Jeet Thayil

Indeed, the spirit of the enfant terrible lives in Thayil’s creations. As guitarist and vocalist in such musical projects as Sridhar/Thayil, and Still Dirty, as well as in his poetry, spoken word and fiction, Thayil seeks to provoke chosen exposure from edenic contentment: his band runs all channels; its frequency is tuned to, ‘consciousness precludes excusion’; its broadcast permits no prisoners, for each reached is thus released. 


His is in any case consistent with the paradoxical net of what is called ‘Good Poetry’ – what is captured is freed; what is severed is fused more perfectly. Thayil’s filaments are adamant and fine, some wrapped in glass like kite thread (‘They were fighting fish, no question about it’), their lattice possessed of a gravity that lets them settle on the very bed of the mind and spread, bright welding fires at their ends and edges, catalysts of synaptic anabranches and anastomosis. (‘Every tributary led to her, to water.’) 


Little wonder his first solo collection was named Apocalypso – ‘to uncover’. In Thayil’s poems, the gesture of encounter is submergence – think of weight in water, how swimming opens a third dimension of autonomous movement (‘Start with fish’). This imperative of revelation through submersion is evident throughout his Collected Poems: the need to persistently immerse ourselves in the real of our lives (‘He found himself drowned’) in order to save them. 


‘Forget the sea, let it fade’, he writes, and on the adjacent page, ‘By the river in this room and the way it returns, / I swear, if I forget you, let everything die’.