Poetry as Devotion
Can writing connect us back to the living, breathing body?
"We live in a time of spin. Everyone is inventing stories. How do we as writers keep authenticity when writing our own stories?"
The creative writing group stared back blankly at me.
I had just read aloud excerpts of poetry that I felt elicited a sense of urgency. I wanted to talk about how a writer, someone who is considered to communicate primarily from the mind, writes to connect themselves and their readers back into the body.
Some of the extracts I read were by Akkamahadevi, a twelfth-century Hindu saint and mystic who wrote devotional verses to Shiva. Stumbling upon her by chance, I was intrigued by the sensuality and overtly sexual nature of her language–addressed to a god, no less.
“Like a silkworm weaving
her house with love
from her marrow,
and dying
in her body’s threads
winding tight, round
and round,
I burn
desiring what the heart desires.”
My creative writing group were mostly unimpressed by the poems I had shared, free of the cleverly crafted, cerebrality of the stories so coveted by the literary community. I had been met with silence. Perhaps they genuinely had no idea what to say. They might have thought I was on an ego-trip, commandeering and taking over the group to push my wildcard agenda.
Yet it had been my final stab in the dark to feel connected to a group I had felt alienated from. Various stories shared by the group had delved into this mind/ body split, contrasting the inner machinations of the mind to bodily functions. Therefore I had hoped for some discussion about what I was proposing, and was surprised by their reaction.
As I writer, I long to extract myself from the obsession with control and narrative, so starkly reflected in today’s world and frenzied media spin. It manifests itself daily in my brain, as it does with so many, creating barriers to presentness and connection with others.
I began writing poetry zealously whilst moving countries. The chaos and movement somehow lent themselves to free expression. Phrases and verses sporadically burst from me whilst I traversed London, riding my bike around the nature reserves and canals of Walthamstow, Tottenham, and Hackney. I was further inspired during a stint on my friend’s canal boat in England’s midlands, teaching students from abroad. As we moved from town to town, I began to sketch the scenes around me. We were solar-powered, moving at one mile per hour, and I wrote as I steered.
I began to connect creativity and the act of writing with dynamism and movement. I was called to stop writing from the mind, and write from the body instead. I feel Akkamahadevi would have done similarly, her poetry almost violent in its immediacy.
Akkamahadevi is considered a prominent figure in the Bhakti movement. Bhakti began in seventh-century India as a movement of devotional song-poetry. It is still going to this day, and its verse challenges caste, organised religion, and is mostly written by women. Most of the verses were sung, and that rhythmical quality is imbued in the poetry, adding to the bodily sensation felt when hearing the words.
Can writing and reading such poems be a vehicle for the corporeal integration of the written word?
Poets and writers throughout time have experimented with the brevity and form of poetry to invoke that immediate sense of beingness. I notice that there are recurring themes that thread this type of writing together, whether they are love, devotion, consciousness, or connection to nature.
This approach to writing is particularly noticeable in the nature writing genre. Take Nan Shepherd’s poetic reveries in The Living Mountain, a memoir of her hikes through the Cairngorms:
“It is, with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”
These themes of love and consciousness as expressed through scenes of nature can also be observed in the poetry of Antonio Machado. Antonio Machado was an early-twentieth-century Andalusian poet who wrote rich bucolic scenes of Castile and also parts of his native Andalusia.
The following excerpt returns me to my five or so memorable years living in Andalusia, in a wonderful small city called Jerez de la Frontera:
“In these fields of my Andalusia,
oh, land where I was born!, I would like to sing.
I have memories of my childhood, I have
images of light and palm trees,
and in a golden glory,
of tall bell towers with storks,
of cities with streets without women
under an indigo sky, deserted squares
where bright orange trees grow
with their round, reddish fruits;
and in a shady orchard, the lemon tree
with dusty branches
and pale yellow lemons,
that the clear water of the fountain reflects,
an aroma of tuberoses and carnations
and a strong smell of basil and mint;
images of grey olive groves
under a torrid sun that stuns and blinds,
and blue and scattered mountain ranges
with the red glow of an immense afternoon;
But the thread that ties memory
to the heart is missing,
the anchor on its shore,
or these memories are not soul.”
Campos de Castilla
I always struggle to reach a definitive understanding of Machado’s poetry, and it is for this reason I am so fond of it. Having lived in Andalusia, the verse is evocatively recognisable and heartfelt. The descriptions of the landscape are wonderfully sensuous, but Machado talks about “the thread that ties memory to the heart” as “missing”. His time away from his birthland has disconnected him from the landscape, and it is now only stored as memory. There again is the mind/ body split. His invocations of Andalusia are body memory recalled in a state of reverence.
