Mushairra - a very different kind of poetry reading

I have just come back from being a part of my first mushairra, which is the word in Urdu (at least I am assumingn it's Urdu) for a traditional gathering of poets in Pakistan, and it is a very, very different experience from the kinds of readings we have here in the US. The most significant difference is not only the degree to which the audience responds to a poet as he or she reads—calling out baah-baah, or vaah-vaah, after verses or images or rhymes that have moved them—but also the way in which the poet responds, repeating the verse that the audience has singled out sometimes two and three times. With the exception of my poems and the poem read by the guy who invited me to this event—Paul Catafago, executive director of Movement One—I understood only a very few words of the other poems that were (Urdu is closely related to Persian, which I understand and speak a little of), but I would be lying if I said I appreciated any of it as poetry. What I appreciated was the openness and sincerity and clear desire to support the people who got up to read; there was in that room a genuine love for poetry, for language and the way language can move you, the way language can change the way you see things—and this was particularly evident in the way the audience would themselves repeat along with the poet a verse that he or she had already repeated two or three times—and it's not that audiences in the US don't feel this, but we certainly don't express it during a reading. We may go up and say something to the poet afterwards or we might clap at the end of a particularly moving poem, but we do not, we are trained not to, there is something in the culture here that prevents us from participating in the poem as it is read, from giving voice to whatever it is that the poem makes us feel. It's almost as if we are ashamed of it, which reminds of something Sam Hamill said in one of his essays about how embarrassed we get as an audience when the poem a poet is reading moves him or her to tears, especially if it's a him.

And it is fitting that, as often as not, the responses of the people in the mushairra were non-verbal, or they were quick, ejaculatory comments, like the baah-baah I wrote about above. I remember taking a course with Hayden Carruth when I was studying at Syracuse University and it was about precisely that, the non-verbal aspects of poetry and how it is those aspects that often give voice in the poem to the emotional energy that breaks the bounds of words. Carruth's course was about rhythm and meter and rhyme, but also about why it is that poets will often spell out the sounds "Ah!" or "O!" in a line, and we talked a lot about how those things function similarly to grace notes in music or the way horn players will sometimes allow their high notes to crack a little bit. In fact, the participation of the audience at this mushairra reminds me, now that I am writing this, not a little of the way audiences at concerts will sometimes start spontaneously to clap their hands to the music.

I read four pieces, two from my translation of the Gulistan and two ghazals in English, which this audience especially appreciated—most of the poems that people read, I think were ghazals in Urdu—and I don't think I have ever felt more warmly received or more genuinely appreciated as a writer than when I heard this audience express their appreciation and enjoyment right in the middle of my reading.