Daily Times
Straggling Through Fire is about proemistics and aesthetics of the margin
* They say when novelty becomes the commodity of the old, the old — the past — becomes the novel commodity
April 29, 2021
Proemistry is the grand total of prose, poetry, media and history. I hope there must be somewhere a concept of graphological metaphor to analyse proems produced by a really original voice from Pakistan. Dr Ghulam Murtaza Aatir, a renowned professor of English Literature at GCUF, has produced a new book of proemistry titled Straggling through Fire. There is a marginal line in the right which is not just a marker of space for the community of readers to add whatever they want to the lines of proems but it figuratively becomes the main concern of the poet too. We have margin in the content because proems deal with the weak and downtrodden. Margin is in form which gives space to readers to add comments, cries, laughters and slogans. Proemistry is scriptible i.e. writerly kind of literature instead of lisible ie readerly one in Berthesian terms. Hence, proemistry is a going concern of the community of the poet and readers that has the potential to metamorphose into the worldview of the whole community over a period of time. Proemistry will take up the chronotopes of the community and turn them into a single grand somatope or a small number of somatopes printed on the embodiments of victims presented in proems or even on proems imprinted on the body of book. He writes: