for my persons who make and read poems
Once upon an evening, I felt brave. It was two days before the day of celebrating romance in February. I opened the door of my small rented place in Kalibata, welcoming two girls I really like and adore so much, D and B. I’ve befriended D since her first year of college in 2011 and, from her, I get to know and hang out with B and G, her girlfriend, and another sweet girl named Flower. Jakarta is not a nice city. It is never kind. And yet, when we met, we find corners of triumph. With them, my hours are delightful. I cannot hide my smile every time I’m with them. Including that evening. Especially that evening. That evening, B read someone’s writings: one is an ugly writing by a sexist man and the other one is a beautiful letter from an envious friend. D and I listened to her. We smiled and cringed; we were perplexed and amazed; we tried to understand. I felt magical. Those words are not B’s craft, but the ways she read allured our gaze. And our gaze influenced her pace and voice of readings. She moved around, we danced around. We formed circular moments of paying attention and reading out loud together. There, we created a space full of joy and tenderness.
I used to be interested in poetry reading but not so much nowadays. I get bored because many readers often talk in similar tone and expression, even when the poems are utterly different. I don’t know. Reading poems out loud is a performance that asks you to be with and in the words that your tongue spells out. I actually blame literary education in Indonesia, either you will read like Rendra or you will read like a depressed millennial trying to find lightness in the dark. Nothing in between. Well, sometimes they put some attractions on the stage: music (musikalisasi puisi oh yeah), cooking show, etc etc. But poetry reading becomes too formulaic for me. No surprises. No curiosity. Only streams of excited feelings to be part of something literary and “cultural.”
But I tried to suspend such judgement. So, I went to a poetry reading performance in one of the big campuses in Yogyakarta. I know some poets there, and a colleague invited me to join her as an audience, so I went. Gosh, I got distracted. Outdoor event at night with too many cigarette smokes blurred my view. I could not see the performers clearly; only hearing their voices jumbled with some people chattered in the back. A literary club made a drama out of poetry but it falls into soap opera. A good poet I know apparently was not too skilful in presenting her words, even when her craft is brilliant. A woman with harmonious voice sang her poetry, but her melody overcomes her poetic. My colleague was amazing; she paid attention and was so focus. And there I was, scrolling through my phone searching for keywords “how to read poetry.”
I know, I’m being obnoxious here for clearly I haven’t seen and will never see EVERY poetry slam and reading event in the whole universe. But if you sympathize with my concern, you might notice my judgement is also a question. What make poetry reading a special event and not just an ordinary thing of which we recite poetry every day as our guide of living? Is poetry really that special because we consider them as a high-brow form of art and literature? Can poetry also become our daily staples?
My first poetry and its reading is a prayer. Doa Bapa Kami. Our Heavenly Father. A Christian child has to memorize this prayer, recite them every day (especially if you also enter Christian, both Protestant and Catholic school), and make sure we can easily recall it if needed. But, as many kids in any religious household and environment have to endure, to memorize a prayer is only to do it as adults told and dictate. Why we have to memorize this lines of prayer? “Just because.” I got a better answer because my parents are a priest. “Because it’s a prayer that Jesus taught.” Sure. But still, why we have to remember words that have being around for two millennium as if these words aren’t obsolete and travel through different times and places? I don’t think I got an answer. And yet, I still memorized the prayer. Bapa Kami yang ada di Sorga / dikuduskanlah nama-Mu.
An Indonesian language class was another introduction of poetry reading. Now, everyone has to read like Rendra and read puisi perjuangan. A teacher’s call for students to stand in the class and read poetry from text books made me giddy. I was so bored and uninterested that I prefer to join competition in English storytelling than Indonesian poetry reading. Also, that performance on every 17 August? No differences between reading teks proklamasi, Pembukaan UUD 1945, and prayer; thank goodness, our national anthem has a good melody and composition.
