Last week, Mridula Koshy launched her book If It Is Sweet in Bangalore. Mridula was as delightful as her book and I much enjoyed her infectious chatter at the launch and afterward at dinner. The audience was larger than usual, about 60-70 people, which is rather good for a book event. Mridula read bits from her story POP and in between, she was in conversation with novelist KR Usha. Some interesting things — she compartmentalises strictly between writing and life, taking chunks of time off from one to attend to the other; she never starts a new story before finishing one; and she writes in cafes.
It was a bit of a shame that the audience was so muted during the Q&A. Of course, I’m hardly one to talk since I suffer from atrophied vocal chords at such times but Mridula is one of those writers who really has a lot to say and is not pompous or boring while at it. In fact, there was a strangely honest, intimate, even vulnerable, air about her when she talked about what drives her to sit at cafes, watching people outside plate-glass windows, collecting details. So it would have been nice if the audience had asked more questions.
***
I watched Kaminey over the weekend and enjoyed it. Somebody asked me if I found the stuttering and lisping distracting. I didn’t. The plot was gripping, the action was slick and everybody was very hot — Priyanka, both versions of Shahid Kapoor, and the Bong villains. Heh. Not sure about the last actually. But I was just thrilled to see Bong villains at all.
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A friend has asked me to compile a list of must-read poets for his edification and entertainment. I also have to put down three poems under each poet. I feel like TIME magazine (100 poems you must read before you die…). But seriously, I think it’ll be a fun way to remember favourites and familiars. Poem suggestions most welcome.
***
I recently read Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, which is all the rage just about everywhere for its bold content and sexual freedom. I wasn’t terribly thrilled. The book sort of leaps from one sex-filled, gunk-filled detail to another. It left me wondering why I should be so interested in someone’s propensity to eat her nose boogers.
And finally, I got very smashed after ages last weekend. It was a friend’s farewell party. There were disco lights and a guy dressed as Mallika Sherawat with fake butterfly wings pinned to his back. There was Shahrukh Khan cavorting on the ceiling via a projected screen. There was lots of drink and some other things. The next day, I could hardly move. I’m getting old.
The weekend was full and exciting but I’ve been a bit sick for the last two days and relaxing with Neil Gaiman (have almost finished the Sandman series), and reading poetry. Also tried to get into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series but couldn’t. I’m a fan of good horror and have enjoyed quite a few of King’s guts-and-blood fests but this one was so pale even 150 pages in that I gave up. I mean, where were the ravens slurping eyeballs? (I borrowed that image from Neil Gaiman’s The Kindly Ones, whichis really deliciously gruesome in bits).
Will blog about other things when I have more energy but in the meantime, here is Jane Hirshfield reading ‘For What Binds Us’.
Kuffir has very kindly translated my poem ‘The Nizam’s Wives’ into Telugu. Sadly, I can’t read the language but for those who can, it’s here at his blog Fakeeram. And here is the original:
The Nizam’s Wives
Four girls in brocade, tussar
and stiff smiles, the slow stranglehold
of gold on their hands, necks, faces.
They were the children who aged early.
Were they friends? Did they
share their fractured power
while swapping dolls, diamonds
and nights? Or were their eyes
darting and vicious over the kheer?
Did they avoid the bath at certain times?
Perhaps, three of them colluded
against the fourth, leaving
frogs on her bed,
peas under her mattress,
spit in her tea.
We can’t know. In this photograph,
they’re just four girls
released from purdah,
frightened and unblinking
into the cameraman’s flash.
I’m commitment-phobic and Wordpress has made it so easy to pick and choose and play around with themes. I’ve really been trying to stick with one. But I can’t. So I’m just going to change the look depending on the mood. It’ll be like those smileys you put at the end of each post. This one appeals to my playful mood. How can it not? Just look at those camels.
I thought Courtney Queeney’s essay ‘The Kings Are Boring: Some Thoughts on Women’s Poetry’ was a confused, rambling piece, unsure of what it wanted to say. There are two questions here — ‘women’s poetry’ which would refer to a vast body of work written by numerous women from across the world, presumably quite different from each other as people, and what ‘being a woman poet’ implies. Queeney’s central point seems to be that she doesn’t want to be classified as a ‘woman poet’ because she does not like ‘women’s poetry’. Her reasons range from the fact that when running out the door she grabs “John Berryman, not Jorie Graham” to being affected by “the occasional spats on the women’s poetry list serv” to the fact that her own poetry has been rejected (“three different men — from different generations, who knew me in different capacities — read the manuscript of my first book and each responded with some variation of, I really like your poems, but they’re not very nice.”). Can any of these be taken seriously?
