Kabir by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

In the March issue of Poetry, AKM's translations of Kabir. Here's 'Chewing Slowly':

Chewing Slowly

Kabir

god my darling
do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law
             —Janabai, tr. Arun Kolatkar

Chewing slowly,

Only after I’d eaten

My grandmother,

Mother,

Son-in-law,

Two brothers-in-law,

And father-in-law

(His big family included)

In that order,

And had for dessert

The town’s inhabitants,

Did I find, says Kabir,

The beloved that I’ve become

One with.

Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

 In his introductory essay, AKM says: 

An authentic Kabir poem, in the thousands attributed to him, may never be found, nor does it matter. If you catch the spirit, anyone can write an authentic Kabir poem. Innumerable anonymous poets have done so in the past and continue to do so even today, adding their voices to his. A researcher in Rajasthan in the nineties looking for Kabir songs in the oral tradition came across one that used a railway metaphor and English words like “engine,” “ticket,” and “line.” Asked how Kabir could have known these words, the singer replied that Kabir, being a seer, knew everything. In “To tonsured monks,” too, Kabir knows everything, including a Jamaican sect and the name of a London publishing house.

Annie Finch's Kegels for Poets

= joy!

When your meter muscles get regular and varied exercise you will find that it actually turns you on poetically. You will better be able to identify and distinguish your lyric G-spot and creative muscles in addition to stimulating your poetic clitoris without even touching yourself! As you perfect these exercises and strengthen the muscles you’ll begin to notice that you can isolate distinctly separate groups of metrical muscles in your poetic floor, including your dactylic, anapestic, trochaic, and iambic muscles. This kind of awareness enables you to isolate your poetic clitoris, for instance, and stimulate yourself poetically at any time. It’s an excellent trick for getting yourself “juiced up” for a hot inspirational experience or important occasional poem. You may even be able to train yourself to have amazing poetic orgasms in this manner. Meter exercises increase blood flow to the poetic region, which aids in the increased flow of inspiration and helps engorge the creative area. With increased blood supply and stronger muscles we prep ourselves for better, stronger and more amazing poetic orgasms. Our lyric G-spot is directly energized and stimulated.

Men – Every bit of the above applies to you, too. Having strong PM muscles aids in stronger lyric erections, lasting longer, increased libido and they help massage the Inspirational Prostate, too.

The whole thing here.

While reading, try not to mix up your epic similes with your extended metaphors.

**

In other news, it's So. Fucking. Hot! Over 40C every day for the last week or so, and 42.4C yesterday. If I've disappeared it's because there's been an incident of spontaneous combustion and someone should come and pick up the pieces.

Or do I mean put out the fire? I need to go do Kegels.

Two Minutes Older: Poets Are People Too

Recently, while discarding books from my overcrowded shelves, I found my copy of Daddy Long Legs. The book had a quotation inscribed in it – a fragment of a poem that read, I say, chicken unlimited,/ your kisses taste like wine/ but I am too old for this sort of thing. As a line addressed directly to my eighteen-year-old self, the sentiments were patently and entirely false, but even now it never fails to make me smile.

Poets are supposed to be mini-shamans or at least act as barometers of our emotional landscape. Everyone knows the charge of finding one’s feelings exactly expressed in poem or song. Sometimes the words are repositories of memories and sometimes they tell you in advance what it will be like to experience something, perhaps in the future. In Eunice de Souza’s ‘October 30, 1987’, the poet writes:

For you I wrote

“I don’t need words

any more.”

Now garrulous

with memories.

That’s the whole poem. When I read it first, there was no question of really understanding what it might mean to know someone so well that it didn’t need words to communicate with them. The idea also, that one’s store of memories of a person could be so vast and sufficient that they provided all the conversation that was necessary, was something beyond my experience. The poem was a sort of battery storing the charge of an emotion I would understand only later in my life.

There are two reasons why people who do not write poetry have truck with poets: one is – naturally – for the poetry itself. The other reason is to find out for themselves, first-hand, what makes this creature called a poet, tick.

