Clever Poem by AK Ramanujan: 'On the Death of a Poem'

Images

consult

one other

A conscience-

stricken

jury

and come

slowly

to a sentence.

This little poem really made me think! So much of a poem is us trying to trap images in our butterfly net. I love the way Ramanujan has characterized the images. It reminds me of Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author. Very meta.

As the poem itself reluctantly ends in a sentence, with the finality of a period, form and content fuse. Feeling is sacrificed for meaning in a sentence, leading to the demise of a poem.

Ramanujan wrote in English and Kannada, and there's a translation prize named after him.

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