PROLEGOMENA TO MARGO SKINNER
Dr. Sanjiva Dev
Stasis and Kinesis, which represent space and
time respectively, may in other words be called being and becoming, which again
represent matter and energy.
Man is man because he is not a stone, a plant
or an animal. Unlike them he thinks, he writes poetry. It is only the human
being who produces poetry, whether spoken or written, while other living beings
are unable to do so.
Yet, all human beings are not poets despite
the fact that all poets are human beings.
Mrs. Margo Skinner is a poet in addition to
being a human being. She was not merely a poet but more than a poet as well.
She was a multiple cultural being. She did belong to every realm of both
enlightenment and refinement. She was a versatile genius.
For her to live meant to make a pilgrimage on
the fragrant path of culture. She was a living embodiment or moving culture.
Apart from other aspects of culture in which
she was engrossed, poetry had been the main aspect in which she lived. Her life
was dedicated to the flames of Truth. Benevolence and Beauty. She was born in
San Francisco. California and in the same city, after husband’s death, she left
her carnal body.
She was a lyrical poet par excellence. That
was why she was inclined to write the Hyku poems, which migrated into several
parts of the globe from Japan.
She was fond of Oriental Culture, especially
she was inclined immensely towards the thought, arts and people of India where
she spent two years during 1960 and 61 in Hyderabad as Editor of the English
Magazine “Mankind”, dedicated to politics and culture, which was
internationally circulated. Dr. Rammanohar Lohia was the Founde-Editor of
“Mankind”.
Later on Mrs. Skinner returned to San
Francisco where she settled down as a film critic and broad caster, contributor
and staffer; to Bay Guardin, Hollywood Reporter, Sacrimento Bee, S.F.
Chronicle, Toronto star, AP, Reuters etc., and many more. She was immensely
interested in various sports and conducted world tournaments creating
inspiration in many a man and woman, boy and girl.
She was a keen traveler: Hawaii,
Phillippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, England, France, Italy. Her interest was
both intensive and extensive covering cultural anthropology, ecology, politics,
love of animals. She had fostered two great Siamese cats as well as special
dogs.
Thus Mrs. Margo Skinner was a rare human
speciman, a luminous flame of all that was right and bright, extending the
triple-glow of the True, the Good and the Beautiful for the sake of the
benevolent; unfoldment of the
soma-psyche of humanity at large.
Like every human being she too was composed of
flesh, blood, bones, nerves, brain, motor and sensory organs accompanied by
thoughts, feelings, hopes, despairs, fear and courage, etc., yet she was not an
empirical being, she was a transcendental
one beyond the shadows of mundane life.
Her aesthetic as well as intellectual
writings, done both in prose and verse, which have remained immortal inspite of
the absence of the writer who has hidden behind the veil of mortality, do
reveal what is hidden behind the phenomena of the cosmic reality.
Mrs. Skinner’s, cerebral-cum-sensory
functions were not the slaves of the cerebum and senses but they rendered the
latter their own slaves. She was never a slave of the phenomena itself. She
stood always in living - Liberation free from all the fetters of the
cosmic existence.
Human life is three-fold-Sub-Human, Human and
Super - human. Man is born as Sub-human grows as human and culminates into
super-human. All human beings may not pass this process of evolution. Some of
them forever may remain in the state of the sub- human, others may in that of
the human while a few may evolve into the super-human.
Mrs. Skinner was able to unfold herself into
the super-human before embracing the evening of her life. What ever fails to be
done by the sub-human is accomplished by the human and eventually whatever
could not be done by the human could be accomplished by the super-human. Judged
by the marvellous achievements executed by Mrs. Skinner one could arrive at the
conclusion that she, beyond all doubt, was a super-woman who had lifted herself
above every sub-human and human imperfection. It seems she was above the common
reach of ordinary humans. No doubt, she had climbed to the ultimate summits of
life and yet she was within the common reach of the ordinary persons. That was
why she happened to be super-human. A super-human is then a super-human when he
or she would be within the reach of an ordinary human.
