One of Rasool Bux Palijo's best books

History Architects are the personalities adored by Rasool Bux Palijo in his posthumously collected book. It starts with Holy Prophet (Pbuh) as a great ideologist and practical man of human history up to Munshi Atta Muhammad Shikarpuri. His description of the personalities more than 30 are not just bones of historical facts and dry rhetoric but fleshy fictionalised and realist narrative. Readers can find the actual spirit of the personalities that why they rose to that height and how they were thinking.  One must read book in Sindhi language. Salute Palijo sahab only you could do that! 

Why do students fear poetry and how can they access it better?

On World Poetry Day, Amber Regis discusses the need for students to 'occupy' poetry and regain their connection with language as a way to overcome verse-phobia

What students’ anxieties boil down to is a sense of disenfranchisement: poetry is not theirs, says Amber Regis. Photograph: Poetry Society

One of the trickier challenges of my job is countering fears sparked by poetry. It's not uncommon to be asked whether a module can be completed without writing on poetry, and the rubric used on several courses in Sheffield's School of English explicitly closes this loophole. Though I cannot help but roll my eyes sometimes in response to this verse-phobia, I try to remain sympathetic and remember what it was like for me as a student. Was I any more willing to face the supposed challenges of poetry?

Poetry suffers from an image problem. It seems a tricksy form, seductive in its rhythms and lyrical language, but teasing and withholding. Prose writing, by contrast, can appear straightforward, honest even, when conveying its sense or meaning. Poetry is the Sphinx, talking in riddles and closely guarding its secrets.

When confronting students about their fears, I often get a sense they think of poetry as far 'too clever' and the risk of misunderstanding, of 'getting it wrong', is too high. They also complain of feeling disconnected from the poetry they have encountered so far. While the literary canon studied at secondary school has diversified in recent years on account of a more inclusive national curriculum – and this is particularly true of contemporary literature – a tradition of dead, white, middle-class men still holds fast. It can be difficult to foster a sense of reading as identification, participation and shared exchange when a student is separated from a poem not only by obstacles of technical form and language, but also by a gulf of years and a strange cultural context.

In a school system dominated by league tables and exam results, a common solution to this problem has been to provide template interpretations. My students complain of this forensic approach to the study of poetry, in which a text is dissected and rearranged to support a formulaic argument: spoonfed, memorised, regurgitated in the exam hall.

So much for the ambiguity that is the beating heart of poetry; so much for the independent critical thought that is the lifeblood of literary criticism. What my students' anxieties boil down to is a sense of disenfranchisement: poetry is not theirs; it does not belong to them. So far, access has only been granted to those who tow an official 'line', reinforcing poetry's status as an exclusive, highbrow form perpetually out of their reach.

When I was a student I shared these fears. I too wondered if it was possible to complete a module without writing on poetry. But an important encounter changed the way I thought about poems, poets and my relationship to them as a reader.

As a first-year undergraduate at the University of Leeds, I studied the poetry of Tony Harrison. Harrison is Leeds-born, Leeds-educated, and much of his poetry is filled with the sights and sounds of the city. While reading V and The School of Eloquence, I met with poems that walked beside me through the urban spaces of Leeds, and which spoke a dialect I heard every day. Harrison also articulated, in his blunt and darkly-comic voice, the same feelings of working-class estrangement I too experienced as the first person in my family to go to university.

It strikes me now as singularly and politically prescient that Harrison chose to express his determination to write poetry as a form of occupation: he declares he will "occupy" the "lousy leasehold" of an elite literary tradition.Harrison's statement anticipates the contemporary Occupy movement, with its targeting of political and social inequality, exclusion and hierarchy. The occupation of spaces of power is an attempt to level the playing field, enacting change from the bottom up.

Harrison refuses to 'squat' in the space of poetry, a phrase that would acknowledge his unbelonging. He occupies; he makes the space his own. And what is more, having read the poetry of Tony Harrison, my 18-year-old self was no longer frightened of this supposedly difficult form with its metrical lines, suffused with metaphor and locked in rhyme. Instead, I was also determined to wrest back and occupy poetry.