In recent times, it has become absurdly easy to satisfy this very natural curiosity: every year there are at least three or four poetry festivals. In Chennai in December every year, there is the Poetry with Prakriti festival; once a year, Kritya has an international festival of poetry, though not always in the same city or town. The Jaipur Literary Festival also accommodates poets among all the other literary luminaries who attend. What is more, these festivals are free to the public.

Though there have always been poetry meets and mushairas, perhaps what is different is the kind of questions people ask. In the February issue of Poetry magazine, the German poet, Dürs Grünbein writes that there are some questions people inevitably ask him. One of them is: ‘Can you really live off it?’

The short answer to the above question is, of course, an emphatic ‘no’. To the questioner that must be nearly as unsatisfying as being told that the poetry books on display at the reading are not for free. (For the long answer you’d need to read the article online. It’s called ‘Why Live Without Writing?’)

There are all kinds of things people want to know about poets. In the online magazine, The Smart Set, the poet Kristen Hogatt has a column called Ask the Poet. It is a rash invitation to people to ask her all kinds of questions. Such as: What do poets wear to the office? How much does it cost to be a poet? What do poets eat for dinner? Do poets bathe frequently? Do I need a poetic license in order to be a real poet? If so, how and where can I get one? I'm sad. I just learned that my own country didn't score very high on the annual Happiness Index. I'm thinking of moving to Denmark. What does a poet do when he or she gets sad like I am? How many poems are left? There have been thousands of years of poetry writing; when will we have it all?

I feel deeply grateful that no poet I know in India has ever been asked to undertake the task of answering these kinds of questions. A really frightening one involved Fermat’s Last Theorem. Surely this is not what Shelley meant when he said poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world?

Me, I’d rather that people read more poetry to find answers to really important questions – though even there I can’t guarantee they’d find any solutions to mathematical problems.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

__

Still extremely frazzled with deadlines both self-imposed and unavoidable, so blogging will continue to be this list of announcements for at least another couple of weeks. Apologies in advance.

This is not a tag. It is also not an origami pelican.

In fact, I am not going to name twenty-five (25!) writers whose work has influenced mine. First because I don't consider that I have enough 'work' to claim influence; second, I mean seriously - 25 fucking writers?! No way.

In any case, how to detect influence? I'm a weather vane like that and if I talk to you long enough I'll begin to sound like you and in that case everything I've ever read influences me.

Finally, what about what one sees or hears? What if the biggest influence in my writing was the films of, say, Bresson (note to self: watch again A Man Escaped) or Buñuel?

Besides, I don't think I could tag 25 people and have them remain friends.

Sorry Aditi. (But y'all should totally read Aditi's blog).

*

Talking about what this post is not, I was chatting with Black Mamba yesterday and the subject of submissions and rejection slips came up. From there we moved by easy stages to origami pelicans*. I admitted to being puzzled. BM reminded me of this essay by Naeem Murr in Poetry that I have blogged about. Apparently it had not only starlings and monobrows and cancer of the left ventricle (fiction has to be specific, Murr says), it also has origami pelicans.

I love origami pelicans and other paper wildlife.

And I miss the orgami pelicaniness in the blogs I read.

So here's the deal:

This is not a tag.

But it is a prompt to write the most outrageously funny, silly, weird, fun, unwistful, unangular, unagsty, chortly post ever.

Anyone, everyone who reads this blog and is weighed down by the burden of life and would like nothing more than it lay it down, here are your bootstraps:

Story, play, conversation, graphic/comic, poem, audio clip.

Write, link, I'll link back.

What? What else do you need? You have eight or nine words above. For other inspiration there's the Poet and her Amuse.

Make those paper pelicans fly, folks.

*

Black Mamba is writing love letters or something.

And Menaka Raman, who is drawing for a rainy day.

Falsie, in the meanwhile, is taking tentative bites. (btw, where did I say this had to be only visual? Not that I'm complaining, but I'm wondering what happened to Chotu-Motu's Mandarin classes.)

Here's Surabhi dreaming that she's painting John Abraham's face with yellow butterflies (it becomes more surreal when you realise that's it's the Amma Ariyen/ Odessa John Abraham).

If this is not a tag, what I get is not an origami camel. According to Dipali.

*You'll find it's a swan, BM.