Anindita Sengupta

I’ve been reading Poetry in Theory, which is an anthology of essays by poets and philosophers written between 1900 and 2000 and today, I read Eavan Boland’s essay The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma. She talks about how the Irish woman poet had to fight multiple ‘force fields’ every time she sat down to write–’romantic heresy’ on the one hand and separatist feminism on the other. Romantic heresy ’sets limits on what is to count as poetic experience’. It allowed a woman poet to write only about certain things, ‘poetic’ things. She could write about other things only as long as she invested them with sufficient ‘poetic experience’. Feminism liberated her to write about her everyday experiences but prescribed the mood and tone, that of anger. For a poet, both were equally restrictive and stunting.

Boland wrote this essay in 1986-7, twenty years ago and she was speaking very specifically about conditions in Ireland. Some of it may be relevant even now, and even in other places where British poetry is an influence. Or the specific force fields may differ but the general notion may still be relevant.

For example, I can think of two different force fields that affect me, and possibly, other IE poets–what the British and Americans say English poetry should be and what people who write in other Indian languages say poetry should be. The feminist identity does not affect me as much, or not that I’m aware of. I do write about women a lot but that’s never been agenda-driven, more a natural outcome of preoccupations at the time.

The way Boland confronted the dilemma was to look at other art forms that provided a different way of looking. And she found a way to break through in painting:

The precedents for this were in painting rather than poetry…In the genre painters of the French eighteenth century — in Jean Baptiste Chardin in particular — I saw what I was looking for. Chardin’s paintings were ordinary in the accepted sense of the word. They were unglamorous, workaday, authentic. Yet in his work, these objects were not merely described; they were revealed. The hare in its muslin bag, the crusty loaf, the woman fixed between menial tasks and human dreams — these stood out, a commanding text.

This part resonated with me. I love the way Chardin builds tension, even menace, into a collection of mundane things. The cat looks poised to jump in both these pictures and one imagines the chaos that will follow–the kitchen disordered, people screaming, perhaps the meal for a party or big event ruined, fights as a result, domestic squalor. The possibility of so much noise and living in this ordinary kitchen moment.

By the time I started writing, we were no longer mired in romantic heresy (thank god). I think there was a happy mix of ‘poetic’ subjects and the ordinary in our English poetry which meant that I never felt that kind of constraint. The equivalent force field I can think of would be political or socially engaged poetry. As I was telling someone yesterday, I burden under quite a bit of guilt. How can one not bear witness to terrible things? Isn’t that self-indulgent? At the same time, I recently trashed three different poems — on the Gujarat riots, the Bhopal tragedy, and on Kashmiri widows respectively — because I felt they were just not working as art. I was not being able to get into the situations enough to bear witness with any integrity. It’s okay to write shallow poems sometimes. Less okay to write them on the backs of other people’s tragedies.

Another bit that resonated with me:

From painting, I learned something else of infinite value to me. Most young poets have bad working habits. They write their poems in fits and starts, by feast or famine. But painters follow the light. They wait for it and do their work by it. They combine artisan practicality with vision.

The way she uses that is to find a time in her daily routine that would amount to her ‘best light’, and make the most of that time. This is relevant for a lot of people who have to balance day jobs or children with writing. I don’t really have to do that at the moment but I think it’s a good principle to work by in any case. Painterly habits also makes me think of Monet’s painting of the Rouen Cathedral which he did in different lights at different times of the day, to see how it changed. One of the things I’ve been trying is to read / edit a poem at different times in a day and see how that works.

She ends with saying that the ‘dilemma persists; the cross-currents continue.’

What I wished most ardently for myself at a certain stage of my work was that I might find my voice where I had found my vision….Artistic forms are not static. Nor are they radicalised by aesthetes and intellectuals. They are changed, shifted, detonated into deeper patterns only by the sufferings and self-deceptions of those who use them.

I like that last line a lot. Sufferings, but especially self-deceptions.

My poem ‘The City of Water’ is now up at Unsplendid, an online journal of received and nonce forms. It’s a sestina. Do read if you’re interested in that kind of thing. That kind of thing being poetry, sestinas, etc.

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My computer was down for six days and I suffered. I had to use computers in a common room and write by hand the rest of the time. I survived. But I’m glad it’s over.

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I went to see Ron Arad: Restless at the Barbican. Arad is an industrial designer, artist and architect. I don’t know anything about design or architecture really but I found some of it really fascinating / amusing including a strangely-shaped ping pong table which one could actually try out. Some pictures here.

