Anindita Sengupta

There was an element of theatre in Ruth Padel’s reading of her poems. Not only did she bring alive the narrative charge of her poems but she also did different voices for the characters in her poems, usually Darwin or his wife since she was mostly reading from Darwin: A Life in Poems. The book is an unusual and ambitious project but the poems she read were not groaning under the weight of the lofty idea. They were tender, humourous, down-to-earth, and they made Darwin more human which is not easy to do with legends. Some are available here.

Disappointingly (but expectedly), the Q&A session after the reading had few questions on poetry. Darwin, spirituality and conservation vied for attention, and obviously more people are interested in these than in poetry. I think there were one or two interesting questions about whether she would ever turn (return) from science towards poetry. The unsaid words here were ‘real’, ‘normal’, something like that. I may be paraphrasing this badly but I think the attempt was to understand whether she would move away from the specific themes she’s been attached to so far, whether she would ‘free’ her poetry to go where it will.

So is themed poetry restricted in some way? Is poetry directed towards a cause glancing away from other areas of truth it could discover? On the other hand, judges on award panels seem to think that big concerns are important for poetry. Re: Judge’s comments on Philip Gross winning the TS Eliot Prize for The Water Table and Roddy Lumsden’s comments on that.

Does anyone else have a problem with this preference for themed books as opposed to miscellanies. Surely that’s an American thing, arc and concept and all? I’m happy with either, but claiming it as a strength which goes towards a prize win is odd, no?

Ditto with ‘big concerns’ – are we giving prizes for ‘big concerns’ now? Big concerns, whatever they are, are great, but surely not a reason to award a prize?

So which side of the fence are you on?

Back to Padel: some of us got to meet her the next day for an informal discussion and lunch,  a generous three hours during which the questions were more focused. We talked about some nitty-gritty stuff like craft and performance but it didn’t graduate to a very evolved discussion on poetics. I’m not sure why. The time was probably short and the group a bit diverse (playwrights, fiction-writers, poets). She clearly believes in modernist ideas of compression, avoiding abstractions and so on. I would’ve been interested to know how she responds to poetry written in a very different aesthetic. Or what she feels about Language poetry, which is more recent.

Anyway, relatedly, I’ve started my three months of poetry-and-not-much-else at the University of Kent. The room is all tidy lines, the air outside is crisp and cold, my fingers have not frozen yet. The snow has stopped but there are some meager patches of it lying around. The quiet is so big I could float in it.

I’m thrilled to have access to books we normally don’t get in India. The high point of my day was reading Don Paterson’s Nil Nil at an English pub outside the cathedral. The picture of the cathedral is a bit blurry because my hands had gone numb in the cold.

Some time back, a Facebook friend posted a link to the Poetry Foundation article on the decade in poetry and commented that it should have been called a decade in American poetry since it didn’t reflect British or Irish poetry.

Or Indian or African or Caribbean, I pointed out feeling a little miffed, perhaps unjustly so since there’s much more English poetry happening in Britain than in India. But it got me thinking about the surfeit of discussion available to us about what’s happening in the west poetrywise. In contrast, there’s very little writing or discussion on what’s happening here. There are the introductions to the anthologies edited by Parthasarthy and Mehrotra. Online, PIW has some essays. Bruce King’s essay talks about Indian poetics with regard to a number of poets right up to Arun Kolatkar and Meena Alexander. Other than this, I haven’t come across much. Muse India’s latest issue focused on Indian English writing but there was no essay on Indian English poetry as such and the editorial gave suitably vague nods to the fact that Indian English poetry is “alive and kicking”. That’s good news but in which direction are the feet pointing?

All of this is a bit limited compared to the vast gigabytes of west-centric lists, reviews and manifestos we can consume.

Partly — and only partly — the reason for this lacuna is that the world of Indian English poetry is so small and incestuous. Nobody wants to disagree with each other on what constitutes good poetry, or even poetry for that matter. The small and incestuous problem exists everywhere to some extent. A few months ago, there was an avid discussion on Harriet about reviews, the necessity of truth and so on. It’s hard to tell a fellow poet that you think their work sucks. It’s even harder in our situation when there are fewer of us. But forget giving nasty reviews, we* seem reluctant to talk about what we think about poetry even in general terms, its purpose, means of production, craft and so on. This is despite all the freedom the Internet allows. Maybe we should have a site where people can post anonymous opinions about these things.