Recently I had cause to meet Glasgow poet, Jim Ferguson, who writes about Glasgow urban life with humour, and heart. I watched him recite one of his own poems, a tender, comical piece about a man sitting in a close (the stairwell of a block of apartments, or as we call them in Glasgow, tenements). As he delivered his poetry, written in a strong regional dialect, he rocked back and forth, entering a trance-like state. This is an example of his work, from the pamphlet, Scheming, produced by Glasgow writer Joey Simons:
“People make things aw the time.
It’s a natural part of life.
Being human. We build stuff. We’re conscious.
Aware and self-aware. Switch it aw on.
Light it up. Go on. Don’t sit aboot.
Get in aboot it. Kick the damn baw. Get a grip n kick it.
Thing aboot, eh, self-awareness, geez ye the fear
Sprawling: Easterhoose, Castlemilk, Pollok,
Aw right oot at the edges, fresh air
In the nothing n naewhere
Oota sight oota mind
Some folk pay fortunes
To build their mansions
In places like this
Wee hoose like a palace, nuthin highrise,
We’re awready near enough the sky, be fearless, fly...”
Jim Ferguson, being in Easterhouse
You get a sense of the movement, rhythm, natural patterns, and intonations local to Glasgow in the words. Ferguson later commented on the fact that when I shared my songs I appeared to go into a trance myself. It is beautiful to reflect that this bodily, fugue-like state, of the ilk I recognise in Bhakti poetry, was reenacted in the presence of other artists and writers as I was writing this piece.
Benjamin Zephaniah would agree. He said:
“I think poetry should be alive. You should be able to dance to it.”
Back to Machado and his poems, I also enjoy his collection of cryptic proverbs:
“Dice la razon:
Busquemos la verdad,
Y el corazón:
Vanidad.”
[“Reason says:
Let’s look for the truth.
And the heart:
Vanity.]
Compared to Machado's other proverbs, the wisdom of this simple ditty is easy to interpret. It is vanity to think you can reach any truth through logic, and the heart knows it. But we are still afraid of connecting to the heart. We don’t dance with it, but around it.
Writer Ray Bradbury said:
“The intellect is a great danger to creativity . . . because you begin to rationalise and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth—who you are, what you are, what you want to be.
Living is supposed to be the centre of our life, being is supposed to be the centre — with correctives around, which hold us like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a way of life — the way of living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know. And the intellect doesn’t help you very much there — you should get on with the business of living.”
In the West we are saturated with the message that only the mind knows. The aftershocks of Christian tradition bids us to be furtive and gentle in our loving. The new religion of consumerism sells us objects purporting to connect us back to the love we’ve spent so long repressing. Loving and devotion are obsessively tied to pursuing a romantic partnership; or, getting a mortgage (to live out the romantic partnership thereafter).
Upon reading the following verse by Akkamahadevi—
“I burn
desiring what the heart desires.”
—the bristling indignation of my Christian forebears is palpable. The rage at her brazenness lies dormant somewhere inside me. Her words are vulnerable. The woman is obsessive. Get a grip!
Indeed, Akkamahadevi’s poetry is shameless:
“Not one, not two, not three or four,
but through eighty-four hundred thousand vaginas
have I come,
I have come
through unlikely worlds, guzzled on
pleasure and on pain.
Whatever be
all previous lives,
show me mercy
this one day,
O lord
white as jasmine.”
The Lord White as Jasmine she refers to is Lord Shiva. Legend has it that Akkamahadevi denounced her marriage to a royal to wander around naked, covered only by her long hair, rapturously writing devotional poetry. The Hindu tradition has canonised her as a saint. I can’t help but think that the Christian tradition would have burnt her at the stake.
Untempered feminine devotional desire is frightening, and coming from a Western, Christianised culture it feels counterintuitive that this is manifested as devotion to God. But it wasn’t only women who wrote this way.
Narsinh Mehta, a fifteenth-century poet-saint of Gujarat, India, was a devotee of Krishna. One of his verses proclaimed:
“To the foot of the bed I’ll fasten your arms
with flower-ropes shamelessly.
Who will free you from the temple of my body?
Rivals? What can they do but flame in anger?
To the foot of the bed I’ll fasten your arms.
You are the gardener, I the flowering vine;
Why plant me if you will not water me?
You are the honey bee seduced by my love,
You, dying in the fragrance of my lotus heart.”
