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trajectorypoetry and life February 18 BACK TO BLOGGINGViju, my wife, thinks I have been squandering my precious time and energy writing blogs and surfing the internet looking for people who are only real, not virtual. She has no objection to my serious uses of internet, which indeed are few. August 28 THE DEATH OF BHUJANG MESHRAMLast night I received an SMS from Hemant Divate---friend, fellow-poet and publisher. It told me of the untimely death of Bhujang Meshram, a contemporary poet from the Gond 'Adivasi' tribe that once ruled the forest heartland of India and has now been colonised, oppressed, and is being systematically decimated by our government's 'development' projects dominated by tyrannical economic policies that are paraded as initiatives in liberalization.
Bhujang's poetry rose from his own besieged and embattled world. He wrote and published poems first in the Marathi language that was not his mother tongue. Later, he infused the idiom and vocabulary of his poetry with his Gondi language and dialect. It was a poetry that stood firm on the poet's identity, voice, and location. It was a part of the politics of identity that informs much of today's tribal, dalit, feminist, and even gay poetry. But Bhujang's poetry uses techniques that are bold and innovative.
Bhujang was barely fifty when he died suddenly and in his literary prime. He was close to both my wife Viju and me whom he addressed as Tai ( Elder Sister) and me as Dada (elder brother). He would visit us at short notice or unannounced, late in the evening, and bringing for me my favourite beverage---wine or liquor made from the flowers of the Mahuva tree. We would sit through the night, until I began to yawn or doze. Then he would vanish into the night, as he has vanished now, alas forever.
Bhujang was a heavy drinker. Alcohol for him was fraught with unpredictable consequences. It often brought out all his hurts and his anger against the system that he served. If he was not physically in our midst, he would call on the telephone, often audibly drunk. Sometimes he was paranoid, swinging between feelings of persecution and delusions of grandeur. However, Bhujang was a warm and generous human being, a remarkable poet, and above all a citizen of the troubled time and space of India that we claim as our own despite frustration and alienation. August 23 Poets BirthdaysVinda Karandikar, is 90 Today! August 23 is the birthday of Vinda alias Govind Vinayak Karandikar. Today he is exactly ninety years old. I spoke with him a little while ago on the phone as he is one of my many 'Gurus' in poetry as well as in life. I reviewed his second collection of Marathi poems in 1954 when I hadn't yet graduated from high school. My review was published by the then leading Marathi cultural weekly Mouj. Vinda was so excited by my appreciation of his poetry that he wrote me a postcard using every millimetre of its scant space and invited me to see him in person at his residence in Mahim, a suburb of Mumbai. In the event we met, he a person twenty-one years older than me, and I just deciding that poetry and the fine arts were my true vocation. I took admission in the Ramnarain Ruia College in Matunga, Mumbai where he had recently joined as a lecturer in English. For my B.A. I chose English Literature as my major subject. Vinda taught us English prosody for our Honours degree. He came from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra and his English accent was influenced by his Marathi dialect. Students who came from English medium schools made fun of him for his quaint English accent and his whimsical style of teaching. But they also held him in awe partly because his grasp of prosody and partly because of his booming voice that went far beyond the classroom. As a reader of poetry from a platform---whether in Marathi or in English---Vinda is unique. He is a performer who browbeats his audience with a thundering and sometimes melodramatic voice. Quite theatrical, he injures his own tender and delicately nuanced phrases and lines with an aggressive pitch and volume. However, he is loved by Marathi audiences and readers, and when he recently won the Jnanpith Award the whole of Maharashtra was ecstatic. A.K. Ramanujan, Ramesh Sarkar, and Vilas Sarang have translated some of his poems into English; as have I, and Arun Kolatkar, though Kolatkar's translations cannot, unfortunately, be traced. I wish him a long life. He would be able to use it well. He has donated the amounts received as literary awards to ngos and individuals doing social work. The longer he lives, the longer they all will be able to work in the public interest! August 01 And Now Antonioni Passes Away!Yesterday, it was Bergman; today, it's Antonioni. Two classic filmmakers gone one after the other. As the journalistic cliche puts it, "End of an era." Era indeed! Cinema has changed with digital technology.
Antonioni was a maestro of the art of cinema. He was 94 when he died. I 'discovered' him late. Blow Up was his first film I saw. I saw it four times in Mumbai. Then I saw his earlier and later masterpieces in India and abroad.
