What is Circumcontentive Poetry?
A movement of contemporary Bangla poetry, its nature and outline
Postmodernism claimed to have saved poetic arts from the sealed museum showcase, poetry was shattered thus by its forces of uncertainty and dissent. The retrieved vase fell from the edge of the table into smithereens to reveal multifaceted truth and realities. Circumcontentive Poetry is conceived as the next logical step — one of reclamation. Standing amidst the milieu of a shredded time, being and reality, Circumcontentive Poetry first attempts to reclaim the granules on the floor. This process of reclamation needs thorough circumspection. It piles them on the table from which the vase fell. We don’t want to make a vase again, neither is there a need to return it to the museum showcase. The purpose is not retromodernist but reconstructionist.
Cover Photo Credit: Debarshi Sarkar
The stages of Circumcontentive Poetry:
- Inspection - helps construct the data of experience which gravitates towards the social collective, interacts with it and forms new information.
- Introspection – occurs often in conjunction with the first, from which the poet conjures an ontological philosophy, something Swadesh Sen has called “my own reasoning, the best reasoning.”
- Circumspection - Information, idea and thought are obtained from a loose exchange between inspection and introspection, transforming this fragmented and fractalized interaction into something more holistic, multi-disciplinary and multi-axial.
- Construction - of the poem; could be both a continuous single-sitting process or digressive and fractalized.
- Deconstruction (optional) - calls for a supportive text or a “sister-text” which could offer a deconstructive critique of the original text. , .
- Assimilation - Reading of the poem marks the process by which a poememe is copied and transferred to the mind of the reader, causing the poememe(s) to codify their genotypes.
The construction and multiplication process of a circumcontentive poem is not circular, it is spiral.
