Author of the Week / 18 October 2024

Hamlet Arakelyan’s poetry collection How Sad Though

Author of the Week: Armenia


Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel Prize lecture, discusses the differences between ordinary information and a literary text, and she gives a very interesting example referring to the essayist Edward Morgan Forster. Forster draws an interesting divide between everyday text and literature. He says that when we say, ‘The king died and then the queen died,’ it’s a story. But when we say, ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief,’ that is a plot. Poetry can also be defined as a storehouse of tricks that we use to convey what we see and feel.

Contemporary Armenian poetry, especially written after the 2010s, can be considered a part of the performative line of thought which rejects the theories put forward by postmodernism, according to which the text is always reproduced in itself, in its own space. By establishing this definition, postmodernism placed literature in an unspeakably difficult situation. If prose, the novel in particular, are fairly young genres characteristic of the last centuries, tracing the origin of poetry is the most difficult task, because poetry has existed as long as mankind has lived on this Earth.

Was it worthwhile challenging poetry by telling it not to make an effort, that ‘everything is divided and devoted’? Or saying that even if you resort to self-reflection, it still brings things seen and heard out of you? Of course not. First, because by doing so you privilege the references in literature to the point that they may amount to plagiarism. Nothing new can be created, right? However, the overcoming of this situation, which was divided and put on the shoulders of post-postmodernism, metamodernism and performatism, has come to say that a writer should not think about things dictated by literary critics or those involved in the commercialisation of literature. A writer’s job is to write. The rest comes later.

Now, where is the space where the poem lives? Is it a cave, where it defends itself from external attacks, or is it a mirror, in front of which it writes an autobiography – something we see a lot in today’s poetry. Or is it a battlefield, where wars are waged? Nevertheless, it is pointless to look for poetry outside of us, because before becoming a linguistic fact, it is a thought and an emotion; therefore, it lives in one’s mind. Metaphors, comparisons and other tricks that increase the emotional influence of the text are only means to bring human stories to visual reality.

Armenian poetry of the last decade is a very interesting mix of the above-mentioned directions. It demonstrates one thing – there is freedom in it. The freedom to know all the rules of poetry writing, but consciously break them. The freedom to realise all the opportunities characteristic of the genre of poetry, but to refuse and deny them through your poetic text. In short – the freedom to live.

To express all this, we can apply only one method: the ‘language of emotional experience’, because only that way can we ‘write what we would like to read’, as Kurt Vonnegut advised.

Poetry is a multifaceted expression of art that transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries, taking on many forms, from the traditional to the experimental. Why is reading poetry difficult and enjoyable at the same time? Because it is a path to introspection, a vital means of existence and an important way to examine the problems of the human soul. Hamlet Arakelyan has a beautiful verse: ‘from me you come to me’. When reading a poem, it is as if you are journeying from yourself to yourself.

What book is in our hands? What poems are included in the collection How Sad Though? I will say that these texts are conceptual poetry, where not only the emotions are emphasized but also the intellectual aspects of the poems. As poet Henrik Edoyan, the author of the epilogue of the book, rightly noted, ‘Arakelyan is a poet with an intellectual bent’. If we examine his texts as intellectual horizons, then it is within that dimension that his language reminds us that it is not merely a medium but a space that allows us to dig deep and uncover the expressions and forms of the content.

So, what is poetry, language or content? It is content that has a linguistic body. It would be a mistake to see the linguistic component of poetry as a path that leads to the content because poetic language is precisely that – content. In the text of Hamlet, the language brings a movement that pushes thought and reality out of place. In the poems, the words relate to each other, to the author, to his close friends and to his surroundings. The ‘long-silent child’ begins to speak words.

On some occasions we read personal lines, on others, thoughts, feelings and conversations with God appear, which Hamlet Arakelyan calls ‘uninterrupted dialogues’ that concern everyone.

