TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things I love about poetry—one of the things I look forward to, and revel in, as a reader and listener—is the way a poet can make the familiar strange. A familiar landscape, thanks to poetic language, can be transformed into something unfamiliar. An ordinary experience can be made extraordinary by the way it’s described. As W.H. Auden wrote, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”  

I think one of the reasons we turn to poems is because we’re seeking an experience that is not business as usual. We’re seeking something new for our hearts and minds to chew on. Something transformative, even. And specifically, we’re seeking an encounter with language that wakes us up to new possibilities in the words, in their sounds and meanings.

Today’s poem offers us such an encounter. There are words here that were new to me, and which may be new to you. Marang Buru, for example, is a religious site in the state of Jharkhand in Eastern India. But in this poet’s deft hands, even words familiar to me—like empathy, detriments, and shutter—are made strange and special.

on projection
by Raena Shirali

the gun to my head is ownership.
the gun to my head is
i’m taking the word empathy
& hanging it as on a laundry line
& watching it waver in wind
& not believing in words & also
relying on them. reader, men & women alike
shutter themselves with superstition.

+

supposing i board 
the plane, remain suspended

some sort of cloud,
buoyant, detached

for one full day, followed by my arrival
in a place not

of my mother’s dialect, not
of my father’s kin, armed

with language : [patrilineal],
[marang buru], [flower feast], [nage era].

how surely i’d arrive with detriments : visible
tattoos, hair dyed lighter at the ends, english

a target pinned to the chest, the west,
                  the inescapable truth of my birth.

+

to explain the distance
between self & subject is to admit
the unlikelihood of my self
understanding a given subject. i’m talking : theorizing

understanding. i’m talking : 
my inevitable failure to embody.
reader, consider 
the basic elements of this narrative—daayan, ojha : hunted,

godly. assume
telling any story fully
involves considering all sides.

+

here, men wield village secrets 
like weapons, catapult accusations
through the fields. i’ve read so much

about legs & backs : ache-laden
& no choice but to eat [paje] daily
& yet—.

i’m just camera. i’m shutter, closed, i’m protected
from light, i’m just telling a story 
to which i’ll never know an end.

+

no boarding the plane

no bitter root

no lean season

no poem

"on projection" by Raena Shirali. Used by permission of the poet.