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Before that, Patience Agbabi came to read at the university. She was warm, vibrant, very lovely. Her next collection is a retelling of the Canterbury Tales in poetry. Quite a challenge, I’m guessing. She’s blogged a little bit about it here. She’s also Canterbury Laureate for the year and the audience was quite large. The questions were similar to the ones asked back home — do you write for the page or the stage? what kind of research are you doing for this book? Patricia Debney who is a poet and writer herself and a senior lecture here asked about the fact that she often uses form and whether she finds this restricting. Agbabi said that using form makes things more interesting / challenging because it sets parameters that she has to work within, makes it less amorphous.

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Somebody read my horoscope and it was full of some troubling stuff. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before and I was all shrugs and smiles about it. But I was surprised at how it played on my mind all the way back in the bus from London to Canterbury. Nothing some wine and sleep couldn’t fix. But still.

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I was only reading poetry (and poetry-related essays / criticism) for the first month simply because there’s so much of it available here that I don’t get back home. I started missing prose though so have picked up a novel, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow. It’s quite gripping and very funny in bits. The protagonist is a conman who pretends to be a healer and diviner. I thought this was interesting:

As a novelist, Ngugi says he is very influenced by the “trickster” tradition. “The trickster character appears in tales all over the world,” he explained. “In West Africa it is Anansi the spider. Elsewhere it is Hare or Tortoise.

“The trickster is very interesting because he is always changing. He always questions the stability of a word or a narrative or an event. He is continually inventing and reinventing himself. He challenges the prevailing wisdom of who is strong and who is weak.”

Among other poets, I’ve been reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Some of her poems here.

Given my current situation (and seductions) in life, I thought this was appropriate. It’s been a month since I got to England and barring one week of illness and a few days of being snowed in, it’s been exciting. Actually, the illness and the being snowed in were probably useful because I got some work done.

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Serendipity: A was in Berlin three weeks back and we met at Paris for a very hectic four days. The Louvre is overwhelming in a way that leads to despair. After walking around for about ten hours, we accepted that at least a month was required to see everything. We didn’t have a month. We had just a day and we had to concede defeat. There was so much to love but discovery-wise, Chardin was interesting. The Musee D’Orsay is much more manageable than the Louvre and one of the things I liked most there was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Four Parts of the World. I also loved The Orangerie, which has a much smaller collection but is beautifully located inside the Jardin des Tuileries. The rooms full of Monet’s Nympheas or Water Lilies are exciting and serene at the same time.

Okay, I’m not going into what else we did (the Eiffel, a river tour, walks along the Seine etc) and ate (scallops, escargots, crepes, cheese, pain au chocolat) because this is not a travel guide and Paris is not little talked about. There was also an embarrassing episode at a strip-show where we got conned but I won’t get into that either. I did feel a sort of helplessness about all the things we couldn’t find time for.  Every now and then, we had to remind ourselves that this was Paris, a city that can’t really be enjoyed in a guided-tour, monument-hopping way. We prioritised leisurely walks and meals over one or two important sights and adopted Indian fatalism about visiting again soon.

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British poet Drew Milne came to read at the university. You can see his work here and here. What do you think? I’m still trying to make up my mind about it. Frankly, my first reaction was not intense. But maybe, I’ll change my mind. I don’t know.

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There was a guest lecture about ecopoetries in America. The speaker went on a bit about Americans and their special relationship to their land. It made me think about our relationship to our land. Especially now that we see it disappearing under construction rubble in cities like Bangalore. It also made me think about some of Ramanujan’s poems, especially A River which has these lovely lines:

People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

And these…

He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year

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I haven’t taken too many pictures in London yet, mainly because I’ve been busy doing other things like being completely turned on, obsessed and orgasmic — to continue with the seduction trope — about the Poetry Library. I can’t really explain how moving it is to be in a library devoted to poetry. And they allow you to read and borrow books for free. I know I sound like I want to squeal with joy. But I felt like Gretel finding that magic house made of chocolate and candy in the woods. Minus the witch.

I’ve also been busy visiting more museums, spending time with an old friend and watching movies. Also, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour made my birthday pretty special.

But here is a gull looking at the Thames. Doesn’t he look like he’s thinking hard?

So we are continuing with the cheer. Look, I even changed to a Christmassy theme! I thought this was nice, sort of subtle, unlike the ones which had holly all over them. I heart Wordpress more and more for making it so easy to change look. I dabbled in web design a few years back, even made money from it which qualifies it as a previous profession, and I used to enjoy playing around with typeface and colour. I don’t do that anymore so this is my consolation.