One good thing about digital technology: one can possess DVDs of the works of the great masters of cinema---from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. Digital technology allows us the luxury of becoming recluses. July 31 Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89Ingmar Bergman has died at the age of 89. Since the late 1950s, when cinema became an abiding passion for me, Bergman was one of my mentors in screenwriting and filmmaking. The near-religious moral torture reflected in his work found a resonance in his work, though his father was a Lutheran clergyman and mine an agnostic Hindu, it seemed to me that we battled similar paternal ghosts. Most of the dozen or so short stories I wrote were proto-screenplays, and when I made my only feature film Godam (1983) at the age of 45, my guiding lights were Luis Bunuel, Ritwick Ghatak, and Ingmar Bergman. Bunuel's surreal flair, Ghatak's intense lyricism, and Bergman's relentless narrative drive were among decisive legacies in the evolution of my own style. Today I realize that my former idol was thirty years older than me and was a Scandinavian. He was younger than my father but of the same generation. I was two years old when Bergman won his first major cinema award for a screenplay; and he went on to make more than 50 films. As an Indian, I knew it was a near-impossibility to make independent art house films a career. Though even in the West, it is never easy. Bergman's best work is classic; you go back to it again and again and find subtle resonances and complex textures that you missed before. This is what timelessness is about. Fifty Years of Being A poet March 28 Editing One's Own WorkI have been occupied with a task I always dreaded: selecting my own poems for a collection that would include my English poems from 1964 till the beginning of 2007. My first published English collection of poems was TRAVELLING IN A CAGE. It came out in 1980, twenty years after my first Marathi collection KAVITA, though I have been writing in both the languages since 1954. The gap kept widening ever since. My second Marathi book of poems, KAVITENANTARCHYA KAVITA was published in 1978. My second English book of poems THE MOUNTAIN came out in 1998. My third Marathi book of poems DAHA BY DAHA was published in 1983. It was followed by my collected Marathi poems---EKOON KAVITA 1, 2, and 3. However, my third English book was the long poem NO MOON MONDAY AT THE RIVER KARHA (2000) and my fourth, too, was a single poem POST-CLIMACTIC LOVE POEM that appeared in 2004. Writing English poetry in India where there are no literary magazines to speak of and no publishers for books of poetry ( except anthologies with an eye on the domestic textbook market) requires one to be tenacious and stoic to an unusual degree. Writing in a native Indian language (as I do too) is far less difficult. Very few of my poems have been published when they were written. The first few appeared Indian little magazines such as 'Damn You', 'Blunt', and 'Dionysus' and 'Intrepid' in the USA. This was in the 1960s. Nissim Ezekiel, when he was Poetry Editor of 'The Illustrated Weekly of India', invited me to contribute and published some of my work. Dom Moraes, whom I first met i in 1958 recorded an interview with Arun Kolatkar and me for the BBC and we received five guineas each as a fee. In the mid-1960s, I met Adil Jussawala for the first time in Mumbai. He was visiting India from England. The two of us were invited to read our poems by the University of Bombay's English Department. Adil later included my poems in his Penguin anthology of new writing in India. There were hardly any literary magazines or journals in India then. Even now, there aren't many. Magazines in England and in the USA seemed remote and I wondered whether my kind of poetry would make sense to them. I just continued to write poems regardless, and they continued to accumulate among my several piles of notebooks and handwritten sheets of paper. It was after the publication of 'Travelling in a Cage' that my English poems suddenly got some attention. I was far luckier with my Marathi poems. By the time my first book in English appeared, I had been a known poet in Marathi for more than twenty years. I was also known as a translator of Marathi poetry into English. It was Adil Jussawala, one of the four founders of 'Clearing House', the first cooperative small poetry imprint in Bombay, who took the initiative in bringing out 'Travelling in a Cage' and selected the poems himself. The book was published along with Jayanta Mahapatra's 'False Start'. The four earlier poets published by 'Clearing House' were Arun Kolatkar ('Jejuri'), Adil Jussawala ( 'Missing Person'), Gieve Patel ( 'How Do You Withstand, Body'), and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra ( 'Distance in Statute Miles'). 'Clearing House' closed after publishing two more titles---'Nine Enclosures' by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and 'Lobo' by Hubert Nazareth. In the mid-1980s, after I had moved with my family from Bhopal to Pune, the Department of English of the University of Pune had convened a conference on Indian writing in English. To my delight, some of my friends and favourite poets who lived far came to Pune to attend. Arun, Adil, and Arvind were there and there was Agha Shahid Ali, then visiting India. In a friendly way, they cornered me and pressed me to publish my selected poems. I said I would not be able to handle the selection myself. Shahid volunteered to do it for me if I handed him the manuscripts before he left for the USA. For some reason, I couldn't keep my promise and let go of another opportunity of being edited by a contemporary whose work I loved. More than twenty years have passed since. I have now done the job myself. 'As Is, Where Is' is now in the press. It will be published by the young Marathi poet and publisher Hemant Divate under his imprint 'Poetrywala'. It is not yet my collected poems but it is large enough a book and late enough published to be treated as such by readers and critics. March 24 Making poems: out of what?Poein means 'to make or to compose'. The Greek and Latin etymology of 'poetry' leads us to the practice of poetry and the changing concept of such praxis. Of course, poetry is a prehistoric and global practice, as old as human speech itself, which is its raw material. Writing was invented much later as a sharable notation of speech in order to preserve it. Writing added the first technological dimension to language and made it possible to objectively memorize and record it and thus to 'dislocate' it from its speaker. It enabled some speakers and/or listeners to become 'writers'. However, all writers were not poets. Poets were only those who used language as a special mode of speech: this mode stressed rhythm, change of pitch and register, expressed feeling and articulated emotion, and improvised itself according to the listeners' response. It was no doubt addressed to a present 'community'---a live audience. Poetry is a unique literary genre today because of the special demand it makes on its reader as its performing participant. One has to recreate a poem as speech from its written text; and this is an act of interpretation where the reader is called upon to appropriate the text, 'listen' to it, and voice it again---be it to oneself. When the reader takes the position of the poet who is the source voice, the poet and the poem are 'recognized' and empathized with. All poems have a contested identity because they are variously performed by readers. All of them point to the same text. Yet its resonances vary for most of them. The proof of a poem is in its reading. However, a reading undergoes a series of complex mediations. People who read a poem agree or disagree with one another about how it should be read. A consensus does not always emerge. The identity of a poem is contested again and again. What emerges from the debate is new schools of critical interpretation or even new ways of reading and writing poetry and placing it in our individual as well as community lives. Poetry was part of the primitive human invention of theatre. It belonged to the same cluster of creative activities as dancing, singing, acting, and storytelling; and not very much removed from 'possession', magical rites, and early religious chants. Poems were presumably addressed to natural and supernatural forces, good and evil, and powers that were outside human reach in the belief that language could reach far beyond the limited world of its listeners. fiction, non-fiction, essays, biography, memoirs, poetry, theatre, cinema, the arts, photography, spiritualism, surrealism, travel
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