weekend intentions

1. Finish an essay I'm working on.

2. Put away books on floor, bed, by the window and work table.

3. Watch Caravaggio.

More updates on 1 & 3. The thought of actually managing 2 is already exhausting me.

'a new and abusive school of criticism'

Rebecca West in The New Republic.

So it is the duty of writers to deliberate in this hour of enforced silence how they can make art a more effective and obviously unnecessary thing than it has been of late years. A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist. Nor is it due to compulsion from above, for it is not worth an editor's while to veil the bright rage of an entertaining writer for the sake of publishers' advertisements. No economic force compels this vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness, which, when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter.

[Via] First published in The New Republic, November 7, 1914 (thanks Rahul!)

Spaniard is a Glutton for Punishment

Not really. Spaniard merely didn't know that the birthday party she dropped her son off at wouldn't get over when they said it would. Spaniard is trusting and naive like that and never learns.

This party was at a gaming mall. That sounds like a den of iniquity, but it isn't, really. There's a food court as you enter and up a couple of floors are a bunch of noisy video games that I didn't stay to listen to.

So when I came to pick the kid up,Ii expected the cake to have been cut and only the matter of a return gift pending.

What I found was a game in progress - did I mention the place was done up in blue and while balloons? And you could hear the music two traffic lights away? - two kids were surrounded by a gang of children (of their own respective genders), who were attempting to smother them in toilet paper. Apparently this is how mummies are made. The event organiser was shrieking encouragement into the mike, the music was...let's just say, when I drank the thimbleful of coke I was offered, my ears popped. The girls won. The event organiser managed to sound both hurt and surprised.

Next up was dancing. With the EO acting as choreographer, chief mime, lip synch artist and lead dancer. The kids hopped around and yelled like a bunch of bloodthirsty extras from The Lord of the Flies.

After dinner and the most nauseating cake in the history of birthday parties, the return gifts made me feel even more ill: a huge bag, with three wrapped gifts and a bunch of assorted candy. At least one gift broke before bedtime; another was a vehicle for more candy; the last had a sticker on it to remind you that this was so-and-so's birthday. Last year these folks took the kids to a bookstore and told them they could spend 300 bucks on their own return gifts. I was appalled but I can't decide which is worse.

I think this party was much more fun.

stone

A milestone needs to be at least 20 years ago to become clearly recognisable as one.

Puri

Puri, January 2010. Hard afternoon light. Behind me, food stalls. Even farther behind, clothes drying on guest house balconies. From somewhere, temple bells.

No, I didn't see the temple.

(can you see the ship way off in the distance? either the light is drowning it or it's a good marriageable distance out in the waters.)

Two Minutes Older: At Tinkonia Bagicha

When I first began to write poetry, I had no idea where to submit my work. So I wrote and watched other peoples’ acknowledgements carefully. One journal whose name cropped up often was Chandrabhāgā. Accordingly, I sent a few poems off to the editor, Jayanta Mahapatra, and was thrilled when he replied saying he’d like to use all of them. The few words of praise in his lovely hand-written letter were exactly what I needed to tip me over into taking my own writing seriously.

I replied and thanked Jayantada – as he requested that I call him – and in the months that followed we kept up a correspondence. At that time, Jayantada had just revived Chandrabhāgā which he edited without a break from 1979 to 1985, when the journal had to close for lack of funds. In its first run, Chandrabhāgā had contributions from poets such as Meena Alexander and Arun Kolatkar and poet-critics such as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, whose now famous essay, ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’ was published in Issues 3 and 7 respectively of Chandrabhāgā, in response to a letter from the poet R. Parthasarathy who took exception to an essay published in the very first issue of the journal. In its new avatar, Chandrabhāgā hoped to revive the conversation (and skirmishing) between poets.

