It's Sunday afternoon, and two representatives of Burmese poetry are introducing us to their art. Khin Aung Aye and Zeyar Lynn, accompanied by editor James Byrne and a translator, read selections from their new anthology of Burmese poetry, Bones Will Crow. It's a simple, no-frills presentation; two poets, a table, a stage, and an audience.
Zeyar Lynn, reading first, has a pensive and expressive rhythm. He explores his systemic alienation within the Burmese government's agenda, enforced by academics in the employ of the state, as when he says:
My history is not mine.
I am already dead.
Eleven out of ten people do not know me.
In contrast, Khin Aung Aye is inquisitive and forceful, populating his poems with the residue of failed systems and bogus ideology. For example, when he mentions God, as in the poem “State of Unhappiness Das Kapital”, it is with bitterness and disappointment:
God is not dead can't speak well can't hear well even from those closest to Him
Has God gone dumb having lost at dice?
Read by Mr. Byrne, Burmese poet Pandora's “The Daft” elicits vocal reply from the audience, with its images of hordes of idiots rising up to overtake the world and non-idiots rushing to comply with them.
After the reading, the two poets give us a quick history of modern Burmese poetry, and explain the absence of Burmese minority poets in the anthology by noting their lack of exposure even within present Burmese culture. Zeyar Lynn speaks to how he avoids writing exclusively political poetry, saying that such poems read like news reports. He also explains how his own translations of poets like Ashbery, Bernstein, and Plath helped break Burmese poets out of the restrictions of classical (and state-sanctioned) Burmese literature.
As I leave the reading, I can't help but think of how relevant and significant these poets are to their society and culture. American poets seem to write in relative isolation. What would it be like to live in a country where until recently, as Mr. Lynn says, use of the word “political” in a restaurant could put you in jail for twenty years? Can we imagine an America in which it is expressly illegal to write “modern” poetry? If these proposals strike us as absurd, it may be because poetry in America has become absurd. Less so in Burma, where it remains integral.