Anyway, over the weekend I watched Cheri, Stephen Frears’ film of Colette’s novella Cheri. I have a weakness for lush period movies and this one is certainly both lush and period — 19th C France and the life of the rich and infamous. Lea, an aging courtesan takes Cheri, the decadent and disaffected son of a friend, under her wing and into her bed. The relationship starts off as a transaction of sorts, the age-old exchange of wisdom and youth, and the two are so cynical about love that they don’t imagine it could happen to them. Against all expectations, they stay together for six years. When he goes off to get married in keeping with his mother’s wishes, they realise they love each other.

The movie has lavish sets and costumes. Rupert Friend looks both callous and vulnerable. Michelle Pfeiffer makes up in style what she lacks in substance, and is patently well-cast as the aging beauty. But it’s no Dangerous Liaisons so don’t expect a huge deal. It feels rushed in the beginning and abrupt at the end because they’ve crammed the entire story of the sequel, The Last of Cheri, into a four-line voiced narration. The lovers are unconvincing in bits and there’s something incomplete about the whole venture. Still, if you have an afternoon to spare and and like period movies, it’s a relaxing sort of watch.

I was struck and a little amused by something while watching the movie. Much of it is about the lovers’ suffering. And because they’re rich, they have the means to ‘cope’ rather well. So here is evidence of my flawed heart: I was finding it hard to sympathise with people who can check into luxurious hotels for weeks to get over someone. I had to remind myself of the debilitating nature of heartbreak, its sapping of colour from everyday things, its dulling. Most likely, the brilliant blue of the Atlantic seemed pale to Lea in her post-love blues. It’s unfair to not extend the same level of human compassion to everyone (including the rich) but I think it does happen sometimes.

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Movies often speed up the pace of books. In one of the essays in Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson talks about how each book has its own pace and good reading means finding the pace of a book and settling into it. Because pace is integral to any text, its deeply unsettling when it’s manipulated too much for adaptation. I think that’s why the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was one of the more satisfying ones because at least they gave the story enough time. Also Jane Eyre, which I watched twice for its gothic mood and for Timothy Dalton as Rochester.

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Speaking of hot men, have you seen Captain Kirk make beat poetry of Palin’s speech? Some of my happiest memories of childhood include ‘Captain Curd’ as I inexplicably called him. I was always torn about who I wanted to grow up and marry more: him or Mr Spock. Twenty years and the Star Trek movie later, I’ve decided on Spock but it was real close.

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.

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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.

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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.

I’ve also been reading Kay Ryan. I like the way she packs in a tight, focused thought in such a compact space. Some examples: ‘Carrying a Ladder‘, ‘Flamingo Watching‘ and ‘Repetition‘.

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, which is 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’.

On the surface, Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is about a bunch of tangled relationships. At the centre is Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a man who’s comically deluded about a vast number of things in his life. He’s sleeping with smart and sexy Georgie, a young academic who pretends to be much freer and easy-going than she is actually is. His wife Antonia is beautiful and elegant. Overall, he’s quite smug. Except, all kinds of things are going on around him that he’s unaware of, and as the novel progresses and more characters enter the picture, it’s hard to keep track of who’s fucking whom. So I can imagine the poor man’s bafflement.

But of course there’s much more to this than sexual shenanigans. The book is really about power and information, how closely the two are related, how they are exchanged between humans, and how quickly, surreptitiously and unexpectedly these exchanges can flip lives around. There are also huge Freudian subtexts with Oedipal instincts and incest forming an important part of the relationships. The book’s also extremely funny in bits.  Murdoch uses irony and farce to deal with Martin’s predicaments and despite the fact that she touches on infidelity, childlessness, depression and suicide, the book is quite entertaining. I would recommend it for a lazy afternoon. It’s quite a romp.

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Phyllis Bose did an incredible job bringing Gertrude Stein alive yesterday at Ranga Shankara. Her dramatic monologue Gertrude ran for nearly two hours. It had a simple set dominated by reproductions of famous paintings done by Bose herself and there was little movement. Yet she managed to hold interest. Part of the credit must go to the script, carefully woven together from Stein’s own texts and notes but a lot of it was the energy and intimacy she brought to the telling. The focus of the script was Gertrude’s famous friendship with Picasso but there was lots of other stuff in there–insights into Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) and Alice Toklas (her partner), anecdotes about the Saturday Salons, and Stein’s views on life and art. Bose was funny and convincing and, quite often, transporting. It was a pleasure.

