Article
E.V. Ramakrishnan on the poetics of disquiet in the work of P.P. Ramachandran
Where the Festival is also a Hunt . . .
April 04, 2009
E. V. Ramakrishnan: The poetry of E.V. Ramakrishnan
Poetry as a Radical Discourse of Demystification: K.G. Sankara Pillai’s poetry unsettles idiom and ideology, combining self-doubt with social criticism, says E.V. Ramakrishnan.
I first noticed P.P. Ramachandran when his poems began to appear in Malayalam literary periodicals in the 1990s. During the preceding decades, the modernist avant-garde had radicalised the idiom of Malayalam poetry. By the 90s, the creative potential of the avant-garde had largely declined. Those who raised the banner of revolt had become part of the literary establishment. With the unprecedented expansion of the print and visual media, the written word faced an erosion of its power. Poetry was slowly retreating into solipsism and silence.
Ramachandran’s poems dealt with this crisis in an idiom which was urgent and contemporary. He had clearly internalised the dynamics of the avant-garde without giving in to its loudness. I remember the poem ‘The Season of Mangoes’, in which he traced the distance between his childhood and that of his daughter who, sipping “mango fruity”, asked him if the mangoes in his village had the same taste as the yellow syrup she was sucking through the straw. In the lines that followed, Ramachandran invoked, with the remarkable economy of words characteristic of his poetry, the variety and range of tastes the mangoes of his childhood offered. The poem became a comment on the polyphony of traditions that enriched culture and experience in Kerala before the onset of wanton urbanisation and consumerism. The mango trees that lined the village paths like village elders had given way to the dull linearity of electric posts. The loss of an organic community that related to trees and seasons was presented in the poem graphically through understatement.
In yet another poem titled ‘Post-modern’, he lamented the same transition: our lightness of being betrays a deeper malady of insensitivity. What I liked about Ramachandran’s poems was his sensitivity to Malayalam poetic tradition even as he experimented with rhythms of everyday speech. He could move in and out of metre, as the subject matter demanded.
P.P. Ramachandran published his first volume of poems, Kanekkane in 1999. Appropriately enough, this volume expresses the anguish of someone caught between two centuries. The final years of a century fill one with foreboding and apocalyptic thoughts. And they also point to new beginnings. His poems have an understated anguish that give his tone great inwardness even as they address social issues. There is a minimalism here which easily communicates the micro-politics of everyday life. Kerala, which has had the distinction of electing a Communist government through democratic means way back in 1957, has always had a vibrant tradition of ‘public’ poetry that tends to be loud and overstated. The debates on poetry often miss the finer elements of poetry which cannot be put into polemic speech. Against such a backdrop, here was a poet who subtly defamiliarised our world.
The act of seeing is political. It is sheer coincidence that one of my volumes is titled Terms of Seeing and P.P. Ramachandran’s first volume is titled Kanekkane, which means ‘Before our very eyes’ or ‘While we were watching’. Poetry can be an assault on our habits of seeing. In the title poem of Ramachandran’s first volume, there is an attempt to locate alternative worlds around us. The derailed train is incorporated into the quotidian and the familiar with a finality that is characteristic of our own society that legislates norms of seeing. Poetry, with its imaginative logic, can destabilise reality. Ramachandran reminds us that radical poetry is not about slogans, but about recasting the familiar world in new formations.
Ramachandran is often self-reflexive. Poems such as ‘The Simple’ and ‘Semantics’ are about the act of writing poetry. In our era, writers face the threat of silence all the time. One is constantly haunted by a sense of bad faith in the act of writing. I share this feeling with Ramachandran. Every act of injustice around us adds to our responsibility and also the silence around us. Paul Celan had spoken of the silence the European poets faced after the Holocaust. In the course of the last two decades, huge areas of silence have infiltrated into our languages and lives.
Ramachandran’s poems like ‘The Horn’ and ‘Mushrooms’ talk about this suppressed world that threatens the sanity of our ‘composed’ selves. The understated quality of his verse becomes effective in locating deeper layers of disquiet in our midst. ‘The Horn’, for instance, suggests that the festival is also a hunt. Ramachandran is able to communicate an essential truth about life in a graphic image, bringing into poetry something that resists poetic speech.
Ramachandran has been a theatre activist. His sense of the dramatic can be noted in several of his poems. He has written a long poem about a doll-salesman who walks through the streets. This remarkable prose poem combines the cinematic and the dramatic and invents new tones of feeling and rhythms of speech. His poetry is always acutely conscious of the tonal shifts of language. Poetry is speech, even when it is written. In emphasising this, Ramachandran has demonstrated a refreshingly original sensibility in contemporary Malayalam poetry.
