nothing about but to let go. It is as if the poet exists only as a medium and has no control over the experience or how she feels about it (“…as if some injustice had been committed…”). The poem that results is deformed: it does record the experience of the poet, but it is one that is yet to mature in the poet’s mind.

Sahay’s “Our Hindi” sees Hindi in the image of a widower’s new wife. The figure of the widower’s new wife – indulged, loved, secure – echoes the poem’s thought about the position of Hindi. The last stanza of the poem spells out the conditions necessary for the language’s survival:

“…our Hindi is a married woman she’s faithful she’s happy
she wants to die before her husband dies
everything’s okay but first her husband must survive her
for how else can she have her wish” (106)

The husband is the speaker of the language – one who keeps the language inside the house. “Everything a woman needs is in the house”, the poem says. Language derives its life force from usage, from the way it is put to use to describe domestic trivialities: the “untended garden”, the “soiled pillows” and “crumpled clothes”, the “five kilograms of gold in the inner room”. The identical domestic works that a wife tends to. Language dies when there is nobody left who speaks it. If her husband survives her, Hindi will not die.

Pattanshetti writes of a woman as a negative on a film. The poem emphasizes memory’s persistence. The speaker recognizes that memory doesn’t let go of things and people one once had strong feelings for. However one meddles with the negative, one eventually “(rubs) the chemicals of desire” (107), rendering clearer and clearer the picture of the woman.
Chaudhari’s “The Naming of Things” furnishes couplets of what the speaker considers parallels. Each couplet is posited as parallels by virtue of a shared quality or feature. This couplet, for example, suggests that something that stirs in the breeze is synonymous to a leaf: “If it doesn’t stir in the breeze, why call it a leaf?” (107). The speaker, almost like Adam, assigns names to objects in his world. In the process of naming, he lays down parameters that are particular to his world: hands, for instance, are meant to give assistance (“If it refuses to give, don’t call it a hand” (108)). The speaker’s world is governed by private parameters, so that to be relevant in it one has to keep to these parameters.

“Still Life” argues “(t)here’s not a single arrow in time’s bow” (114). Living things exist in the flux of time. They appear solid in the way human beings choose to capture (to ‘freeze’) them – in memory, pictures, paintings and such keepsakes. In time’s framework, everything is fluid, constantly changing. This perspective negates familiar thoughts of the world as a solid entity.
Metaphors bridge the public and the personal worlds. In the use of metaphors, writers reinvent familiar facts and occurrences. It is an act of persuasion to see things from their perspective. One’s private world is filled by personal metaphors, like the private map that recreates common geography.

Further, a person’s perspective organizes the chaos of his experience. In Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”, to place a jar upon a hill in Tennessee is to command the wilderness, so that it’s “no longer wild”. The jar, in its capacity to structure the wilderness and dominate the landscape, resembles the authority of man’s imagination (or perspective) that functions to glean an exclusive pattern out of the disarray of reality. Man’s imagination is an essential authority because reality doesn’t carry promise of order. Imagination and perspective become tools to create a semblance of order.

In “The Yellow River”, Sen undermines the potency of the Great Wall. The Wall was built to protect the Chinese Empire from anticipated external attacks. The poem suggests that the wall does protect the city; it “(blocks) everything” (109), but its construction overlooks an unforeseen attack – from the Yellow River. The river has existed all along, and is hazardous only at random. If it “sweeps away village after village”, it doesn’t do so by design. Yet it is the lack of purpose that renders it overlooked. There is, presumably, a clear concept of ‘enemy’ that provokes the building of the Wall. The construction of the Wall is meant to produce a sense of security, the feeling of being protected. The poem highlights the fact that the perspective that defines the concept does not see the River as an enemy. Acquainted with the destruction brought about by the River, one knows the Wall is only a semblance of order, but if deprived of the knowledge of the River’s activity, the Empire’s sense of security would remain intact.

