Originally an actress in Indian films, Girija left this career after five years, despite its initial and continued success, to follow a higher calling. To begin with she remained close to the film industry – writing spiritual film scripts with an art film director in Chennai. The journey from thereon became ever more inward, and she began to focus on academic pursuits, obtaining a PhD in Indian spiritual psychology in 2003 from Cardiff University, which was followed by a short-term academic post in India. Finding academia unsuitable to her nature, she left it to take up journalism (she is currently the world markets reporter for a world-leading medical technology newsletter in London) with a view to developing her self-expression through writing. Girija feels that poetry is one form of this search for perfection in self-expression but finds it to be very demanding because through words has to be conveyed the magic of the reality behind the veil. She believes she is still not yet a true poet, as mostly she still writes from ‘emotional intuition’ (on a good day), and too literally. Her aspiration is to find and express a higher intuition and to write increasingly symbolically.

Poet's Letter Beowulf Poetry Prize Now: Prizes £17,000.00 

Alan Buckley

People I meet often say that they don’t like poetry, that they don’t understand it, don’t get it. If there hasn’t been an item on the radio recently about the decline of poetry, don’t worry – in the manner of the mythical London bus, there’ll be another one along soon; and someone will say it’s all down to modernism, or poetry not being taught properly in schools (although as one very sharp interviewer pointed out recently, Spenser was saying this back in the 1590s).

However… In his TS Eliot Lecture “Thin Ice and the Midnight Skaters,” George Szirtes makes the following point. Everyone knows – even if they don’t know they know – the fundamental law that underpins poetry, which is this: the language of everyday speech, when arranged into particular orderings and shapes, enables a more concentrated and heightened expression of ideas and emotions than conversational language, or the language of prose. When thousands of people laid flowers outside Kensington Palace in memory of Princess Diana, a large percentage of the cards that went with them had verses on. Now, it could easily be argued that most of these verses were not good poetry; and there’s a strong possibility that many people were unconsciously processing unresolved issues from their lives through mourning Diana. But what can’t be questioned is that thousands of people who probably wouldn’t know Rilke from Bilko experienced something at a depth that was beyond their ordinary experience, and they instinctively turned to poetry as a means of communicating and making sense of that experience.

Just as poetry is a bridge between levels of human experience – between that which is everyday, and that which is extraordinary within the everyday – so writers of poetry have to be a bridge themselves. It’s no good sitting in your bedroom writing poetry and hoping that the world will somehow come knocking at your door. The line about every artist needing to create their own audience is true; you need to be willing to get your hands dirty out in the world, and not just the world of open mics, festivals and poetry magazines, but the world of schools, libraries, hospitals, prisons – all the institutions where poets can jam their foot in the door with a sheaf of paper in one hand and a clutch of cheap biros in the other. Poets have to teach people what they already know: that poetry is as essential to the well-being of their souls as breathing is to the continued life of their bodies.

This doesn’t mean being populist, bums on seats at any price. Poetry that loses its hold on the territories of ambiguity and multiple meaning has lost its most precious resource. But it does mean thinking of the poem and its audience being like two potential but rather shy lovers who need a bit of help from the poet to really get it together. I often think of Billy Collins, who said that poetry is difficult to write, so it shouldn’t be difficult to read; and then of Geoffrey Hill, who said that poetry is often difficult because life is difficult. I feel drawn to each statement, knowing that there’s no resolution, just an ongoing process of exploring creative tensions. But – to risk pushing the metaphor to its limits – we know that any bridge is only free of tensions when it fails in its task, collapsing into the river below.

Philip Ruthen

Philip Ruthen has a diverse range of texts published including poetry, short stories and reviews in a variety of arenas, including: Cambrensis – Short Story Wales, The Poetry Church, and associated Anthologies, CPR/Christian Poetry Review, Psychopoetica, Target – Poetry and Comment as a featured poet. A selection of his poetry and other works is available from the Poet’s Letter archive pages.

Currently living in London, a significant position in his  writing originates from movements pressing for improved, and optimistically, transformed health and social care services, which influenced his choice of  post-graduate studies in legal theory.

Floating beside shoulders

To make you
of memory
is all I have
after being close enough
to kiss your tousled smile

as you lay your breath
in place
here, I pull the sheets around
then into me
legs wound to forearms

you I sense are naked
arms flung behind your head –
this artifice; I can’t do justice
to the touch of you
an invitation

to living holding within
our dancing fingertips
your nape our liberty
the call – the caress
that asks for now.

Copyrights @ Philip Ruthen, London 2006

A Reflection on the Nature of Poetry

What is poetry?

In its most mature form, poetry, like any other art, should unveil a reality that evades us in some way – whether it is through making the reader ask penetrating questions or by lifting their heart from suffocating gloom and allowing it to see the light a little. The greatest poetry can be spiritual poetry that openly speaks of eternal verities because the poet has become a perfect channel for those realities. Such are some of the lines of John Milton or of the Indian poet and sage Sri Aurobindo Ghose, for example. And what about Japanese Haiku poetry, whose utter simplicity can shatter inner doors and free the spirit into cool vast mountain spaces?