Honestly, I found reading this quite shocking (and thrilling). It was in a section titled, “God as Lover” from the poetry collection, A Book of Bhakti Poetry: Eating God [Penguin Ananda, 2014]. Indeed, for those of us recovering from the guilt and sexual shame we were reared on in the Catholic tradition, it is mighty curious. Even publishing it possesses me with a vague fear, a sense of ancestors turning in graves. I have no reference point for understanding this manner of devoting oneself to divinity. Therefore I am grateful to the editor of this collection, Arundhathi Subramaniam, for illuminating us in her introduction:
“Eroticism here is not just courtly or romantic love; spiritual hunger is not just pasteurized asexual longing. One leaks into the other, and together both ‘articulate a wide range of human experience’ that is never monochromatic, never anaemic. It is a reminder of how inextricably linked the sexual is to the spiritual, the physical to the metaphysical. It is also a reminder of a fact familiar to every poet: that there is no way to articulate subtler areas of experience except in sensuous terms.”
Subramaniam adds that in Bhakti poetry:
“God was sublime, exalted, beautiful, but he was also family. He could be addressed the way that someone might speak to a beloved, if habitually disobedient, member of one’s family.”
This familiarity, and outpouring of loving expression is where I can understand Bhakti poetry across the cultural difference. When I write or sing something, each character or story has to enter my heart, or I cannot convincingly convey the message. I saw a video of PJ Harvey (my musical hero) speaking in the 90s about how she had this overflowing sense of love inside her that she desperately needed an outlet for. She spoke about wanting to be seen through that. I think any poet or artist can understand this.
How can a writer speak of an unknown person, or situation, and bring meaning to it if they do not devote themselves utterly to the story? Poets have to fall in love with their muses again and again. This is quite dangerous (I speak from experience), and I think the Bhakti poets had it right. There is so much more joy to be had in falling in love with divinity over an earthly being, who although flattered, is likely to be overwhelmed by the poet’s avid attentions.
Subramaniam talks about the “porous membranes that separate Sufi and Bhakti literature”. Sufi poetry enthusiasts are likely to note a similarity between the two. The verses of Jalahaddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian, Sufi mystic, are characterised by rapturous love for the divine, or “the Beloved” as he refers to it:
“Love came and made me empty.
Love came and it filled me with the Beloved.
It became the blood in my veins,
It became my arm and my legs.
It became everything!
Now all I have is a name,
The rest belongs to the Beloved.”
Intrigued by the Sufi practice, I came upon some literature produced by the Indian Sufi Shaykh, al-Tariqat Hazrat Azad Rasool, who was involved in a movement to spread Sufi teachings to the West (such as Glasgow, where I discovered the School of Sufi Teaching). The book, Turning Towards The Heart: Awakening to the Sufi Way, was medicine to my soul in a dark chapter.
Many in the contemporary Sufi movement are keen for the practice to be widely accessible to those of all backgrounds. As someone who has forever skirted around groups and identities, resisting labels whenever possible, I don’t foresee myself swearing undying allegiance to the Sufi order anytime soon. That is not to disrespect it, but honour my own truth, as an ideological vagabond: not unfaithful, but accepting of all paths.
I have equal allegiance to the Celtic, pagan gods, and forest spirits. I am recognising that there is something beyond the physical realm; something more urgent that animates my heart and spirit, returning me to myself when days are dark. This “thing” can be found in poetry and music, but to get to that next step; to be able to transmit this feeling through my own work means I have to get closer to the source. I have to connect to this sense of love and devotion in myself. Undeniably, I struggle with this.
In the Sufi tradition, meditators are encouraged to pay attention to their heart, and when this focus is achieved, to turn their heart’s attention to “the holy essence”. In Sufism, it is the heart and not the mind that is the centre of truth. Sufis are encouraged not to lose themselves in meditation. Unlike the Buddhist path, which some follow hoping to reach a state of “Nirvana” or “Enlightenment”, Sufis must remain in the world, participating in its daily, messy machinations, though never losing that connection with the heart. And if one can connect to the heart, one is, in theory, able to arrive at a purer understanding of themselves.
There is a quote attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, as referenced in the book, which I particularly enjoyed:
“There is a piece of flesh in the body such that if it is reformed, the whole body becomes good, and if it spoils, the whole body becomes spoiled. That piece of flesh is the heart.”
It echoes the sentiments of the Bhakti movement.
Subramaniam, calls Bhakti poetry “the deep science of the heart”.