Kolatkar’s “The Alphabet” contains a set of words. The last line of each stanza persuades readers that each word – like the objects represented by these words – “have places of their own” and “won’t interfere with each other”. It helps to quote one stanza for illustration:

“pajamas pineapple rabbit and ram
sacrifice seal spoon and sugarcane
won’t interfere with each other” (116)

Arranged in such a manner, the words may or may not appear as an intelligible sentence. The reader’s perspective decides that. The sequence of words can be read together as a sentence and understood as a statement that each of the word listed in the first two lines does not have anything to do with another word. The alternative is to read each word in the first two lines as completely isolated entities, each completely disconnected to any other word in the sequence.
The last two stanzas of the poem are written in such a way to contradict the statement made in the last line of the first live stanzas. The author combines words from the first five stanzas, positioning them to create comprehensible sentences. These are the last two stanzas:

“the mother won’t put her baby on the compost heap
the brahmin won’t season the duck with garlic
the yacht won’t hit the watermelon and sink

unless the ostrich eats the baby’s frock
the warrior won’t shoot an arrow into ganesh’s belly
and if the ram doesn’t knock down the old man

why would he need to smash the cup on the tombstone” (116)

The statements in the penultimate stanza are legible and logical; the statements in the last – including the final line – are legible, but not logical. The penultimate stanza appears logical because one can make sense of the statements in it by connecting them to the norms of the real world. The codes in which the regular world functions specify that any mother in her right mind, in ordinary circumstances, will not put her baby on a compost heap. A Brahmin, by definition, will not season any duck with anything. The yacht won’t sink just because it hits a watermelon.
The statements in the last stanza are legible. They are grammatically, syntactically correct – even lexically legible. Of course the ostrich has the capacity to eat a baby’s frock. Of course it is possible that a warrior shoots an arrow into ganesh’s belly. A ram can knock down an old man, and the old man can smash a cup on any tombstone for whatever reason.

The statements in the penultimate stanza, when contrasted with the ones in the stanza that follows, appear as ‘truths’, if only for the fact that the events described in the penultimate stanza sound more familiar than the ones that follow. The events illustrated in the last stanza are not completely implausible; they do, however, sound bizarre.
Is ‘truth’, then, nothing more than a construct derived from a person’s degree of familiarity? Kolatkar’s poem seems to persuade readers that it is. Truth is true only so far as one believes in it.

Imagination that creates perspective for the individual is necessary to reduce the chaos of reality into comprehensible units. Yet imagination, for its individuality, lacks collective authority. In order to interpret the world and exist as an individual in the collective, one must believe in the authority of one’s imagination. Truth, in this sense, is what one imagines to be true. What is described in the poems are significant because they matter to their writers. What is worth knowing eludes specifications. What is worth knowing: truth is always relative to one’s convictions.

Works Cited:

Bhatt, Sujata. “What is Worth Knowing?” The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 99.

Chaudhari, Bahinabai. “The Naming of Things”. Trans. Philip Engblom and Jayant Karve. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.107-109.

Kolatkar, Arun. “The Alphabet”. Trans. Vinay Dharwadker. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 116.

Paniker, Ayyappa K. “The Itch”. Trans. Ayyappa Paniker. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.111.

Pattanshetti, Siddhalinga. “Woman”. Trans. A.K. Ramanujan. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.107.

Pritam, Amrita. “The Creative Process”. Trans. Amrita Pritam and Arlene Zide. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 102.

Rajeevan, Savithri. “A Pair of Glasses”. Trans. Ayyappa Paniker and Arlene Zide. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 103.

Sahay, Raghuvir. “Our Hindi”. Trans. Vinay Dharwadker. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.105.

Sen, Nabaneeta Dev. “The Yellow River”. Trans. Nabaneeta Dev Sen. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 109.

Shahryar. “Still Life”. Trans. David Paul Douglas and Gopi Chand Narang. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.115.

Thanker, Labhshankar. “Poem”. Trans. Sitanshu Yashashchandra. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 99.

Shamsie, Kamila. Kartography. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002.

Stevens, Wallace. “Anecdote of the Jar.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1957. 76.