In search of topoemas

A Topoema

Octavio Paz

It was 1996, I had some time off and was regularly loitering the book shelves of District library, Guwahati. I was ready to gulp anything that could food for thought and one day I picked up –The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz . I knew nothing about him at that time except that he is a big name.  I borrowed the book home, tried to read and comprehend but most of them were smarter than me at that time. To me poetry is to feel not to understand, so I was not bothered as long as I could feel them. What attracted me was some bizarre line in the form juxtaposition of word and sketch. They were named Topoema by the author.

I didn’t had a clue what was it all about but it appealed me so much that –I had those pages photocopied (may be illegal as per copyright act) and I am carrying those page till today though I have moved from Guwahati to Dibrugarh then  to Delhi then to Dehradun then…..over next twenty years.Those scripts continued to puzzle me and after the advent of internet I started to goggle what is topoeama by Octavio Paz but I found nothing.

When I could afford and most books become available in online shops I brought the book from flipkart then I found some clue and fell in love with the concept of topoeama .

It seems Mr. Paz also had some problem with words (or their meaning…also read words...

Even In net sphere now a days there is a very very little information available on Topoema .But  gradually I became convinced that in order to escape time and space and to give meaning and mystery to words Mr. Paz created Topema.

Later I found a paragraph about Topoema in a Spanish language in a Spanish website and had it translated with help of Google translate it says

“One of the most common obsessions in his poems is the desire to escape time, which led to the creation of a poetry space whose poems were baptized by the author under the name of topoemas (Moles + poem). This is what poetry space, poetry as opposed to the typical temporal and discursive. It is an intellectual and minority poetry, almost metaphysical in sign language also includes visual signals. In topoemas, as occurred in the poetry of the avant-garde, stress is suggestive and expressive power of visual images. There is no doubt that the last poetry of Octavio Paz is quite esoteric, but, beyond that, above all his poetry is noted for its lyricism and the magical sense that the author gives to words."

I said “Pretty surreal but damn appealing”

Much later I was intending to fictionalize Surrealism (not that I will write about art history but I intended to take some theme of surrealism and to write a fiction on it),I was lost then this Topema came to my rescue by becoming a part of the story .