The New Life of English Poetry

A double page feature titled 'The New Life of English Poetry' in this Saturday's Mint Lounge which also features yours truly. 

I'm happy to be featured, of course. So it feels churlish to express the hope that (some time soon,) magazines would stop celebrating anglophone Indian poetry's resurgence and start devoting serious column inches to the examination of poets' works.

Put it down to a building head of steam that is flavoured with ill-temper. I should like to withdraw and write. This is why any evidence of my having occupied public space makes me twitchy and cross-grained.

My apologies therefore, to Mayank, whose piece is unexceptionable. The fault, dear Brutus.

who steals my words steals [insert chosen word]

I wanted desperately to post on this when (or is that a 'but'?) I was busy. In the intervening four or five days, I have given myself repetitive stress injury thinking about this and now my brain is broken, fit only for romance novels I can finish in a couple of hours or a dizzy hour around the local park (which is only a park in disguise and is really a place to hide over-ground sewage pipes and overhead high-tension wires).

However, I still think I should be able to find these posts for ready reference at some point in the future, so I will first link and then modify with a couple of cryptic statements of my own.

First, the posts:

(Apparently something happened on Facebook but since I am no longer on it, all this happened as if on another planet. But news gets out, news gets out.)

(A few poet friends found someone on FB passing off lines from poems they, and others they knew, had written. As far as I can tell from the screen grabs, there was no attribution, but really - I know nothing about what it really was like on FB.)

Since this appears to have happened to other poets over several years, some of them wrote a joint post about it. You can find the post here. There's a follow-up post that selects some of the comments and responds to them, but you can find it for yourselves from the blog.

More interesting to me is poet Monica Mody's comment (who, along with Vivek Narayanan, raises some questions that I don't think the signatories to the post have thought about sufficiently). In follow-up, she's posted about this on Montevidayo.

Now, I promise I had plenty to say about this. But see opening paragraph: I have sprained my brain.

My own rather smashana vairagyam inflected view is that our poetry, as it is today, is neither strong enough nor lasting enough for this to really matter. In a few centuries, someone might make stupid movies about how one of us is really someone else. Even with Google’s apparently long and ineradicable memory, it’s not going to matter which one of us wrote which poem (or which part of a poem). What will live or die are the poems themselves. Between ‘live’ and ‘die’ you know which I think is more likely. 

Which is to say: Homer. Shakespeare. Kabir. Lalla. Calvin signing the snow. Signatures & stamps of ownership. Temporary immortality. Steve Jobs. Thermonuclear war. Bikhre Bimb. Single word quotation. Hive-mindedness.

Clearing House, Lal

First of all, RIP P.Lal. He died yesterday.

Whether you liked the kind of poetry he published or not, Indian Poetry in English would be a smaller world than it already is without the encouragement he gave poets in their early years.

*

Anjum Hasan has an essay in Caravan, on the years when Clearing House produced some of the best known books of poetry in English. There's been some discussion on Facebook, but I don't think I will reproduce that here (you had to be there).

Neither will I extract; I think the piece needs to be read in entirety. But some observations:

The idea of classifying poets by their location rather than their poetics is, I'm sure, not unique to IPE; if the poets published by independent, cooperative ventures - among them Clearing House - were 'The Bombay Poets', there were also the Kerala poets - Ayyappa Panikker and K. Satchidananda, who were writing poetry and criticism as well as translating not just Malayalam poetry into English, but other poetries into Malayalam. There has to be other collectives elsewhere, in other parts of the country, but none of them have got as much press as the 'Bombay Poets'.

What, then, of poet-publishers such as P.Lal and Jayanta Mahapatra? Mahapatra* was published by Clearing House, though of course he wasn't a 'Bombay Poet' (which leads me to think that - unlike the 'Kerala moderns', to use Hasan's phrase -  the appellation was an accident rather than by design). Mahapatra was published by University presses abroad and by the Chandrabhaga Trust and has always been on the edges of any 'collective' or group of poets.

P.Lal's contributions, on the other hand, have always been elided over as being not worthy enough of attention. The primary schism having occurred between Lal and Ezekiel way back in the dawn of post-Independence, modern IPE (I will write more about this soon), the charge of publishing poetry indiscriminately stuck. 

Hasan mentions Lal thus in her essay: "Saleem Peeradina’s anthology of Indian English poetry first appeared as a special edition of Quest in 1972 and was considered a critical response to P Lal’s massive and apparently less discerning Modern Indian Poetry in English which had been published three years previously."

If there is a difference between a bunch of poets publishing their own work and the work of their friends, and one man publishing any poet who had gone to the trouble of putting a manuscript together, surely it isn't one of superior discernment? Lal, after all, published many of the poets we consider major today: A.K.Ramanujam, Jayanta Mahapatra, Keki Daruwalla, Gieve Patel, Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Alexander and many, many others. On the other hand, other small presses have published poets who have disappeared without a trace, or are just plain unreadable.

Whatever the stated or unstated reasons are for sidelining P.Lal, I think a history of IPE would be incomplete if we did not examine his contribution to it. RIP.
__

*I thought it odd (and telling) how Hasan, throughout her essay, referred to poets by their first names. I might do it on my blog, while referring to poets who are, often, also friends; but I wouldn't do it in an essay being published in a less informal space. Thoughts about this? (After all, so many definitions about publications, criticism and accessibility are changing in this discussion, so - perhaps - why not this as well?)