Aren’t those monologues, where the writer talks about highly personal topics and relationships, examples of confessional poetry? The very term suggests a confession, and we confess very personal things, emotional, experiential and autobiographical, which conveys openness and vulnerability:

Arakelyan’s poems are also buildings with visual associations. Only buildings made of words have moods and meanings. In general, conceptualism challenges traditional understandings of poetry by emphasising other aspects of the poem. In this case, visuality is one of the methods of text construction, where visual perceptions participate in the creation of content and are as important as the meanings of the words. This visuality is not only for the eye but also for the mind; it is the intersection where language and visual art converge. Thus, Hamlet invites exploration, interpretation and appreciation of the creative possibilities that arise from the juxtaposition of language and imagery. This combination releases sounds, rhythms and symbols.

This gives rise to the question of whether Hamlet tries to merge the boundaries of literature and other visual and conceptual arts, or if he wants to erase them. It seems he seeks to do both. We should see the erasing as a strategy in which visual poetry is moved to a conceptual and metaphorical dimension. Erasure is everywhere in this book. Rejection is everywhere. Words, conjunctions, sentences, entire sections of voluminous poems, even whole pages of the book are deleted. Punctuation is missing.

Those who have read Hamlet’s book or are reading it now will notice the jumps from line to line, word to word. The reader, along with the writer, tries to catch something that slips through their fingers. The act of erasure here is a symbol of loss and absence. This is why poems with visual presentation sometimes gradually fade, shrink, scatter and become like rain falling on the paper. This is why there are so many ellipses, disjointed lines, vertical and diagonal lines that act as fences, marks placed there in lieu of missing or irretrievable words, and blank pages as spaces of the mind that do not yet have a name:

In this way, Arakelyan spotlights the topics of memory, reality, life and the instability of mood and state of mind. Through the deliberate absence of words and images, he prompts readers to ponder what is left, what has been forgotten and what name can be given to life. We didn’t come to this decision easily: by consciously erasing parts of the poem, we draw attention to a number of painful questions, the missing dialogues in our lives, the fragility of memory and the inevitability of drastic changes.

Through the interplay of presence and absence, Hamlet urges us to think about what we have lost, whom we have lost, who and what still endures around us, and what we seem to gain from loss and the ‘unbearable lightness of being’.

‘Your eyes are continually being disunited from me…’ To hold life in your palm or to let it go voluntarily and freely. It is up to you to decide if you can stop the free fall that way. ‘Life is a chain of creation and termination.’ It is difficult to endure: ‘who will be the last / standing as a hero’, writes Hamlet.

The deliberate act of breaking the poems into pieces is sometimes a metaphor for the inevitable process of decay and disappearance of life. ‘Before skin, flowers grew on my body’, and now ‘I am giving away a piece of lifeless leather’. This reflects the innocence of a child who has not yet encountered life, the tenderness in which they lived, the veil of feelings, within which everything is beautiful. But what emerges in the whirlpool of life is no longer that former child, and the skin once covered with flowers has long since dried up.

Only when the narrator goes to sleep does the ‘woody smell’ of the bed remind them of the past, which has long since disappeared. What remains untold, unseen, unlived? What remains unsaid makes us ponder the complex interplay of presence and absence, important themes in Hamlet’s book. After all, ‘human relationships are fluid...’, as the poet states, and it is loneliness that is constant.

‘Seems like – / we’re holding this planet / me – from one end of the thread / you – from the other.’ Then the speaker and the listener, whom Hamlet calls ‘conscience’, are able to collect the thread, wind up this big planet and place it into the heart, as Lilit Altunyan drew on the book cover.

And is all this summed up in one poem?

Author

Armen Sargsyan

Armen Sargsyan (1991) is a poet, literary critic and editor. He graduated from the Armenian State Pedagogical University, Faculty of Armenian Philology. In 2016, Antares Publishing House published his first collection of poems, Instead of Unread Books, for which he received the Republic of Armenia Presidential Youth Award in 2017. His poems have been translated into several languages, including English, German, Georgian, Ukrainian and Russian. He has participated in poetry festivals in Genoa, Kyiv and Dushanbe. Sargsyan is the lead specialist in literature at the RA Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports, the editor-in-chief of Vernatun Publishing House and the artistic director of the Yerevan International Book Festival.

 

Photo by Kamo Davtyan

Related