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Welcome to Indian Poetry — August 2010
July 08, 2010
“We are just ordinary people, aren’t we?/ But we try to do extraordinary things” writes Malayalam poet S. Joseph in his poem, ‘Between these Lines’. “You drive a vehicle./ Or open a shop, making use of a loan./ You pass an exam. You sing a song./ I try to write poems.”
The twenty-fifth edition of the India domain presents three poets – writing in Malayalam, Hindi and English — who are committed to this ‘extraordinary’ business of writing poems; to what Teji Grover calls the ‘dance’ of poetic labour; to what Tabish Khair calls the age-old ‘song’ of ‘separation’ from “leaf-layered, wind-voiced” origins.
If there is a recurrent theme in this edition, it is memory – its valiant retrieval, its wanton erasure. Each of these poets finds a distinctive way of approaching the vexed and yet compelling business of personal and collective history. When Tabish Khair (a Denmark-based Indian poet who writes in English) speaks of exile, he captures its ambivalence and unease: the process of renouncing the integrity of one’s ‘voice’ for the easy mobility offered by borrowed ‘legs’. When S. Joseph invokes memory, he recalls the deep stigma of caste printed indelibly on a college identity card. When Teji Grover, a Hindi poet, invokes memory, she sifts through random, seemingly inconsequential detail – the four leaves growing through a wire elephant in a children’s park; the moment before a lover begins reading his novel – as if such a catalogue of subtle transitoriness could liberate art from the petty expectation of ‘meaning’, and bring it into the luminous mystery of the real world.
Each of these poets is also alert to the politics of selective memory. Removing the mole from the face of the woodcutter’s daughter in his personal vision of her is, in Joseph’s poem, an act of artistic dishonesty, of ethical failure. It explains the hollowness of art, why something is always ‘missing’ from his poems. Renouncing her own voice for a new pair of legs is an unhappy deal that the mermaid makes in Khair’s poem, aware that her past is now doomed to be seen in a violently reductive way as a mere morass of “weeds and scales”. In Grover’s ‘Poem of the End’, on the Shakuntala story by the Sanskrit poet-dramatist Kalidasa, the fisherman is told he can no longer fish out the ring of ‘memory’ from a stray fish’s belly; the new world seems to demand a less whimsical, more responsible beginning this time round.
In addition to some fine poems, this edition brings some special gifts: a new and unpublished sonnet by Khair; an essay on her poetics by Grover; and an audio recording by S. Joseph of his poems in the original Malayalam.
Welcome to an edition that turns “the curse of consonants, the wobble of vowels” (‘Immigrant’ by Tabish Khair) into some remarkable poetry.
If there is a recurrent theme in this edition, it is memory – its valiant retrieval, its wanton erasure. Each of these poets finds a distinctive way of approaching the vexed and yet compelling business of personal and collective history. When Tabish Khair (a Denmark-based Indian poet who writes in English) speaks of exile, he captures its ambivalence and unease: the process of renouncing the integrity of one’s ‘voice’ for the easy mobility offered by borrowed ‘legs’. When S. Joseph invokes memory, he recalls the deep stigma of caste printed indelibly on a college identity card. When Teji Grover, a Hindi poet, invokes memory, she sifts through random, seemingly inconsequential detail – the four leaves growing through a wire elephant in a children’s park; the moment before a lover begins reading his novel – as if such a catalogue of subtle transitoriness could liberate art from the petty expectation of ‘meaning’, and bring it into the luminous mystery of the real world.
Each of these poets is also alert to the politics of selective memory. Removing the mole from the face of the woodcutter’s daughter in his personal vision of her is, in Joseph’s poem, an act of artistic dishonesty, of ethical failure. It explains the hollowness of art, why something is always ‘missing’ from his poems. Renouncing her own voice for a new pair of legs is an unhappy deal that the mermaid makes in Khair’s poem, aware that her past is now doomed to be seen in a violently reductive way as a mere morass of “weeds and scales”. In Grover’s ‘Poem of the End’, on the Shakuntala story by the Sanskrit poet-dramatist Kalidasa, the fisherman is told he can no longer fish out the ring of ‘memory’ from a stray fish’s belly; the new world seems to demand a less whimsical, more responsible beginning this time round.
In addition to some fine poems, this edition brings some special gifts: a new and unpublished sonnet by Khair; an essay on her poetics by Grover; and an audio recording by S. Joseph of his poems in the original Malayalam.
Welcome to an edition that turns “the curse of consonants, the wobble of vowels” (‘Immigrant’ by Tabish Khair) into some remarkable poetry.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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