“Excerpt from Clown Crown[ed],” by Sreshtha Sen
I’m torn about whether Sreshtha Sen’s sonnet crown is relating the life of one clown, or a clown among clowns. Because I feel like clowns travel in groups (or troupes). Or that’s one of the dynamics I read into their poem, ”Excerpt from Clown Crown[ed]”. Where the poet is “in on the joke,” whatever the circumstance. They can see the ridiculousness in each situation. When they’re identifying whether the Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan should be seen as a clown, and they say, “[the clowning] is only fun only camp if it’s / in on the joke,” there’s a reveal about what it takes being a clown. Yes, the clown played by Sen, but they’ve widened the clown identity, so it includes everyone in a “community” or a polycule or a military unit dressed in fatigues or whoever it is that’s in the car you just bummed a ride from. Wherever two are gathered in my name, you might say, there’s clowning afoot.
But what I wonder is whether there’s a difference between the clown and the fool. Not that Sen proposes this distinction. But there’s something about how they can perceive the construction of any group, the ridiculous performances necessary to be both inside the group and outside it observing group dynamics. What does this say about clowning? And how might it contrast to the fool? I think the fool is often beholden to someone more powerful than them. But where the fool lacks agency, they still summon a knowledgeable position. They’re the one who’s wise to what everyone’s saying in the group chat, and maybe they themselves are instigators to move things along. The power often given the trickster, or the fool when he appears in Shakespeare, flourishing rhetoric so people admit what they hadn’t expected to admit.
What might not be clear in Sen’s poem is how much others know of the clown’s knowledge of the moment. And that restraint might be one form of power. But the clown at the center of this poem is typically the one holding a bunch of whatever’s left, and they know it. They’re along for the ride. They are the one who has to beg their friends for a ride to the grocery store, they find more security in a polycule binding them to their cat than to a basket of sexual activity. This is the power dynamic that pushes me to read for some relationship between “clown” and “fool,” I know. Because however pathetic their position, it’s funny, and the poet knows it is. And should that humor signal a role that’s “more powerful” or is it simply exaggerating the poet’s “powerlessness.” And the poem only complicates this further because it operates under the duress of formal poetics. In a sonnet crown, there’s only 14 lines before the poet has to pivot to their next subject. And even that next subject is bound to whatever the last line from the previous sonnet has said. Ironically, in a poem so conspicuously aware of the poet’s powerlessness, these pivots are where Sen asserts the most control. They pivot from an ethical consideration of trolleys as lethal instruments to trolley as method of transportation. Or another pivot from road trip into the desert to a review of the Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan’s oeuvre, where he’s his most clown, and why.
These transitions are ridiculous in nature but assured in their execution. And so, again, I wonder whether to cast Sen as the clown or the fool wanting to pass themselves as a clown. A fool might be judged competent to their actions. A clown could be conspicuously clowning. And where the poem steps into a more serious occasion, like submitting a visa petition, it’s unclear what to write in. “I can clown,” the poem says, like that’s what a country is, a bunch of people clowning together. Or what if the verb clown was worded better?
Excerpt from Clown Crown – NOTESDownloadThe post “Excerpt from Clown Crown[ed],” by Sreshtha Sen appeared first on theKalliope.
