DOTH THEE CONVEY THY TRUTH MESSAGE!: the poetry of Bauccha M. Shameem Akhtar.
“So that above all I can raise my ink and say
THIS IS THE MIND WHICH BROUGHT THE WORLD ON THE RIGHTEOUS WAY!”- Pen, Bauccha M. Shameem Akhtar
Just before Christmas last year, my grandmother and I had the following conversation.
Grandmother: “That Christmas card I bought for your mother is no good. I’m taking it back.”
Thomas: “Why? It looks fine to me.”
Grandmother: “I paid £2:50 for it, and it doesn’t even have a poem inside.”
Thomas: “But the poems inside Christmas cards are trite and insincere! They don’t mean anything to anyone! Contending that the depth and scope of one’s sentiments towards someone are accurately reflected by a faceless piece of paint-by-numbers doggerel is as much an insult to their intelligence as an injury to their feelings!”
Grandmother: “……. I’ve already written on the envelope, so I’ll just have to tell them that I lost it. :|”
Thomas: :(
Written pornography is infinitely self-replicating because, very often, its writers’ only experience of their subject matter is through other pieces of written pornography. The same, I think, is true of bad writing generally, and especially of bad poetry. There are people, to quote La Rochefoucauld, who would not know of love, if they had never heard love spoken of; and most people are mere conduits for the self-expression of others, happy to have booming echoes instead of pathetic squeaks for voices, defining themselves in soundbite angst and silly song-lyrics. I am constantly reminded of the sister in Almost Famous, setting up the record-player and announcing that this song explains why she’s leaving to become a stewardess.
Bauccha M. Shameem Akhtar is a terrible, terrible poet, but the most charming thing about his poetry is that were he a slightly better writer his poems would undoubtedly be the worse for it. If he had the faintest glimmer of an idea about planning or structure, he would be able to avoid painting himself into all sorts of ridiculous corners from which he can only escape by rhyming “intricacies” with “atrocities”, “poem” with “phloem” or “themselves” with…. “themselves”. If he was possessed of a single iota of self-control, he would be able to diffuse his feelings and intentions throughout the entirety of the poem, rather than chuntering aimlessly on about platonic love for thirty, bloodless, bottled-up lines before explosively ejaculating some terrifyingly lascivious bodice-ripper of a sentiment. If he had a little more self-awareness as a person and a poet, he would write a little more incisively about himself and his experiences, and a little less expansively upon such bland abstractions as man’s inhumanity to man and the passing of time. If, in short, his poems were not sixty, seventy, eighty line improvisations in search of increasingly more tortuous rhymes for his homeland of Mauritius, if they were not such a situational succession of self-imposed escape acts from frying pan to fire and back again, climaxing in some orgasmic, apocalyptic sandwich-board bellow of “YOU’LL BE BANNING YOUR FREEDOM AWAY!!!!”, why, they’d be good enough to put in Christmas cards.