In his Poetics, Aristotle separated the parts of a poem in order to arrive at its skeleton. The parts do not look as they might have in a laboratory. They have been shaped by a natural order, then reshaped by habit. Poetry begins from a natural instinct to imitate, within which is a kind of rhythm, that "can in principle be continued indefinitely" till our "rude improvisations gave birth to poetry".

If language, rhythm and harmony are the components of a poem, then here is a selection of 11 poems by poets below the age of 40 from 'The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry', edited by poet Sudeep Sen and published in 2012, that invoke this great Aristotelian truth.

These poems span the concrete, like trains and houses and places and cats, and the metaphysical, such as dreams and love and leaving and the self. But upon closer inspection, they are all about the making of a poem. Every poem, perhaps, is also about the craft of the poem. To seek the inherent form of a poem, or techne, Aristotle declares, is a source of pleasure.

So revel in these, and let them mete(o)r inside you, measuring you in nature then in artifice, in an infinite loop of beat, then beat.

SURREALIST FILM-MAKING
Aditi Machado

The train is running off track, the air oneiric and chill.
We cut across the forest like thieves. All that derails
is one thread of your scarf – I am dizzy with its unravelling.
How linear it is. Almost absurd, this logic of movement.
The train breaks; the trolley man falls back, burns
his face with coffee. Outside trees commit acrobatics
in the elastic wind. I shoot three scenes with you
by the window. We have blackened out your eyes,
but a strange science is at work: here your pupils
are visible; here your hair flies in with the draught (action-
reaction); and there your skin is so pale we see blood
channel through. I shake my black box. It rattles.
It too works with theorems and will they come apart
if opened?

LIFT
Anindita Sengupta

Glancing past the slum at noon, they shift quick,
lift faces to sun like stones. Blue tarpaulin

gaudies houses in squalor. Inside, children celled
in dust and smells – fish blood, gutter water, rain –

chanting A for apple, B for bear like prayers
for promised land. They plug their ears, glide up.

Everything’s relative, ma says. Her smile
browns at edges like meat roasting on low flame.

Fingermarks, like forks, crisscross her back
in red. They close their mouths at dusk

so nothing escapes, not even anger.
Behind closed doors, they fling their bags down,

stamp and kick them with hard feet
as if they’re living bodies, aching and silent.

THE ADULTEROUS CITIZEN
Tishani Doshi

I am an adulterous resident;
when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other.
I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing
— suketu mehta, Maximum City

When it comes to it,
there’s only the long, paved road
that leads to a house
with a burning light.
A house you can never own,
but allows you
to sleep in its bed
without demanding sex,
eat from its cupboards
without paying,
lie in the granite cool of its tub
without drowning.
And only when the first shards
of day slice through
the blinds
of the basement windows
nudging you
with something of a whisper,
something like, Maybe it’s time to go —
do you finally drag
your suitcases
up the carpeted stairs,
out the front door,
on to the summer pavements.

It is nothing
like losing a lover,
or leaving behind
the lanes of childhood.
Nothing like scaling
the winged walls of memory
to discover your friends
have packed up their boxes
and vanished.
More like stumbling 
into a scene from the future,
where the ghost
of a husband
beckons with pictures
of a family
you no longer recognize,
and other peoples’ children
race across the grass,
lulling you into belief
that you can always return like this —
without key in hand,
to lie in the folds of one city,
while listening to the jagge,
carnal breaths of another.

MERA NAAM JOKER
Sumi Kaipa

It was that opening scene. You are the centre of the circus,
the sublime moving force of this farce with baggy pants,
suspenders and comically large shoes. The clown face which
so purposefully betrays suffering that it epitomizes it. It was
that opening scene. The characters of your past blot dew from
their eyes as they turn the corners of their mouth upward
to meet yours. You are lying on an operation table. Even
as a child, I knew the scene was staged to tap the essence
of dark humor. Another clown performs surgery to remove
your heart. “I no longer need it,” you say, flippantly. You
say it because you don’t mean it. Because you have chosen
solitude. Or, as you scan the audience’s attentive eyes, hoping
for comedy, because it has chosen you. The red glass heart,
as big as a candy box, belongs to no one. It’s free for all. It’s
the most difficult thing you have ever encountered. You toss
it carelessly into the air. I watch my father watch the scene,
gazing at the television with a sadness I have rarely seen. As
the heart shatters to shards, I exit the room.

COUNSEL
Sandeep Parmar
 
for Anna Smaill

Looking to ward off danger, I browse the eighth floor of the Bobst Library
 for some composite rite,
 a wrist-length of red thread,
 éblouissements to blind intervening shadows.


 It is good luck to dream of your wedding day,
 to feed a cat from an old shoe (so long as the cat does not sneeze).
 Do not marry a man born in the same month as you,
 or eat while dressing. Tear your veil (at the altar by accident).
 Wear earrings. Not pearls. Carry salt. Drink water.

 Beware a woman carrying an empty bucket.
 Turn away from the mothers of stillborn sons, monks, pigs and lizards.
 Under no circumstances should you marry on a Tuesday. Or Thursday.
 And once you start from home, don’t dare to look back.

How to coin the finest and most singular antidote—to dance against  
 possible risk?
 From PR6003.U64—the fair-weather lesbians of Dorothy Bussy’s
  Olivia—
to the Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1915-1919 [PR6045.072]
 we plunge straight into Lily the ‘simple-hearted’ servant, her  
  indiscretions.
A married Miss Stephen keeps schtum in her tremorous florals two sizes  
 too big.