I learn the beauty of poetry reading because my literary teachers in junior school loved literature. I had two teachers back then: Pak Fidi taught me to write proper essay and Pak Kus introduced me to the “canon.” The former helped me honing my writing skill to the core; he put me in an essay competition, entrusted me to take a big part for mading (wall magazine), and asked me to be a sort-of student editor for a school’s magazine. The latter was far more distant but his passion affected me so much. Many students mocked him for being too passionate that he often unconsciously spit out. I, of course, was one of the “victims” because I used to sit in front rows due to my near sighted eyes. Nevertheless, the ways he read Chairil Anwar’s poems or Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana’s excerpts with exact spirit–not in Rendra’s style but, I think, in his own style–made me go to the library and borrow some poetry books and novels.
In putting down these memories of reading poetry, I only feel regret. My first was poetry, but I never took it seriously because I felt betrayed. Prayer could not save me from adults’ violence. Poetry did not save me when I needed it most. I stopped reading them in seriousness. I stopped talking about literature as if they’re magical. I despised young writers. I envied them. Years went by. I became smaller and smaller. I put Sapardi Djoko Damono’s poetry collection Hujan Bulan Juni as a decoration for my working corner, to let people know that I’m a poetry reader. I read Wiji Thukul’s words because it looked cool to recite them in front of human rights activists. I attended musikalisasi puisi because I feared of missing out. I printed Subagio Sastrowardoto’s “Kata” in a black cotton shirt because I wanted to impress strangers. Poetry was ornaments to my petty self. My reading was never about poetry. It was always about me, me, and me.
In 2016, I bought a poetry book Sergius Mencari Bacchus by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. I never heard of them, but the book had a label for winning a prize. So I tried reading it. And then I cried. I sent it to an old friend of mine, the first person I wanted to tell about my feelings of living in a closet without directly coming out to her. In the same year, I met Bram and PP, two persons who also wrote poetry but never really published them. For them, poetry is never about readers’ existence and validation. Was it a fate? Destiny? Critical juncture? I have no idea. I only know I started reading poetry again. In fervour. In love. In admiration. In respect. In awe. With a new eyes and ears and touches. I might not know what a good poetry is. But I re-learn to ride those flows and ruptures of lines and syntax. I become loving poetry so much that I recite again, memorize again, incorporating them into my work and lives.
Now that I re-claim my feelings about poetry, I wonder if my boredom to some (if not most) poetry readings I attended to is actually a self-projection of my own dispassion in the past. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough. Those voices are so loud that they bite my own tongue. What’s wrong with me? I cannot write poetry, sure, I can accept that. But can I — we — at least read it well? How to understand the pressure and urgency of its form without slicing them into pieces for “scientific” literary debates, without stripping them into mere “analytical discourse”? How to dwell in the mystical sphere of poetic languages that push back a regime of thought that conflates objectivity with coldness of reading attitude? How to read poetry?
I don’t have the exact answer because I’m not a literary scholar focuses on poetry studies, nor I hone my professional skill as literary critics. I’m a quotidian reader who only knows proximity of answers and tries to make affinity with words I read. And perhaps, what I really want from poetry reading is a spectrum of ordinary tenderness, in which words — in poetry or not — touch us gently and lightly, and still embrace us. I want moments of performative readings that are full of curiosity about living a life, not just enduring it, not just surviving it, not just because. It’s strange even for me to have this kind of hopeful remark. But I dare to say it because I remember clearly how my chest was full of desire to live when I read my friends’ words and hear they read theirs out loud, seeing their gestures and dances of pronunciations, pauses, intonations. Their body moves around with words on their tongue. It’s immensely living. Poetry reading, my ideal one, is about this moment of bursting out of proportion that we cannot even remember our own despair. In this moment, sorrow is laid bare but never define. Sorrow does not dictate. We flow with it.
As I’m writing this post, a good friend shared this poem by Marina Tsvetaeva in her instagram, translated from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine. “Where does such tenderness come from?” Tsvetaeva asks.
Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.
The evening had become night. B and D parted their ways from mine. “Thank you for coming. Thank you for welcoming.” We know our invitations and parties do not end there. I long for their presence again and again, their soft greetings makes living is ultimately bearable. I wish days are kind to them. I wish their love to their people blooms and flourishes. I wish they can always read their words out loud in courage and confidence. I wish their tenderness always come and become.
Nik Setiadarma 