PudhuKavithai - Part I

As always, I wanted to start 'Kaatil oru maan' and ended up starting the collection of poems by Athmanam. And started thinking about my adventures about poems. Somehow, poem does not bring out the essence of it like 'Kavithai' in tamil. And specifically I am talking about the 'Puthukavithai'. When I first heard about it, first thing I did was to start writing one. It was so easy. Just write what you want and break it into 2-3 word per line. Thats all. And the 'kavithai's were all call to a revolution or something similar. Once I get past that rhetoric phase, I started writing about love. Read a lot of Mehta, Vairamuthu and other puthu kavithai writers who were churning out kavithais in huge quantities. Thats when(around 1989-90) I got my first introduction to the international poetry, courtesy of Abdul Rahman. It was an eye opener. Although I continue to write a lot in the next 2-3 years, the realization was dawning on me that 'puthukavithai' is different from good 'kavithai'. While I was writing poems at dime a dozen, I was thinking all it took was to put some fancy words and start constructing it. There is no personal experiance in it. The reader actually can enjoy the rhyme of the poem, but there is no possibility of deriving a personal experiance from it. Once that realization came, I started looking into my personal experiances and try to put them in words. Some came out good and some bad.

Anyway, I am going for a vacation starting today and so will not be updating the blog for another 10 days. Will continue after that.