 Zigzagging to PR4863.A33 The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb:
 ‘Your goose found her way into our larder with infinite discretion.
 Judging by her Giblets which we have sacrificed first, she is a most  
  sensible Bird.’
 [C.L. to John Rickman, 30 December 1816]

At PR4231.A43: Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: the courtship  
 correspondence—
Nuances of love and outrage elongate a shortened life.
I drift towards one leaning oversize Wandering of the Soul [PJ1551.E3];

Egyptian Papyri transmuted into spells for safe passage in the afterlife.
‘Do not stop to play draughts with the dead lest you be trapped for eternity.’

To the Brothers Grimm [PT921.K56]—
 Three women turned into identical flowers in a field.
 Only one returned home every night. At dawn she said to her 
  husband:
 ‘If you come this morning and pick me, I shall be set free and stay  
  with you forever.’
 Imperative chance. He chose correctly.

Dearest one, the riddle of marriage admits no luck.
What it recognises is pure—
it fires the dew from sleeping grasses.

Only know that he will not err (and nor will you) where love
has paused in an evening’s silence to light the unlit road.

UNTITLED, OIL PAINT ON CANVAS, 1958
Ravi Shankar

 
“Shapes have no direct association  
with any particular visible experience,  
but in them one recognizes the principle  
and passion of organisms.”
—mark rothko

The proposal: luminous drama.
Ensconced pallor meets an edge
of burnished orange for a shotgun
romance. Share a moment
of horizontal bliss. Then watch
as doubts arise. Ardor turns nasty
Recriminations grow ever nastier,
spiraling into black, burning coals
of depression, continually brooding

on death. Timelessness passes.
The whole spectrum gets absorbed.
Somehow the couple emerges aglow,
slightly altered, happily lanced
in yellow, each a part of the other
expecting, miraculously to give birth
When harangued by hue and cry,
they admit to eloping. Step away
from domestic light’s embrace

to tally the gradations that hint
at perspective abstracted:
romance, pain, renewal, failure,
the ecstasy of later years, happening
all at once. Step to the surface.
Look there, dead center: the secret
wedding. An exchange of vows
in an effulgent chapel where color
gathers to praise us in our plight.

CONSOLATIONS OF SOLITUDE
Monica Ferrell

Imagine your craft has crashed on a foreign planet.
You’re alive. You stumble from the hull
Testing your radio, which gives a promising fuzz:
But the mother-ship does not return your call.

So you are forced to find food and water,
But the food is green, and the water purple.
Furtively you try them, one night, cursing,
Ravenous, in the open, under pale, circling moons —
Sweetness of daffodils, water clear as dimes.

Still you’re searching some key thing, you suppose.
Parts? Gasoline? At the time you like to call midnight,
Long spokes of smoke rise from mountain pools
And when the violet sun gashes you awake
You see how everyone on Earth is retreating from you
Starfish beneath soft, repeated waves.

The way starfish slide off beneath soft, repeated waves.

Scrambling over the crags of this new planet,
Strange but not unpleasant, with angular black rocks,
Periodically you may gasp, checking over a shoulder
But then you’ll recall there is no one else here,

OOLONG
Judith Lal

In a dance with two fingers
they pluck the first two tips of camellia
when the season is a sterling flush.

 
A sometime heat finds out green
humming a recipe to itself.

 
No time for the Krishna butterfly
to smoke into the concentration of perspiration.

 
With their crèche of babies
rocked high further on
they must fill the quota and over.

 
Delicate, where foothill rings
step close together
under layers of a wide skirt,

 
ghats where the sun is still young
before the pukka guesswork of rain,

 
where an umbrella is a basketed idea
in service to monsoonal silver.


A few rupees flow down. Needs must. They laugh with us who drink dust.

MONSTER POEM
Anupuma Raju

Let me wake you up, creature of silence
breathe into your waiting body, feed you drops
of night blood so that you will survive the day.

You will survive, dearest spirit, in words
lying in cemeteries poets built long ago
to remember dead muses for centuries to come.
 
Your muse remembers you, beloved child of darkness,
as a brooding bundle of images, recalls how your five
limbs crawled into pages waiting to be stitched up.

I see you crawl now into this page, your ears alert
to the cries of a new born metaphor, your eyes
watching its fragile fingers curl into meanings.

But you are not fragile. A swift move and four stanzas
later, you swallow the unsuspecting ideas. Deed done,
greed fulfilled, you live again. While I die.

IDENTITY CRISIS
Priscila Uppal

My cat thinks it’s a dog.
My dog thinks it’s a horse.
My horse thinks it’s a car.
My car thinks it’s a train.
My train thinks it’s a submarine.
My submarine thinks it’s a skyscraper.
My skyscraper thinks it’s a museum.
My museum thinks it’s a carnival.
My carnival thinks it’s a funeral.
My funeral thinks it’s a birth.
My birth thinks it’s an episode.
My episode thinks it’s eternal.
My eternal thinks it’s hope.
My hope thinks it’s cynicism.
My cynicism thinks it’s time.
My time thinks it’s anachronism.
My anachronism thinks it’s pride
My pride thinks it’s a cat.

HOW TO BE A POET
Aimee Nezhukumatahil

Breath¹

Spider²

Boxes³

Eyeliner⁴

Thirst<sup>5

1.</sup> Even though the mudskipper can breathe through his tail,
    I wouldn’t recommend picking one up with your bare
    hands. At the very least, use gloves.
^2. Of course, some cultures throw onions at a newly-wed
    couple instead.
^3. Not every box of Cracker Jack has a prize. In fact, as many
    as twelve per cent of the boxes are distributed to stores
    across the country prize-less.
^4. Eye paint was used in ancient Egypt as a sort of insect
    repellent throughout the summer months especially. You
    can imagine insects were much larger then: locust, scarab,
    giant crickets.
^5. Eight glasses of water is recommended, but not
    required.

Himali Singh Soin is a poet with a penchant for primary numbers.