The present volume “As Green As Emeraude”
contains Skinner’s poems of diverse contents and forms full of fine feelings.
She was a subtle romantic poet like Shelley and Keats. Her poetic impressions
are beyond our perception because the impressions are subjective and abstract while
the expressions are objective and concrete.
She was an admirer and adorer of Nature’s
charm and calm and her poetic expressions remind of Shelley’s subtle poetic
sentence “There where feeling, music and moonlight are one”.
Skinner lived on the earth in her physical
body but used to fly in the sky in her psychical body. She was, for a major
part of her time, occupied by the transcendental atmosphere in the infinite
azure sky above. In her poem “The Silent Fountain” she sings:
“Silent now the singing stone
The Listener has gone
The black bird, spotted bird, with blood
Flyaway; bathe your marked breast, wings in the distant river,
Wither pomegranate, Shrink Papaya,
Titily, see your golden dress in another
mirror
Rose-Tree scatter soft white petals
There is no waiter to keep you green.
Striped Squirrel, whom Rama stroked,
Skittening Lizard, quick - winged sparrow.
Travel, you have lost your garden
The Listener has gone.
Silent now the singing stone
The gravestone of the garden”.
In the above poem, the theme is new, the
technique is charming and the aesthetic appeal is sensitive.
English Poetry is divided into three: regular
verse, blank verse and free verse (vers libre). Regular verse is that in which
both rhyme and metre are used: blank verse is that in which mere metre, devoid
of rhyme, is used: free verse does not contain both, meter and rhyme.
But now modern poetry in all languages of the
globe is addicted to free verse whose father was the American poet Wait Whitman
in the last century: whose publication of free verse “Leaves of Grass” has been
very famous.
Skinner was familiar with all these poetic
forms. Her poetic content used to appear in amplification in the simplification
of the construction of form. It seemed she was born in poetry, lived in poetry
and died in poetry!
Her poems are paintings in words, or visual
poems: these poems are not written in the medium of words but in the medium of
poems. In the following short poem only feelings appear in the place of words:
“Come out, come out of your narrow house
Come into the starlit streets and dance,
While rockets spangle the sky with gold.
And music pours forth from every star
to the double pulsing of our hearts”.
The creators of such pure aesthetic poems are
not poets but poems themselves. Margo Skinner was not a poet but a poem itself
- a living poem!
It was already stated that she did produce
also Haiku poems. Haiku originally was born in Japan. A Haiku poem in the
Japanese language contains seventeen syllables in three lines - the first line contains five syllables, the second line seven and the
third line five. These mini-poems are pure word-pictures delineating fleeting
incidents especially ephemeral natural phenomena
In the English versions of these Haiku
poems the poet transcends the Japanese principles of prosody. In the following
Haiku in English, Skinner did the same.
Haikus:
“Rain falls on the sea,
Nourishing coral gardens,
In subterranean grottoes”
“A Brilliant paper fan flouts westward
who has left it to the tide!”
“I looked for the star
The sky was black
No headlights on the dark highway”.
Such a luminous human star (Skinner) did
vanish forever from our territorial globe into the more luminous stellar
sphere.
She lived not for the
sake of her own living but for the sake of the living of others too.
Living is a loftily delightful act, no doubt.
But living in sorrow and suffering is worse and more miserable than dying.
Skinner used to be keenly diligent in
keeping herself as well as other fellow – beings ever delightfull. She was well
aware, man could not happily live without food and at the same time she was not
unaware that man could not do so with food alone. In order to lead a happy life
man should have both food and culture - food for the survival of the body and
culture for the radiance of the mind. That was why hunger and ignorance ought
to simultaneously be eradicated mercilessly for mercy’s sake!
Margo Skinner lived for the sake of
realization of that lofty effulgent Ideal.