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2002-04-10 - 10:46 a.m. Letter from a young poet to an older one ‘A History of Amnesia’ was a lot harder to write than 'One Fierce Hour' because it involved finding the proper register to articulate, like what you have mentioned, 'loss' (as well as various other disenchantments). In ‘Hour’ I felt sometimes that the anger was self-immolating, and even blindly retaliatory, but in ‘Amnesia’ I tried to move towards a more objective (but hopefully no less impassioned) tone. Dealing with this 'objectivity' was a task most onerous because it threatened to displace my role as a poet into one of historian and journalist. But I realised later that in a country where many things remain unspoken the act of bringing attention to 'what is found there' (to borrow a line from William Carlos Williams) can constitute some kind of poetry, if poetry involves providing fresh perspectives. And I realised too that it was not enough to simply unveil eyelids to previously shadowed realities, the poetry also has the responsibility to sear the retina the way a laser beam carves a diamond rock. And this transformative potential--of not merely changing what we see by illuminating them, but perhaps to also surgically change the way we see, I located only in poetry--that fistful of harmless, impalpable gunpowder.
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