Up the Star-spangled garden path

By

Randeep Wadehra

I scowled at my reflection in the mirror. Things were certainly looking blue... Don’t get me wrong. I never disapprove of anything that belongs to me, especially my reflection in the mirror. I am in deep love with myself, as a good poet should be. It was just that there was nothing to look forward to in life but the weekly meeting of the Sad Abandoned Poets’ Society, more popular as SAPS.

SAPS meetings draw a select attendance – all sensitive souls, each one eternally searching for fresh literary colors with which to paint life’s sunshine, or its shadows.

It is the lot of this fraternity to be generally ignored by the humanity at large. Make a mention to a gathering of friends and relatives that you dabble in verse and you find yourself deserted quicker than you can utter ‘Tagore’.

Editors, with extreme reluctance, allow a poet’s corner in one of the insignificant pages of their publications and never ever let it be known that they actually have anything to do with the column. Often they resort to sadism by appointing someone as poetry editor who has all the propensities of a retired government auditor. No matter how much time and creativity you invest in refining your craft the fellow will find something objectionable in your submissions. Your labor of love, sent to his office with elaborate ceremonies and great expectations, wings back to you like a boomerang.

But a poet is a stoic animal. He soldiers on in the hope that at some point of time in future the barbarian will morph into a civil, sensitive being.

The SAPS has a long-term perspective while organizing poetic symposiums and seminars. At every such seminar we bring our poems with latest rejection slips still neatly stapled to the top left-hand corner and analyze the merits of our respective works threadbare. There couldn’t possibly be any demerits in our poems. The unanimous conclusion would be that any one of us could easily give Vikram Seth the run for his phoren-earned money. Every week the SAPS conclave ends with a solemn ritual: each Sad Abandoned Poet (SAP) strides to the front of the assembly, takes up one of the long slender quills of antique design from the table and – with a dramatic flourish – plunges its sharp steel nib into a little wax doll with distinctly simian features tied to miniature chair marked “Editor”.

If only editors weren’t such unfeeling, brutal, mean-spirited and obdurate clods.  Thanks to this hard-nosed breed of spoilsports, our efforts in verse always meet with reverse.

On rare occasions, someone would graduate – usually temporarily – from a SAP to Selected Poet.  Yes, some lucky rhymester would actually succeed in getting a poem published.  Then he or she would declare the editor a splendid fellow while the rest of us hissed under our collective breath “toady!”.

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 Enjoyed mingling with the SAD poets, their genteel-ly simmering rivalries, and the bit about the jauntily perched cap and the dabs of 'Charlie'!

Dr. Iqbal judge | May 31, 2010