His poems are deeply sceptical of the prevailing ideologies of culture and politics. He does a tightrope walk between the inner and the outer worlds. While being meditative, he wakes up to the larger context of the social that sustains the individual. In a poem about a coconut tree, he talks of its moth-eaten trunk and then reminds the reader that E.M.S, the veteran Communist leader, had once sat in its very shade, leaning on its trunk. That the very name of Kerala is derived from ‘Kera’ (coconut tree) makes the poem profoundly ironic.
Much that is valuable is disappearing before our very eyes. Poetry for Ramachandran is a means of saving us from the compulsive amnesia we celebrate as “contemporary culture”.
Also on this site:In yet another poem titled ‘Post-modern’, he lamented the same transition: our lightness of being betrays a deeper malady of insensitivity. What I liked about Ramachandran’s poems was his sensitivity to Malayalam poetic tradition even as he experimented with rhythms of everyday speech. He could move in and out of metre, as the subject matter demanded.
P.P. Ramachandran published his first volume of poems, Kanekkane in 1999. Appropriately enough, this volume expresses the anguish of someone caught between two centuries. The final years of a century fill one with foreboding and apocalyptic thoughts. And they also point to new beginnings. His poems have an understated anguish that give his tone great inwardness even as they address social issues. There is a minimalism here which easily communicates the micro-politics of everyday life. Kerala, which has had the distinction of electing a Communist government through democratic means way back in 1957, has always had a vibrant tradition of ‘public’ poetry that tends to be loud and overstated. The debates on poetry often miss the finer elements of poetry which cannot be put into polemic speech. Against such a backdrop, here was a poet who subtly defamiliarised our world.
The act of seeing is political. It is sheer coincidence that one of my volumes is titled Terms of Seeing and P.P. Ramachandran’s first volume is titled Kanekkane, which means ‘Before our very eyes’ or ‘While we were watching’. Poetry can be an assault on our habits of seeing. In the title poem of Ramachandran’s first volume, there is an attempt to locate alternative worlds around us. The derailed train is incorporated into the quotidian and the familiar with a finality that is characteristic of our own society that legislates norms of seeing. Poetry, with its imaginative logic, can destabilise reality. Ramachandran reminds us that radical poetry is not about slogans, but about recasting the familiar world in new formations.
Ramachandran is often self-reflexive. Poems such as ‘The Simple’ and ‘Semantics’ are about the act of writing poetry. In our era, writers face the threat of silence all the time. One is constantly haunted by a sense of bad faith in the act of writing. I share this feeling with Ramachandran. Every act of injustice around us adds to our responsibility and also the silence around us. Paul Celan had spoken of the silence the European poets faced after the Holocaust. In the course of the last two decades, huge areas of silence have infiltrated into our languages and lives.
Ramachandran’s poems like ‘The Horn’ and ‘Mushrooms’ talk about this suppressed world that threatens the sanity of our ‘composed’ selves. The understated quality of his verse becomes effective in locating deeper layers of disquiet in our midst. ‘The Horn’, for instance, suggests that the festival is also a hunt. Ramachandran is able to communicate an essential truth about life in a graphic image, bringing into poetry something that resists poetic speech.
Ramachandran has been a theatre activist. His sense of the dramatic can be noted in several of his poems. He has written a long poem about a doll-salesman who walks through the streets. This remarkable prose poem combines the cinematic and the dramatic and invents new tones of feeling and rhythms of speech. His poetry is always acutely conscious of the tonal shifts of language. Poetry is speech, even when it is written. In emphasising this, Ramachandran has demonstrated a refreshingly original sensibility in contemporary Malayalam poetry.
His poems are deeply sceptical of the prevailing ideologies of culture and politics. He does a tightrope walk between the inner and the outer worlds. While being meditative, he wakes up to the larger context of the social that sustains the individual. In a poem about a coconut tree, he talks of its moth-eaten trunk and then reminds the reader that E.M.S, the veteran Communist leader, had once sat in its very shade, leaning on its trunk. That the very name of Kerala is derived from ‘Kera’ (coconut tree) makes the poem profoundly ironic.
Much that is valuable is disappearing before our very eyes. Poetry for Ramachandran is a means of saving us from the compulsive amnesia we celebrate as “contemporary culture”.
E. V. Ramakrishnan: The poetry of E.V. Ramakrishnan
Poetry as a Radical Discourse of Demystification: K.G. Sankara Pillai’s poetry unsettles idiom and ideology, combining self-doubt with social criticism, says E.V. Ramakrishnan.
© E.V. Ramakrishnan
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère