Jaihoon asserts that poetry powerfully explores the depth of human experience, inspiring the young students to embrace creativity.
Poetry unlike any other spectrum of reading, it is not a very interesting topic. I’m sure most of you here aren’t very interested in poetry. Poetry isn’t a very frequently read genre of literature, mainly because of the reason that it requires a certain amount of thinking. And in this fast moving world, most of us aren’t ready to think and ponder over what the poet is saying. When I say most of us, I meant the general people, not necessarily my young friends seated here.
So what is poetry? Poetry is nothing but the celebration of the human experience: that isn’t a definition, I just came up with that today morning. Human experience involves everything you can think of: our emotions, tears, laughter etc. Poetry isn’t just some lines and rhyming words. It could be a national anthem of any nation. Certain companies have their poetic punchlines and mottos. Nike, for example, has “just do it”.
When you watch sports, there is poetry in the commentary, because you don’t say things as it is, you elaborate and describe it. All the religious texts in the world are poetry, not prose. Be it Bhagavat Gita, the Quran or the bible. We call them a ‘verse’ from the Holy Book, not “a line”. The worship of God is poetry, because we don’t know what He looks like but we praise and glorify Him. So majority of the world runs on poetry and yet sadly nobody wants to read poetry.
There is a platform called WordPress, a leading platform for blog publishing. Do you know what their motto is? It reads “coding is poetry”. Why would they say that? Because anything you love can be poetry.
From the day of Adam, all the poets have written about love. Love from the mother to her son, love for a rider to his or her horse, a warlord’s poem for his weapons and his force. So here love is like the sun and all the poets revolve around it.
So now I hope you have an idea what poems are.. in prose we say things as they are, we state the facts and figures in the Statistics. In poems, we imagine, metaphorize and symbolize. We say “you look like the moon” we know you don’t look like the moon but we say things like that.
My idea here is to make you like the literature, because it’s the only thing that makes you feel human again in this busy world. And it is ok to be human, for example, tears are something that is discouraged and it is considered shameful and embarrassing. But I say that a good poet always cries as there must be moments that reflect your signs of a true human being. Our social settings like our friends and family are like dams: they stop our tears. And what happens when you withhold the water for too long? It bursts. So cry as you please because its part of the human experience as we discussed.
We are living in an age where nothing helps you feel human again. We have the Ai which teases and mocks our intelligence, but Ai generated poems are so easy to identify because they are “too” perfect, and we human beings are far from perfect. We make mistakes, you can note down a lot of mistakes from the speech that I am delivering right now.
Almost every country has fought for freedom, the interesting thing is that most countries got the desire for independence from a poem. For example Allama Iqbal wrote the poem “Tarānah-e-Hindi” and that poem created such an energy that all the people felt empowered to fight for their country.
There was recently a post on the Khaleej times talking about the people who have “popcorn brains”. They gave quite a funny example of a person, he puts the clothes in the washing machine, and makes his way to the living room to switch off the toaster. But on the way she hears a notification come from her phone, after checking her notification she got distracted and suddenly she started smelling a burnt smell.
So it is a big battle for us because the elders are blaming the children for spending too much time on the phone when they are spending time on their phone too. So we need some time with the kitten, the sun, the beach and trees, only that will make you human again. A good poet is always a good human being too. Our education nowadays is unfortunately based mostly on textbooks, but we need to have some interaction with nature also. Im not saying that you have to go to Al-Ain to spend time with nature, just watering the plant, for example, can make you connect with another living thing. Spending some time with a plant can get you humanized again because it is a living creature.
Highlights from Mujeeb Jaihoon’s poetry workshop for students of ‘GEMS Our Own English High School, Sharjah – Girls’. talk at Our Own English High School, Sharjah – Girls. Posted Dec 24 2024.