I now realise and sustain this occupation through my teaching. I try to help students overcome their residual fears of poetry; I try to instil confidence in the use of technical language and to insist on the reading of poetry in context, as a vital and living engagement with the world around us. World Poetry Day shares this aim. Set up by UNESCO to foster the writing, reading and teaching of poetry as a mode of expression., it insists that poetry is for everyone, a meeting place for aesthetics and politics. This is an important message. And so today, why not do something different? Why not pick up a poem? Read it. Occupy it.

Amber Regis is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Sheffield – follow her on Twitter @AmberRegis

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Sheikh Ayaz! We Miss You.

Sheikh Ayaz! We Miss You.

Mubarak Ali Lashari

We again and again come across the final ten days of a December every year in which the land of mighty Indus River and human-lover people of the world have seen the loss of great Shaikh Ayaz. Sometimes, mind becomes paralysed to think over the idea that what is the gist of poetry of the great poets like Ayaz that appeals human feelings whereas a lot of poetry is composed and sung every day, every moment and every minute, perhaps?

One can even think of culture, think of language and its everyday usage in which brutally murdering humanity in the name of culture, in the name of honour, in the name of identity, in the name of ideology and also in the name of faith and religion and religious bigotry is justified. Perhaps, the refinement of culture has its own parameters and own criteria that enable its adherents to define by their own. Is this phenomenon so simple and acute and so can be tuned so effortlessly? The mind, human exercising mind is forced to think the parameters that suit his inner craves pines for writing the way the great poets adopted. Ayaz is incarnated in the way, one can’t deny.

Human being has been in search of path and way towards his inner satisfaction and outer expositions. Great teachers and humanists (not in the sense of the movement) gestured by their own ways towards that. The sane ones adopted and followed and the irrationals took the ways untoward. By the same way, Shaikh Ayaz, being born in a small but majestic territorial land of Sindh, developed the rationality of human essence on the foot prints of Great Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai who prayed for the world as:

Warm preparations are again
in progress everywhere;
Again the lightnings have begun
to leap with arduous flare;
Some towards Istanbul do dive,
some to the West repair;
Some over China glitter, some
of Samerquand take care;
Some wander to Byazantium, Kabul,
some to Kandhar fare;
Some lie on Delhi, Deccan, some
reach Girnar, thundering there
And greens on Bikanir pour those
that jump from Jesalmare
Some Bhuj have soaked, others descent
on Dhat with gentle air...
Those crossing Umerkote have made
the fields fertile and fair...
O God, may ever you on Sindh
bestow abundance rare;
Beloved! all the world let share
thy grace, and fruitful be.

You very well be noticing the final stanza of the poem in which Shah Latif is offering prayer for the entire world as, ‘Beloved! All the world let share thy grace, and fruitful be’. Thus, he has torn away the boundaries of geographies, ideologies, faiths, race, colour, culture and linguistic identity. Ayaz, similarly, spoke of the world and general human feelings and human rationales.

This Sangram! In front is Narain Shayam!

His and mine tales are the same

Promises are the same

He is king of poetry,

But my colourful ways are also same

Land also same, beloved also same, heart also same, horrors also same,

How can I point a gun to him!

How can I shoot him! How can I shoot! How can I shoot! How can I shoot!

The above poem the people of subcontinent must be remembering is composed at the time of Indo-Pak war. In the war-mongering days, Ayaz took the human, peace, and tolerant side of the issue and despised the war and portrayed the human-side picture that in front of us are the same human with same hearts and horrors. If the feelings of both sides would have been raised, the wars had never been escalated. This is the track peace and human-loving poets have adopted and led to the people to save themselves from irrational instincts.

Ayaz, is unexplored and undefiled poet of our era. One of his gazals I read just now and tried to know it again in this moment which took me towards something novel;

You have come for the world,

So, why are you worried about heaven?

The earth is like Mom Maryam,

She needs some healer, like Jesus.

 Rumi wept the whole night,

While, Hafiz laughed a lot, why?

Ayaz, arrives at maikada (Drinking house), everyday,

For, forgiveness of his sins!

