What is Poetry?

Poetry is an art of listening. A habit that can be inculcated only by a mind that is receptive and open.  The hymn, the metrical composition and the rhythm is given by the pulse of the feelings through which we choose to see or hear the situation. Poets know how to listen.

 Poets listen to themselves. They listen to objects around them, to situations, events, happenings, feelings and at times get an intuitive insight complicates the intense weave between the Truth and the Perceived “reality” of this world.  This Art of Listening gets translated through the Self in the poet and is expressed as a Poem.

Poetry becomes an art at the point where listeners generate their own individual response to the verse. The experience of the poet, illustrated in the rhyme of words and language may be entirely different from the visions inculcated in the reader.

Writing poetry cleans the soul.  The personality benefits from “the readiness to listen”, “the ability to synergise the experience with the Self” and finally “the strength to bind it in an expression”.  This is almost like BREATHING, where in a poet/writer is imbibing, exchanging/benefiting and exhaling. The oxygen is absorbed by the soul of the poet. As a person who benefited from this aspect of writing and learning I can vouch for the amount of Healing I feel after writing or even after reading poetry.

Like in life, in poetry too, it is not always important to be correct or to understand poetry or a verse correctly, because there is a complete Spectrum of Colours and Feelings that needs to be understood to enrich the experience of life. For us Be-lagams, life is to be seen as a poet, in all its colours- by the day, rather than as in Truth or False ( Black or White) by the night.

(Be-lagam definition of Poetry)