After a nod at Sharon Olds, she goes on to say that most contemporary women’s writing is tidy and boring. Her complaint:
The work of another one of the poets I was hitting my head against epitomizes the poetry of quiet, easy epiphany, which I’d sum up thus: the speaker is adult, the setting bucolic, the pretext a noticing, the tone reserved; the language is “transparent,” as is the handling of line and rhyme. The poems are inhabited by fruit, foxes, moonlight, wind, autumn, waves, birds, gardens, etc. Often cautious, afraid of offending, these poems wind up saying nothing. I wanted — unfairly, as they weren’t my poems — to imbue the work with even a modicum of curiosity or hunger. I wanted to hook them up to an IV.
Firstly, the dull or cowardly poem is hardly a reserve of women. A lot of modern, workshop-finessed poems are a bit tidy and boring. I think there’s even a school of thought upholding it. I’m also a little taken aback that she thinks women interested in poetry (readers and writers) expect Danielle Steelish stuff from it (“If you’ve been prepped by a lifetime of Danielle Steele books, you’re probably expecting some sort of vague, gushy warmth and then tender, post-coital cuddling during which both heterosexual adults express their immense gratitude for aforementioned encounter.”) I don’t remember ever reading about gushy, post-coital cuddling in a poem, by a woman or anyone else.
Secondly, I’m not sure that poems which have factories, frescoes, steel, cement, bridges and metro stations will necessarily say more than poems with nature imagery. There is no simple rule book that stipulates which kind of images hook up to curiosity, hunger, fierceness. Mentioning an IV drip does not necessarily infuse a poem with body or blood. Some of our greatest living poets demonstrate, time and again, that a poem is a not a lego set with fixed pieces and a manual. You have to choose things from the wide variety of the world, and you have to make of them what you can. Mark Doty writes about fish in A Display of Mackarel and Jane Hirshfield writes about a horse in Heat. And both are wonderful poems.
I do agree with some of her points though. There is no reason for women to be less critical of each other’s writing because they are women. Nor is it particularly unusual to want to be free to write how one wants and not be pigeonholed as a ‘woman poet’. And poetry isn’t about fitting in a feminist agenda — or any other agenda for that matter. At the same time, identity and politics (and identity politics) do play an important role in the work of some very good poets ranging from Cavafy to Anne Carson. So again, it’s a question of how it is done, isn’t it? Also, the fact that women write about ‘womanly’ experiences is hardly odd. After all, to us, it is not ’subversive’; often, it’s just life.
Anyway, here is a response to the essay, which I liked, and here is another.
And speaking of poems by women, I liked a dog poem I read today. It’s by Julie Carter and it’s called ‘Bitten’. An excerpt:
…I thought hers
was the relief of philanthropy–a woman proud
when her Annies found their own pie-eyed
Warbuckses. But maybe it was the promise
of sleep, of safety. A night without alarm.
Did she curl up her hands tight around
the bite marks? Did she pull her collar
up, up to ward off teeth?
It’s not cute. It’s not cuddly. Read the full poem at her blog.
A shout-out for a book I liked very much. I read If It Is Sweet recently, and found it gentle and brutal, searingly honest, and very brave. Toto Funds the Arts in association with Tranquebar Press is launching the book here in Bangalore, on Thursday, 13 August, at 6.30 pm at Crossword Bookstore on Residency Road. Mridula’s reading will be followed by a conversation with novelist Usha KR.
From the invite:
Mridula Koshy was born and raised in Delhi till she migrated to the US, where she worked as a union and community organiser. Years went by and she returned to the city that makes her think the hardest. She lives in Delhi with her partner and children. Her short stories have been published widely, both in India and abroad. She is at work on her first novel, set in Kerala, Delhi and other parts of the world. If It Is Sweet is her first book and has won rave reviews and a very wide readership.
The book is also being launched in Chennai on Tuesday, 11th August 2009 at 6.30 pm, at Connemara Hotel.