But Jayanta Mahapatra is not just an editor of an important little magazine but also one of the best poets of his generation. He was 42 when his first book, Swayamvara and Other Poems was published in 1971 (take heart, all you who started writing late!) making his work contemporaneous with younger poets such as Dilip Chitre and Keki Daruwalla. His poetry is dark and makes no concessions to the reader’s desire for hope (‘Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in,’ he writes, in his best-known poem ‘Hunger’). In 2009 he was awarded the Padma Shri.

It could have been an award given too late: in 2006, Jayantada was critically ill. The news made my heart lodge itself in my throat and refuse to budge. I could not say why it was important to me that Jayantada survive and recover – maybe because of the letters he wrote me, maybe because the poems in his then-recently-published book, Random Descent affected me deeply – I wrote him letters often and sent him poems by other people that I thought would bring comfort. The amazing thing is that he replied to every one of my letters though his hand was shakier and more crabbed with each reply.

I was determined to meet this poet who wrote to an unknown writer with affection and encouragement, through bad health and a painful recovery.

It took me nearly four years to move from wish to fulfilment: earlier this month, I called Jayantada and asked him if I could come and visit him. He was ill once again, but he welcomed my visit.

The three days I spent in Cuttack were like a gift: we talked, though not always about poetry. I explored the Chandrabhāgā office, read old and new issues of the journal, browsed through poetry books and was given valuable copies of his books, A Rain of Rites and False Start (with a cover by Arun Kolatkar) and his latest, The Lie of Dawns: Poems 1974-2008.

Reading through the books chronologically, I find a poem from The Lie of Dawns:

If he turns the night darker

and the silence deeper

it’s because the wind

doesn’t like him touching it

and because the earth is afraid

at the power of his feeling

From ‘At Times a Man Growing Old’

For the first time, I find myself on the brink of an opportunity to understand a writer’s work as a whole. Jayanta Mahapatra’s autobiography is now being serialised in the Oriya magazine, Bijoya. I hope it will be translated into English soon and wonder how like his poetry it will be.

My one regret is that I could not get Jayantada to record a few poems – he was too unwell to speak for long, let alone recite poetry. I hope some day I can return to Tinkonia Bagicha and persuade Jayantada to lend me his voice.

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

disappointed

Don't have much time to do an extended or rounded out post, so quickly, just a few thoughts: just returned from the reading this evening and have to say I am disappointed. For one thing, Meena had a lot of mannerisms which were distracting and, I thought, took away from the impact of the poems. She read mainly from Quickly Changing River and Raw Silk. The latter has a poem sequence called (not sure I have the exact title right, since I wasn't making notes) 'Letters to Gandhi', which were written post-Godhra. Only during these poems did her voice become more conversational and her rhythms more varied.

The rest of the time, I noticed, her speaking voice was markedly different from her reading voice - which is fine; many poets have that distinction, a shift from a more informal register to a formal reciting voice. But: her reading voice came not from deep down; not even a high, back-of-the-throat kind of voice music teachers try their damndest to discourage; her voice appeared to be produced from somewhere between her teeth and her lips, a method of reading that distorted the words strangely. It didn't help that her reading style is a drawl, a way of elongating some syllables in a way that reminded me most embarrassingly of my own AIR reading from last year (or was it the year before?)

At the end of the reading, I asked her how she prepared for a performance, if she ever heard herself read. I wanted to know, because until I heard my own recording, I had no idea how much I drawled and ruined the poems by stretching them out like that. I don't do it anymore. I also try to read each poem aloud in a number of different way, with different emphases, to see what works better or what about the poem changes with different reading styles.

I'm not sure she understood my question, really - she said she used to read her poems aloud to herself, but now she reads them out in her head. It would account for the sameness of the reading.

So I have to say I prefer her poems on the page than listening to them read aloud. But it was interesting all the same.

