In Praise of Shape Poetry

In his MasterClass on poetry, Billy Collins tells us to think of the title of a poem as a welcome mat to lead the reader in. I like the idea of title as threshold, poem as house with all its corridors, stanzas, alcoves, and dead ends. Where I live, in rural coastal Tamil Nadu, the thresholds of homes are decorated with kolams—geometric patterns of rice flour that are made daily once the floor outside the front door has been washed clean. Kolams are meant to invite prosperity into the home but have the added benefit of offering sustenance to ants and other wandering creatures. The design of kolams can be intricate or simple—a series of swirls and dots that could evoke either a flower or a nest of serpents eating their tails. By the end of the day though, they will have disintegrated into a chalky smear, and the process must be repeated the next morning, which is an ars poetica in itself.

Doorways are liminal spaces in architecture—portals that connect the inner world to the outer. Poetry too can be thought of as a kind of portal between emotional inscape and the landscape that surrounds us. Some years ago, I heard the writer Vikram Chandra give a talk titled “Chitra Kavya: The Poetry of Amazement.” In it, he introduces us to one of the world’s greatest literary snobs, Anandavardhana, a ninth-century Sanskrit theoretician who wrote a seminal text called the Dhvanyaloka, where he asserted that poetry was beautiful because it spoke without speaking. For Anandavardhana, dhvani, or suggestion, was what gave poetry its power. Like all good literary snobs, he had clear ideas of what he considered bad poetry to be, and top of that list was chitra kavya, or picture poetry—poetry that relies upon tricks of language, shape, or sound for effect. This kind of poetry was merely imitation poetry for Anandavardhana because it lacked rasa (emotional essence). In other words, it was amateurish, tacky, dhvani-less stuff.

Chandra’s talk was fascinating, not just because the study of chitra kavya has all but vanished from Indian syllabi, but because it made clear that while our ancients were creating poetry of the highest sophistication, they were also having a lot of fun. Play was abundant, whether in the form of vakrajhivam (tongue twisters), prahelikas (riddles), or chitrabandhas (picture stanzas), where interlocking Sanskrit syllables are patterned to create formations on the page, which can be read as palindromes and form a plethora of shapes—lotus, trident, sword, plough. There were war poems in the form of battalion lines, erotic poems in the form of intertwining ropes around a drum, and my favorite, the gomutrika-bandha (cow urine stanza), which emulates the zigzag of a cow pissing as it sways along a path.

For all his derision about chitra kavya, it turns out Anandavardhana went and wrote one of the greatest chitra kavyas of all time—the Devisataka (The Goddess’s Century)—a hundred shloka sutra in loving worship of the goddess, so full of mind-bending tricks that the scholar Daniel H. H. Ingalls compares him to the juggler of Notre Dame, another man performing feats for the glory of a goddess. The final twenty shlokas of the poem make the shape of a great wheel, and Anandavardhana reveals his identity in the inner rim of the wheel, saying he was instructed to write the poem by the goddess herself, who came to him in a dream. Naturally, Sanskrit scholars have been baffled for centuries about why such a disser of chitra kavya might engage in the very practice he found so tasteless. But Chandra tells us to look at this work as an act of devotion, reminding us that by making an image for the goddess with language, the poem allows us to look upon the form of the goddess herself, and our only possible reaction to this can be amazement.

For years this talk on chitra kavya took up residence inside me. I had read shape poems before, of course. As an undergraduate I delighted in John Hollander’s “Swan and Shadow” and George Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” Later I stumbled upon Apollinaire’s calligrammes to his sweetheart Madeleine, which were written on birch bark from the trenches of the Western Front in 1915; poems in the shape of a star or cannon. But hearing about chitra kavya, poetry that emanated from the geography I inhabited, unlocked a mystery about how shape and language could not only be playful and pleasurable, but could add texture and emotional depth to a poem.

The landscape of the Indian subcontinent in the ninth century may have been slightly less chaotic than India today, but geometry and shape has always been a preoccupation in a country that delighted in disorder while obsessing about form. Nowhere is this fixation for synthesizing the physical and the metaphysical manifested more greatly than the second-century foundational text of the performing arts, the Natyashastra, which goes into breathtaking lists and categories of anatomical joints, gaits, stable and transient emotions, types of stage-building (each meant to be a micro-model of the cosmos), and the twenty-four hasta mudras or hand gestures, from which the entire human story can be told. More and more I began to feel that perhaps because of the increasing chaos of Indian streets, the eye is drawn soothingly toward the concreteness of shape: the perfect geometry of stepwells, the octagonal stars of jali windows, the embroidered diamonds and square gardens of phulkari quilts, the dot and line universes of Gond and Bhil art. Even household items began to take on epic proportions: the South Indian coffee filter, reminiscent of a lingam; the humble tiffin carrier holding your lunch, opening and opening into a galaxy. Perhaps the most potent of all these shapes is the bindu, which in Tantra is the point at which all sound is created. The dot. Infinity. Staring at you from the center of a woman’s forehead. That invisible third eye, little planet, whirring and fixing you.

My American editor, after examining my new manuscript of poems, gently asked: “Are you sure you need all these shape poems? They can be considered somewhat gimmicky.” And it’s true. It’s a bit like going into a tattoo parlor for a delicate dragonfly on your back and emerging with an entire rainforest. Once you begin to think of shape as container, it’s difficult not to get carried away. A pair of Speedos, yoni, nib of fountain pen, Manchurian fir? Reader, I’ve tried them all.

I blame Anandavardhana, although there are several instances in Indian tradition where the sonic and iconic have worked together to generate power. We know that painters and calligraphers in Mughal courts sat together with text and image. Yantras, those mystical diagrams, are charged in meditation when they are overlaid with the sound of accompanying mantras. Ragas, the melodic framework in Hindustani classical music, were amplified by miniature paintings called ragamalas, which were meant to evoke and intensify the essence of the raga. This is also dhvani, suggestion, resonance. It’s why the water bowls of the Deccani sultanate had inscriptions of the Qur’an at their base, so that the words may make the water taste sweeter. It’s why temples have poems for the goddess inscribed on the walls of their corridors, so when pilgrims pass through to the womb chamber, they may touch those words, which is like touching the goddess herself.

Language is never just about what is being said; it is also about how it is held. Like the kolam patterns that are made daily outside the thresholds of homes—a ritual act of renewal and dissolution—language too must be continually reimagined and shaped into being. So, when I offer Pliny the Elder a poem in the shape of a menstrual cup, it’s not just a chance to finally say, two thousand years later, to that grandest of mansplainers, that perhaps he got a few things wrong about menstruation. It’s also a harnessing of those imagined powers, a fierceness that can work through spell and incantation. It’s not just a mat for the reader to wipe their dusty feet, but a mandala in which to hold the universe, which is, in fact, our own bodies and selves.