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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. March 17 Saving One's Own Voice and Separating All NoiseA poet's identity is in her/his own voice because all poetry is a unique form of speech that its listener/reader can identify. A poem is a unique relationship between its speaker and its listener. Most, if not all, of us possess the ability to identify or recognize faces and voices of people. When listening skills are further honed, a sharper and finer image of a particular poet's voice, and the tone of a specific poem, can be perceived. The details of language used in a poem are all framed within its voice and contained in its tones and textures. A poem makes us attentive to its language in a special way. Listening to poetry is like listening to music. First, you must become aware that the sounds music makes are deliberate or spontaneous human-made sounds and that those sounds are made according to human-made rules. The rules can vary and they can be changed. But unless you understand them, you cannot understand the music as a larger system within which what you are listening to is placed. Similarly, the voice of poetry is really a wider realm of human voices addressed to listeners. The more unique voices a listener has heard, the mgreater becomes her/his developed skill to identify and recognize each voice as a 'location'. Poets and their poems are locations within much larger and vastly varied languagescapes. This is seldom understood by teachers of poetry in schools. They often damage the listening skills of their students because their own hearing is impaired by what they learnt and how they learnt. Poetry and art teachers in schools, and even in colleges and universities, are seldom aware of the damage learning systems do to those who have innate abilities to learn. They deprive their students of the profound experience of poetry as an art by imposing limited 'purposive' agendas by way of teaching them wrong ways of measuring their own experience and making it conform to generalized notions. At a certain stage, a student who cannot find enjoyment in learning poetry off the page of a textbook, simply gives up. Education often blunts the sense perception and the mental process that follows it. A society with a deadened sensibility is the result. Sensitization of human beings to one another used to be one of the noble goals of education. This cannot be confused with moral education that always has disastrous effects on growing minds. Training the senses and the mind eventually contributes to moral evolution and not vice versa. We learn on our own and from our own trials and errors. We cannot learn unless the learner's independent and individual ability to learn is absolutely trusted. That trust is still lacking in even the most advanced societies today. March 16 Is a poem a thing? Is a poem a service or a product?About two decades ago, I wrote an essay in Marathi---Kavi Kaay Kaam Karato---raising certain fundamental issues about the evaluation of a poet's contribution to society and his/her place in society. The title of the essay roughly translates into English as : What Work Does A Poet Do? I was provoked to write this essay by a question asked of me in different forms by family, friends, and strangers ever since I seriously decided at the age of sixteen that I was and would be a poet; and therefore poetry would be my mother tongue and the very source of my identity. I may have been an idiot then as I must be even now because I have not given up yet. Meanwhile, a whole lifetime has been spent in writing poetry and supporting it by doing all sorts of things society values more than the writing of poetry. Being a philosophical animal by nature, I am puzzled by life and its self-awareness that I seek to explore and celebrate through poetry and through its other sibling art forms and their progeny of art genres. As a living being, since my early childhood, I am profoundly aware of my mortality and the perishability of all persons, things, and relationships that surround me. Life, especially one's own, is a perennial puzzle; and so is death, its constant companion. However, puzzles are the problem of rationality; and human life is driven by passion, including even the passion to explore its surroundings. For myself, I found the right register for this in the mystical world-view of Shaivism---an esoteric branch of Hindu praxis often mistaken because of its metaphorical expression for a 'theology'. The philosophy of 'Shivadvaya' or 'the not being separable of Shiva' came intuitively to me during my rather precocious childhood and it has continued to evolve since. Unlike other branches of Hindu thought that originate in the scriptures ( 'Nigama'), Shaivism is non-scriptual, and therefore non-textual teaching; it comes directly ( 'Aagama') from a Guru (which simply means 'a greater one' in terms of experience, practice, knowledge, power, and grace). Shivadvaya has a unique cosmology---in essence it is a mythopoetic story of genesis: 'Shiva', the male is a tranquil void that contains 'Shakti' the female desire to be and to become many. Shakti stirs within Shiva, and Shiva is aroused and curious to find the form of what stirs within him. This is how creation began: with Shiva the non-being containing Shakti that is being. The two are inseparable and yet they cannot be absolutely one except in the state of deluge or dissolution of all phenomena. The tension between Shiva and Shakti is an erotic tension which is what life is about. Life is fundamentally erotic. It seeks to unite with the Other or what it perceives as not being itself. It also seeks its own orgasmic end in that union. Life desires to die but only on condition of a sense of fulfilment; and that, according to Kashmir Shaivism and its Marathi extension by Shri Jnandev, is the poetics of Bhakti, mutual absorption of the self and the other, that became my world-view. It was the two great Marathi poets, Jnandev (13th century) and Tukaram (17th century) in whom I found the resonance that became the pitch and the register of my work even in English. The philosophical calm of Jnandev and the existential anguish of Tukaram define the temper and range of Marathi Bhakti poetry; I was born in a different world at a different time with a self-doubting modernity and a sense of tragic irony that pervaded my own life. But without understanding where I come from, it is not possible to explain how my work in my two chosen languages of self-expression coheres, if it coheres at all. Alternatively, as a bilingual poet, I have, at best, just been a spectacular schizophrenic! March 15 Poetry in the Age of ConsumerismI write poetry in two languages: Marathi and English. Looking at the way poetry is written and received in both these languages, I observe that in the 1950s when I started seriously reading and writing poetry it was still regarded as an art. Over the next five decades, it got transformed into a product---either a commodity or a service. Marathi and English have each their own distinctive literary traditions. But these differences notwithstanding, the changed status of poetry in the last fifty years is a phenomenon both share in India. It connects with deeper and wider changes of a political and economic nature. It also changes roles and rules in a profound---and for me disturbing---way. Of all literary genres, poetry is the most condensed and in a certain formal sense most disciplined. Even on an epic scale, it is structured differently from prose and the prose art form that is fiction. Poetry is founded in music but improvised through an interplay of ideas and images and made palpable by its deviation from the normal routines of everyday language and speech. Its cognitive aspects cannot be separated from its artistic form even as it makes subtle subliminal connections among disparate co In the last fifty years or so, in my personal observation, readers are less and less prepared for poetry and more and more influenced by prose. The increasingly peripheral position of poetry in the print media has given it a ritual and ceremonial status distanced from the central concerns of mundane life and its values as well as its issues. Fewer readers read poetry. Larger numbers of them read fiction and even non-fiction. The largest number of them read newspapers and magazines. Fifty years ago, the readers of poetry knew what to expect of poetry. Today, most of them don't know. Most of the new readers of poetry don't know its history as an art in different cultures and traditions. They have very little memory of poetry and very scanty knowledge of its culture since antiquity. Some of them can't even distinguish it from catchy advertising copy or hummable and cliched song. |
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