Meena Alexander reads at ASCI Friday, Jan 22

Osmania University Centre for International Programmes

in collaboration with

The Public Affairs Section, U.S. Consulate General Hyderabad

&

Department of English, University of Hyderabad

cordially invite you to a poetry reading by

Meena Alexander

Time: 6.30 pm Day & Date: Fri 22 Jan 2010

Venue: Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), Bella Vista

Raj Bhavan Road, Khairatabad, Hyderabad.

__________________________________________________________________

Meena Alexander <www.meenaalexander.com> is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Centre, City University of New York. Her poems and prose works have been widely anthologized and translated. Her new collection of poetry is Quickly Changing River. Her book of essays Poetics of Dislocation was recently published under the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series. Her works of poetry include Stone Roots; House of a Thousand Doors; River and Bridge; Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award); Raw Silk; and two chapbooks, each a single long poem: The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, and Night-Scene, The Garden.

She is the editor of Indian Love Poems and the author of the memoir Fault Lines (chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year 1993) She has also published two scholarly works, one of which is Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley; and two novels, one of which is Nampally Road.

She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, Rockefeller, Arts Council of England, and other fellowships.

Arun Kolatkar: 'Fire'

Fire

Arun Kolatkar

This fire            This one laughing          This is yet another

What shall I do with it               Where shall I keep it

Shall I   set it     to the house      to the door       to the world

What will it cook          Where will it spread

This torch         where shall I throw it

This fire            must be obeyed

This fire            wear it on your head

Become a torch            dance

 

Come, let’s play

Light my cigarette

Fire my engine

Leaven my bread

Cook my stew

Condense my soul

Boil my blood

Bend my steel

Melt my gold

Bake my brick

Crackle my mustard

Burn my corpse

Fling my arrows

Helter skelter

This fire            This one laughing          This is yet another

I am the toppling Ravana           I am charcoal       I am charcoal

This is Dussera

 

This fire            Flames flames               This bonfire

Broken window            I’m a smashed door      This bonfire

This bonfire             This bonfire

Limping chair              I’m a table on crutches      This bonfire

            This bonfire              This bonfire

 

Running fence          I’m a beam escaping          This bonfire

            This bonfire             This bonfire

Flying cupboard            I’m a warehouse being looted               This

bonfire         This bonfire           This bonfire

 

this world without tunnels          This house of wax

Helpless   Helpless   Fire engines   Sandbuckets   Water tanks

 

You are fire      I’m ash

You are today     I’m cash

You are yesterday        You are fire      You are tomorrow

You are fire      You are now    You are before      You are after

You are flower I’m stalk

 

You are matchhead       I’m matchstick

 You are sacred fire      I’m holy man

You are fire         Ask      Take

I’m smoke        I’m smoke        I’m smoke

 

I am myself sacrificial fire          I am the host       I am the altar

            I am the priest      I am the fire           I am the sacrifice

The fire itself         is ignorant

I sacrifice          I sacrifice          I sacrifice

 

Your mane will catch fire           Be careful

Your tail will burn         Take care

Come my lion        Make a compromise

Jump         through        this burning hoop

From here to there        and again          from there to here

This fire shaped like a zero        This freedom to burn     is daily

This whole circus      is you alone

 

Rajabai Tower       The Gateway    The Taj

The Majestic Hotel

These buildings      beasts          foxes      tigers      wild boars

This jungle        molded        this clear         darkness

These vultures

 

You are hearth       neighbouring            fire

Scatter       the city        make them wait           

Rajabai Tower       The Gateway    The Taj

The Majestic Hotel    Churchgate    Station

The Town Hall       The Victoria Terminus         The Regal

            The Eros

Detached       Immobile

Keep burning       please       for my sake

Keep       me     warm

Terrify          this city

Otherwise    these buildings   will tear me   and devour me

This city       stays as is    because of you    or else    or else

 

Terrorize         the city         the museum

Be        a neighbour.

 

[Translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre and Mick Fedullo]

Chandrabhaga 13

Thanks, Rahul!

Preview: Net

In the days to come, a few tidbits and then (I hope), more filled out posts.

Until then,


Net.