It is difficult to imagine a “science” of feelings, as science is a practice so rooted in physicality, and what can be proven and disproven in the material world. Yet it makes perfect sense to me. In my meditations, I notice at times that my heart has the sensation of burning–perhaps this is why I felt so identified with Akkamahadevi when I read her verses. The burning is not always a pleasant feeling, and it makes me want to turn away. But I believe that this is exactly what my heart is asking for, for me not to turn away. It alerts me that this is what I have been doing throughout my life. It is telling me that the intensity of my burning heart must be channelled somewhere, beyond a flesh-and-bones person, who, most likely, will not be able to withstand it.
I have discovered that the intensity I feel is often misunderstood by others, just as I fail to understand others and what I perceive as their lack of feeling. Do you mean to say that your heart doesn’t burn if you are moved by something? A piece of music? A tree? A person?
It seems that in everything I do, and the poetry I am attracted to, I am called to devote myself to something. Devotion is frightening. It involves an unknowable, un-measurable amount of trust in something that cannot be seen. When we love, or feel passion for something, we want it to be tangible; we want an outcome; we want it to give us a return.
A well-known section of the Bhagavad Gita states:
“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”
It is a noble idea: that we create for the sake of creating. That we act because we know we ought to, and not because we will get a return. The key is to feel the experience and to find the experiences that connect us to this sense of devotion.
Therefore, how do we translate the immediacy of these experiences, whether painful or wonderful, through language? This is the challenge that writers have.
Suffering, as much as we are loathe to go through it, is something we must pass through to arrive at this. An anonymous Sufi poet (as quoted by Shaykh Azad Razool in his second book) wrote:
“Everyone
who comes into this world
brings a reason for living with them.
Those who strive not
with deeds towards it,
are among the living dead.
Drench this universe with the rain of your actions.
Only those who sow the seeds
of action
reap the fruit of bliss.
The destination is reached only
after suffering the hardships
of the journey.
Those who know the reality
of suffering are the ones
who will know joy.
Each suffering
carries a message of joy,
just like winter
holds out the promise of spring. He who flows on
like a river
is oblivious to the plains and mountains.
There is a treasure
that is distributed with abandon, in
the late hours of each night.
He who is awake, receives it
and he who sleeps,
loses it.”
The sharp shock of pain in suffering indeed gives us a sense of immediacy. That is why when you read the poetry of marginalised and oppressed regions, they cut straight to the heart of human experience.
I was moved by a collection of Uyghur poems published by Everyman’s Library in 2023, compiled and edited by exiled poet, Aziz Isa Alkin. The Uyghurs are Central Asia’s earliest settled Turkic peoples. There are about twelve million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, the North-West of China. China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uyghur population and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Uyghur poetry embraced the Sufic poetic tradition, adapting it to the Turkic Chagatay language, and this can be perceived in its poetry today. Aziz Isa Elkun writes about Nowruz, a festival held on the first day of spring, or the beginning of the new year (21st March), based on the Iranian Solar Hijri calendar:
“When the dew forms in spring,
When the apricot and willow blossoms fall,
When my grandmother’s wheat ears sprout in the gourd,
I ask if my spring has arrived.
Elkun’s heart cannot smile any more
Because winter has not yet gone from the farmer’s home,
So he calls the spring with ardent love,
I ask you, please come, my spring!”
Neither Nowruz nor Uyghur poetry can be freely celebrated in its homeland at the time of writing. In the lines of this contemporary poetry, although there is sorrow, there is also hope. The “ardent love” directed towards spring is also bound up in familial ties to the homeland. The intimacy of the poem–his “grandmother’s wheat ears”; his unsmiling heart; and the sensuousness of the elements–brings us to the urgency of the poet’s longing.
To conclude, I defer again to the words of Subramaniam writing about Bhakti poetry:
“What continues to inspire me about these poems is that they tell us that even at all those times when we felt homeless, desolate, dislocated or despairing, we were not abandoned. They remind us that the gnawing human experience of distance or viraha from the deeper mysteries of life need not be a cause for despair. There can be no harvest without fallowness, they tell us. No experience of separation, however arid, they say is ever devoid of presence or grace. Waiting is not mere passivity; it can be a state of dynamic receptivity, a radical and alive responsiveness.”
Despair and sorrow can feel like waiting, loneliness, or perhaps being left out in the cold, but through poetry as dynamic movement, we are liberated from the inner machinations of the mind. We are able to transform this sense of longing. Words that channel the immediacy of experience lend significance to difficulty or pain. Devotion is the active, bodily momentum connecting us to each strand of our existence. Why write, or create, from the head, when you can do so from the heart?
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P.s. Sport us a coffee if you can, pal.