In anticipation of the release of Christopher Nolan’s allegedly historically inaccurate depiction of Homer’s Greek epic ‘Odyssey’, the influence of the classics in both art and literature on popular culture remains strewn with dilemmas.
The present-day artist — a filmmaker, painter or writer — faces the question of separating imitation from inspiration. There are continuous attempts at understanding popular culture, and integrating their work that may appeal to the masses by understanding the target audience.
A cognisant author of the 21st century, attempting to understand artistic integrity while aspiring to retain finances enough to remain in the dwindling middle class and buy popcorn at cinemas, must understand the foremost importance of the rainbow camera icon on the phones of a vast majority of young people.
I speak of the resurgence of ‘poetry’ and quotes on Instagram. Naveen Kishore’s ‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’, with its structure of disconnectedness, may be appropriate for the photogenic teenager to use as captions on posts of dark silhouettes on Friday nights.
‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’, written by the theatre practitioner-turned-publisher, certainly begins with an inspiration from greatness, as most works do — references to William Shakespeare’s tragic heroes such as Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth remain a recurring theme. Divided into four parts, the book of poems uses intense imagery with theatrical measure, literally and metaphorically.
The poems transform the reader into an audience member viewing the proscenium with dim-lit images of bleeding angels, dragging wings across the stage. The first part of the book may be seen as heavily inspired by the British modernists with its use of visuals and mingling physical theatre in the form of poetry. The book’s progression (or digression from any meaning) may also be viewed by a well-seasoned reader as TS Eliot’s use of disconnectedness and imagery as seen in the popular 1915 poem ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’.
It remains, however, necessary to address the difference between Prufrock and ‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’ — Elliot’s narrative remains consistent and plausible. As most modernist poems go, any reader may become disillusioned by the use of excessive fractured, disconnected sentences. The question of whether modernist poems or the idea that poetry in general must make sense to the reader remains relevant.
The disconnectedness in Kishore’s book, while deprived of a narrative or coherence, may be viewed as a homage to the Bard through its use of physical theatre in poetry or vice versa, although the question of inspiration from modernists such as Eliot in its deviation from traditional poetic structure to an almost stream-of-consciousness form remains a disjuncture as it fails to come close to coherence.
The poems seem to be an amalgamation of the writer’s fleeting thoughts, emerging from Hamlet’s melancholy to the wounded angels of the psyche, words strewn across pages as ephemeral as the young generation’s attention span. The book undoubtedly requires patience and its inability to garner constant interest till the concluding chapter may be attributed to its arbitrariness.
Although the primary origins of most contemporary poems allude to the Modernists, ‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’ does not provide an empathetic perspective of the depth of Shakespearean tragedies or the beauty of arbitrary thoughts of identity and desolation to the modern reader with the same intensity and perplexity as perhaps has been done in the previous century. The collection poses an important question of the inspiration that present-day poetry owes to predecessors yet fails to encompass its intricacies.
‘Ode to a Grieving Angel’ may be consequently befitted for transitions and thus suitable for readers browsing airport bookshops where reading poetry does not require a bookmark for previous context.