A few days back I wrote a snarky post pointing to a poem published on the front page of The Hindu Literary Review. An hour later, I was guilt-ridden because I’m rarely nasty in public. I removed the post. Of course, by this time super-efficient feed readers had picked it up and some people read it anyway. Some people agreed with me. Some said I should put my post back online. One reader argued with me because he liked the poem and that I should’ve explained why I didn’t like it. I realised that he was probably right. If I was stepping into choppy waters, I needed to wade in a bit more.

I couldn’t bring myself to post the full critique that I wrote quite painfully. It seemed too rude, even cruel. So the culture of politeness clearly has me in its grip. But in a nutshell: the thought does not work for me. At its worst, it subsides into a public service message against using your cell phone while driving. There are hints of interesting themes in there but they’re never fully developed and buried too deep in ugly lines, banal words and cliche. Cheesy horror film images like “statued stalkers” do not help. Plus I do not like poems that say “Slap!” to convey the sound and sense of a slap.

I’ll also say that Eunice D’Souza’s collected poems Necklace of Skulls has just been published and Dilip Chitre died last month and deserves to be remembered. There is no lack of good poems (and poets) to choose from if HLR has decided to encourage poetry. I hope they won’t stop publishing poetry on the front page of Literary Review. I hope I’ll like the next one more.

I also think we should be less attached to individual poems we write and less ‘careful’ about critiquing other poems. Though they’re often compared to babies, they’re not really. You can’t revise a baby’s nose (oh well, now you can but you know what I mean) and you don’t have hundreds of them. A poem, one can revise. And since hundreds are expected, we’re going to keep trying to get it right. We may as well tell the truth about our relentless progeny. It will help.

*By ‘we’, I mean my generation of Indian English poets.

…I’ve had a good year. According to Facebook, that is. But FB also gives you the option of choosing the status messages you want to display because not all of them will fit into this collage. An interesting exercise in choice. What we want to remember. What we want others to remember about us.

I found myself leaving out a lot of laments about lack of sleep and insomnia; some about being sick (it seems that I announce all my illnesses); messages celebrating or mourning public events like Carol Ann Duffy’s laureateship, Chitre’s death, Bhopal and 26/11; lots and lots of links to books, poems and movies. I tried to make sure the happy news items of the year — my book, my travels, the UV relaunch and the CWIT fellowship to Kent — stayed in. I felt manipulative doing this but remembered that the online persona is frequently manipulative, a careful sorting and choosing of the selves we want to reveal or highlight. Also, like most other FB widgets, this is an exercise in self-indulgence. Tech-savvy nostalgia. If I was sitting on my verandah with a glass of wine and getting soppy about the year, these are the things I’d talk about — the warm stuff, the successes, the interesting and extraordinary.

In a nod to honesty, I left in some messages on insomnia, deadlines and the nitty-gritty of writing. Also, the death of a friend. Because yes, 2009 was about those things as well, and in the daily churn, more about them than about magical mystery tours.  Still, all in all, a good year.

Revisit notions of beauty and ugliness–all notions, actually–plus get my head out of the sand and not plunge it back there again. This is the closest I’m going to come to a new year resolution. Of sorts (, out of sorts). Last year, it was consistency and balance and I’m happy to reminisce that I’ve almost been successful. When I’ve eaten, drunk or slept too much (or too little), slept and woken at odd hours, been workaholic or too-lazy, been extreme in other words, at least I’ve pursued one end consistently for many days. And then the opposite for an equal number of days. Which balances it out in the end, I suppose.

So there it is for 2010: revisiting and clear-eyedness. This ostrich, which is ugly or beautiful depending on how you look at it and does not have its head buried in the sand, is a mascot.

Oh, and I hope y’all noticed how I’ve done some dusting and cleaning around here with categories and links. This look, I think, will stay for a while. I’ve been playing around with it too much and there’s no reason to give up on consistency just because the year’s over.

Happy 2010!