What it is
The first of the five lesser fields is poetics, kāvya: the science of speech made beautiful. Not poetry in general, which every people has, but the trained art of ornament, the figures of sound and sense by which a plain statement is made memorable. In Tibet it became a required subject for anyone who would write, and its influence is in the preface and colophon of nearly every classical book.
Where it comes from
The source is a single Indian text, Daṇḍin’s Mirror of Poetry, the Kāvyādarśa, written in the seventh century and translated into Tibetan in the thirteenth under the patronage of the Sakya rulers. It catalogues the ornaments: thirty-five figures of meaning, simile, metaphor, hyperbole, the pun and the riddle among them, and the figures of sound, alliteration and the patterned repetition of syllables. Generations of Tibetan scholars wrote commentaries on it and composed in its style, and the ornate literary register it produced is still the mark of a learned writer.
Beside the learned tradition runs a native one. The mgur, the song of realisation, is the form in which Milarepa taught in the eleventh century, and his songs, collected in 1488, are the most loved poems in the language. The folk song, the glu, belongs to every valley and every kind of work. The Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, wrote short songs of love and longing at the turn of the eighteenth century that everyone still knows. And in the twentieth century Gendün Chöphel and then Döndrup Gyal, whose Waterfall of Youth of 1983 abandoned metre altogether, opened a modern poetry that is still being written on both sides of the Himalaya.
What is at stake
Poetry is where a language shows its full range, and it is the first thing lost when a language is read slowly. A generation that reads Tibetan with effort reads no Tibetan poetry, and the ornaments of the Mirror, once the common possession of every educated person, are now known to specialists.
On Genla
Poetry holds the Mirror of Poetry and its ornaments, the songs of the yogins and the people, modern poetry, and exercises in writing.