A personal view: The best poet on Caferati

I am sitting here, with the snow swirling outside the window, with work piled up, but I need to get this demon out of me, this demon that wants to prance and preen on stage, and say its bit.

The thing I like about Caferati is how it makes you feel like writing.

When we post to Caferati, clearly we wish to obtain the love of the rest of the world, what Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, has called our "secret shame". Tagore thinks of this creative spirit as the surplus intellectual energy, but I think de Botton is more selfish and more to the mark (more on this some day).

We all want our voices to be heard, to be admired, to be loved. And to show our love, we have set up the ingenuous medium of "comments", which do gather a lot of discussion. Quite a few times, while writing a comment, I will feel the need to expand on it, as in the posts on Interviewing women...

In fact, it may even be politically correct to be discussing "the best" but PC is so dull!!! Anyhow, I do not propose that Caferati officially bestow any such awards -- but I think that on the whole, a literary enterprise like Caferati cannot be complete without some form of personal contemplation of the activity. Also, who am I to cast a judgment? But aren't we making judgments all the time? This is just my expression of it...

So who is "The best poet on Caferati"? There may be as many answers as there are contributors here, and it would be unwise for Caferati to officially sponsor such a contest, but I am moved enough to cast my vote for Manisha Lakhe.

I think looking at the comments she has been gathering, some of you also agree...

I am terribly impressed by her recent posts - Be With Me or Jealous Coffee, or Need to Know. These reveal a similar style, with a refrain repeated in novel ways, building up to a climax. The first few stanzas build up an expectation, and the later parts deliver... Some of this also holds for Snap Shots ( "Two left feet...").

Going through her earlier work for the archived stuff - I find some of this style also in A New Story and Wish and Mixing Colours.

But she has another completely different weapon - a more direct story. All good writing is not about the author - for it to be good, it must ultimately be about the reader. When Descartes says, "I think, therefore I am", we believe it and see it in ourselves as true. So what Descartes is really saying is "You think, therefore you are." And reading Manisha's
Digital Dilemma, which I had not read before, I was strongly reminded of this - the mystery of the vanishing edit... When one transitions to electronic typing from paper, one misses one's scribbles and the history of ink marks, a feeling of transition and loss that I am sure most of us can relate to, (though I can't say that for our children). Some years ago, I had also written something on computer typesetting which I should dig out perhaps. Other poems in a simpler, more descriptive style can be seen in Haikus on Goa, which also features a theme of repetition.

Personally however, I consider her For you as the most touching, and therefore, her best. In the end, beyond all the rhyme and the writer's craft, it is the power of the thought that stays...

Finally, do these types of "best-of" discussions generate any value? I am convinced that in some long term utilitatiran world, they do absolutely nothing. But fortunately the human spirit is far from utilitarian. As a case in point, otherwise you wouldn't have read this article so far, would you;-)

Well... that's the demon off my chest ....