In the lines, Ayaz’s tone is very mysterious and demanding irrespective of limited accesses of people and identity. It depicts the predicament of all the people on the earth. That’s his peculiar way to deal with genuine issues and matters of human being. His metaphorical tone calling earth as mother is significant because the earth endeared nuclear attacks and ailing humanity due to bigotry and disposition of might. No mother would ever like to see her off-spring ailing, wounding and murdering, thus, earth is mom if you see with Ayaz’s eyes. Whereas in his first stanza he is reminding people to make their life better and fruitful in this world as all the religions came in order to make their worldly life livable. No religion allows you to create mess in this world in order to keep in your mind the heaven, thus, do justice, good deeds, be tolerant, live and let live others in this world.

Ayaz is also praying for the immortal love like Shah Latif, his predecessor in the following words in his Prayers;

Oh Creator!

Make my love immortal and inbounding

So that,

I may regard every human as my own being.

Let my superstitions and evil whispers diminish

To create the feelings of Bhittai in me.

This whole universe is Your attestation

You too wash beloved’s pelts….

Oh my Creator!

Today, 28 December 2011, we, the people of Sindh, Indus river, Pakistani, Asian and the entire world remember him on his anniversary just to miss his existence and looking forward to explore his pointed ways and the creative genious like him. Ayaz, We Miss You A lot!

Incompletion poem by Mubarak Ali Lashari

Incompletion

Poem

By Mubarak Ali Lashari

Not to speak of dreams

When

Your sleeps are wrecked.

Not to speak of pleasure

When

Your sorrows are un- shared.

Not to speak of parting

When

When your gatherings did not initiate.

Not to speak of you

When

I am yet incomplete.

Thus,

I postponed all the dreams

Desires

Wishes and

Longings

For an indefinite period!

Poetry

By Ali Izhar

Translated from Sindhi to English by Mubarak Ali Lashari

. بيوفا

مان هن کي

بيوفا ڪيئن چوان؟

هوءَ بهار ۾ آئي هئي

يا

بهار هن جي ڪري آئي هئي

مون کي خبر ڪونهي!!!

Disloyal

How I,

Can declare her disloyal?

She had arrived in the spring

Or

Spring had ushered due to her

I am not sure!!!!

Love, Poem by Ali Izhar

Poetry by Ali Izhar

Translation from Sindhi to English by Mubarak Ali Lashari

محبت

محبت

جڙڻ ۽ڀڄي پوڻ

ڀڄي پوڻ ۽

جڙڻ جو نالو آهي.

جڙ

ڀڄي پئه

۽ هڪ ڏينهن

اهڙو ڀڄي پئه

جو ڪنهن کان به نه جڙ

پاڻ کان به نه!!!!

Love

Love

Is the name of

Building and demolishing;

 and

Demolishing and building.

Build up!

Demolish!

And

One day

Demolish in such a way

Never be built up

Not even by yourself!!!!

Whom Condolence Be Said To?

Poem By Adal Soomro

Illuminations of our land

have been grabbed from us;

as darknesses never felt

the need of getting permission.

To whom this complaint be made,

As we are the voyager of suffering?

The torments would come down on us,

Along with the moments of misery,

there would also be patience at us!

The words of ruthlessness, as it is

Would remain at the tongue of people!
The moon eclipse was as if preordained

In the month of June;

Nurtured the sighs in the breathing,

And brought departure too in the June!

Clutched the melancholy to the whole neighborhood,

Whom condolence be said to?

All the sobbing were on shore,

Sea-waves were in the eyes!

Shoulders got weakened,

There are cots in our fate!

New notes from the critics

Reached to the knowledgeful people:

“Drunken poets have composed themselves

Their own elegies;

Let them to commit suicides”!

Loyalties will be homeless;

As egos are eyeless!

They would become rubbed down

Birds are dying of thirst;

Love is making nomadic

Otherwise

We are not itinerants;

We are looked for by someone!

Adoration of our hearts

Are moveing with delight;

Sometimes,

Some words of expression

are vanishing on the way to!

What is going on within us;

Healers are well aware of!  
O, our ignorant sphere;

Our plights are nonchalant!

Trees are forgetful, thus;

Let’s ask from the winds

That our trekkers paths

Fading away and leading to distance;

Don’t know where reached?

Many ways to the deserts

While offering ‘Fateha’ on graves,

Tears had dropped on the earth!

It’s the relation of suffering,

It’s the tragedy with my land!

Translated from Sindhi into English by Mubarak Ali Lashari