Hiroshima anniversary. Bombs in general, actually. Coincidentally, I saw this production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen over the weekend. I liked the play (and the performance) and it took me back to poems on bombs including Yehuda Amichai’s ‘Diameter of the Bomb’ which I’ve posted earlier. Also, a few days back The Guardian featured war poetry commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy. I’ve been very upset with the poems she’s written since she became poet laureate and the one she’s contributed here didn’t do much for me either. But war poetry is very difficult to do well — the stock images just overflow so easily plus one is battling general fatigue and inurement because they’ve become common on TV news. However, I liked:
Afghanistan by Paul Muldoon
It’s getting dark, but not dark enough to see
An exit wound as an exit strategy.
In related thoughts, death and grief and so on, something in Jeanette Winterson’s column for July on her blog moved me very much:
So the book finished, I was just moving forwards, when I faced two deaths in the next 4 months: Pat Kavanagh, who had been my agent at the most formative time of my writing life, and with whom I had had a very serious affair. For me, if I love, it doesn’t stop, even if the shape changes. Love is as strong as death.
And then my father…
What a time… so if I say that I am in a good place now, and that everything has changed – both at a deep level, and on the surface… I keep remembering that the the opening line of my book Written on the Body, is ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’
At one time I could relate to the ‘love doesn’t stop’ bit, but over time, I find myself growing more cynical. Does it become easier to start and stop love once you “master the art of losing”, get used to measuring loss? There are people I can imagine loving all my life. But there are enough others who I loved desperately at one time and now feel a vast sense of fatigue and indifference towards. My mother says “what is true for a time is true for that time” — and post-loss fading should not blur or sully that truth. I lean towards this most days. I really like Winterson. I think her writing is luminous. A friend, who had the incredibly good fortune to attend a reading, tells me that she is as impressive in person. And the generosity and faith of this statement, the heart in it, lives up to all that.
I also find it amazing and very admirable when people notice and remark on beauty even when shrouded in grief. When my father died five years ago, I went into a fugue from which I took months to emerge. I don’t remember writing about a single thing, let alone about his death or the grief. Clearly, my coping mechanisms were not very evolved. I think, today, I would try to do it differently, turn more to things of beauty around me, and to writing. Because that is the best way to cope, isn’t it? To continue to do the things you love most, the things that nourish and nurture.
Winterson mentions the lunar eclipse in her column and I’ve been thinking about it too. Firstly, because I love the moon. I like putting it in poems despite being advised not to. I like reading poems about it even though it’s a face pocked with as many cliches as craters. And the actual eclipse may have been a damp squib but I’m excited anyway because Susan Miller, who is my secret vice and superstition(al) weakness tells me that it will bring me good things and make August generally fabulous. I’m not arguing with anyone who says such nice things.
And lastly, here are two poems of mine — one on war and one on the damned moon. They’ve both been published before (Mosaic, Unisun; Not A Muse, Haven Books) and will also be in my first collection City of Water, to be published by Sahitya Akademi some time soon (hopefully this year)…
Homecoming
You cried while telling me–
about the land, packed stone
under your boots, the air
dry as burnt bread, your skin
blistering like volcanic earth,
your head, a numb knob, stunned
by the monotony of the miles
and the village,
its cluster of homes
like a flock of sheep
in the open, its people
dim with terror,
and how you raped
the first woman you saw there,
how she crumpled like wet newspaper,
pounded your back with her hands
as the child in the corner
cried and cried without knowing why,
and crawled about
and knocked over the kerosene stove.
Your tea had gone cold.
I put my hand on the back
of your neck and said
everything would be okay.
I said that I understood.
But even after all these years,
when I close my eyes, hers
swim up, warm and brown,
and every time we make love,
I see her bruised hands
reach up like a prayer.
***
Moonsong
My love
shames rivals into oblivion,
obscures them
until all that is left in the sky is my orb,
its one gleaming eyeball
white as sand on foreign beaches,
hollow as dust.
You slid in
to find mountains, craters
and lava spew.
Now you are afraid
of my solitary anger,
the coiled serpent
at the base of my spine.
You are afraid
of its nameless hungers,
its slow uncurling down the length
of your body.
You are afraid
it will stalk you in dreams.
You are afraid
of my haunted face in the night,
my fragilities–
the soft space
at the base of my throat,
the fine line of my collar bone.
You are afraid they will unravel you.
You, who have spent a lifetime
simplifying yourself.
Where am I?
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