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Editor’s Note: Poetry is known to have a long history. The Africans poetised about hunting; the ancient Chinese and the ancient Indians wove tales and then converted their protagonists into gods. The Greek dealt with the rhetoric and the Italians and the Persians were taken over by the metric. In essence, poetry could very well be the story of human obsession – a narration of our varying and fleeting regard and eventual disregard for god, power, nature, beauty, monarchs and courts, morals, and vice.
What if after singing all these praises for the institution of the poetics, I were to shatter the illusion, gently take away all the distinction I recently accorded to it, and tell you that poetry is, in fact, nothing but a scam? A flimflam, a project of diddle, a boondoggle? If poetry is just an eddy of sentences, a series of strange-sounding synonyms pieced together, well then, dear reader, you have just been scammed!
But your humble editor is barely a scammer, and so, keeping my personal admiration for poetry aside, I will introduce you to a modern poet who claims that poetry is a scam. Following the undercurrents of unstated Imposter Syndrome that every creative subtly but constantly feels, full-time digital marketeer and part-time poet Arjun Chopra, who works as a full-time digital marketer so that he can pursue his passion of running an Instagram meme page and being a writer, talks about how, he, as a poet, ends up scamming everyone who reads his work.
In an earlier conversation with us, Arjun had solemnly expressed, “I’m down to write a poem about anything and I’d love to write a poem about everything. I am partial to meta-poetry. I really enjoy reading and writing poems about poems. Maybe, I should write a poem about writing poems about poems.”
And he did!
Lover of meta-poetry, Arjun has, in fact, been writing poetry about poems since he was in the VIII grade. “It was a poem about the different types of poems I like – repping the meta-poetry game since ‘09! It was pretty basic with four stanzas in the ABCB rhyme scheme. My neighbour is a teacher for children with learning disabilities and she felt that my poem was perfect to introduce her students to poetry. I remember swelling with pride as I saw her craft a lesson around my poem for her students.”
So, why, one wonders, would Arjun think that poetry is a scam?
Read on as Arjun makes us ponder further in his own voice.
I’ve never described myself as a poet.
Why, you might (or might not) ask?
Cause writing poetry is a scam,
In more ways than just one.
Watch me string together words
Like cowrie shells making up a necklace
And revel in the simile,
Like I’ve struck literary oil.
Let me spin an eddy of sentences
That flow incessantly sans
Break; leaving the reader
Gasping for a pause.
I’ll add unnecessary
Line breaks, that seem to
Hold significance
when there might not
be any
I’ll also let the theme of my piece,
Be as vague as possible.
From its vagueness blooms relatability,
From relatability blooms appreciation.
Let me spin an eddy of a previous stanza
To mirror it exactly as it flowed
Before, leaving the reader
Gasping in awe.
If the piece lacks in substance,
I’ll slap on a conceptual premise,
Throw on some experimental presentation methods,
And voila, art.
Writing poetry is an orchestrated scam, alright.
But not once have I ever
Described myself as a poet.
Why?
Cause so is everyone else.
The difference is;
Some of us run jobs on the daily,
While others are biding time until they pull their first con.
Arjun Chopra is a Mumbai-based digital marketer, who studied in Raigad, Maharashtra. He writes poetry in an attempt to bottle life and its various instances from his perspective. If you were to read his mind 10 minutes before he was going to start writing, you would find this running on a loop.
Find Arjun’s poetry on Instagram here.
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