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Afterward, some of us went to Koshy’s where among other things, we talked of how the place elicits such extreme reactions from people. Some love it and others just don’t take to it at all. Often, the same things about it bring out such diverse reactions — the ancient and faintly dingy air of the place, the lacklustre furnishings, the lack of general hipness, the sense that someone built it a long, long time ago and then forgot to do anything for it ever again. This time-warped air is exactly what some of us love about it. It lets us feel we’ve stepped into a different world, a world where things never change. It makes us feel secure. Also, the sheer variety of human type and activity at these tables — people talking, staring, drinking, gorging, playing some board game, having meetings, sharing quizzes, discussing art — is terribly interesting. Some people like these things. Others don’t. Everyone likes the potato smileys though.

As an aside, Gertrude talked about identity and memory and what happens to them in the face of eternity. I think Koshy’s was rather apt in the circumstances.

This is a picture I took some time back of the place.

Should audiences refrain from booing?

Etiquette is not, these days, a growth industry. The Internet is inundated with bile in the name of free expression. Television reality shows encourage a thumbs-up, thumbs-down mentality. The allure of instantaneous reaction makes Twitter the talk of the town. Meanwhile, the economic meltdown is melting down manners: More than ever, people who pay good money to see a show feel they have every right to express righteous anger.

Art isn’t easy, but booing is. A mind-closing activity, it tends to be the expression of rigidity in the face of invention. Artists are almost never booed for incompetence (no one can deny the craft of Freyer’s stagecraft). They are booed for intent and out of partisanship. I don’t necessarily advocate acclaim for nothing more than mindless effort, but in a lifetime of attending the performing arts, I have encountered an insignificant number of truly insincere artists.

Not everything works, but at least in the noncommercial realm of the concert stage and the opera house, I credit nearly everyone with trying to say something. And when they actually manage to, the meaning may not immediately sink in.

Booing may be pointless but I’m all for honest panning. Art isn’t easy, true. It’s not meant to be. But is sincerity enough to merit applause, let alone money? I don’t see why I should credit “nearly everyone with trying to say something”. In poetry, we are repeatedly told that it is clearly not enough to just say something. What matters is how you say it. Why should this be different for the performing arts?

In Bangalore, I’ve seen disastrous plays that were touted as good. There are times when I’ve cared less about the money spent and more about how I’m going to make it through the next hour or so before they open the doors and let me out. (It’s difficult to walk out midway at Ranga Shankara though in situations of extreme boredom, I’ve even done that.) Few things are as tortuous as a play with banal lines, flat humour or terrible acting. Being stung to death by bees, for instance.

If the state of literary reviews is not top notch, the state of theatre reviewing in the English language newspapers is even worse. Most feature supplements in the city have degenerated to celebrity-obsessed rags. There are few play reviews and most are written by rookie reporters who know little about art or performance or performing arts. Under these circumstances honest audience reaction is not only healthy, it’s necessary.

Having said this, I must raise a thumb (in typical trigger-happy fashion) for Butter and Mashed Bananas, which I finally managed to catch. They had a clear premise and they managed to communicate it. Their funny lines were actually funny. There was movement and energy. And oh yes, a script that actually seemed to have some thought behind it. All good things.

Fairy Tales and Legends at this year’s World Sand Sculpture Festival. India’s there too.

But my favourite is Gulliver. I love how they’ve managed to make his face so expressive.

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Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Nayara Noor with ‘Aaj Bazaar Mein’.

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And the World Digital Library recently went online, which “makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world”. Basically, lots of gorgeous manuscripts and maps and other ancient things.

I saw it last week and thought it was very good. Some loose notes (may contain spoilers):

- I like that there is very little gore in the movie. Riots have been done so often in movies that many of the images have come to be, awful as this may sound, hackneyed. The screaming mobs, the fire, the puddles of blood. Here, she makes a much stronger statement by staying away from that and tackling the aftermath. The quiet devastation wreaked in individual lives has a stronger impact. In the opening scene, the pile of bodies mechanically dumped by a truck (whose driver you can’t see) underlines the dehumanization that takes place during a riot.

- I also liked the scene in which Munira (Shahana Goswami) is gathering up burnt vessels from her kitchen and methodically throwing them out. Her house has been burned and what choice does she have but to clean up? But this simple act of cleaning up, familiar to so many women, now carries so much loss.

- In one scene, a character is killed just when you thought he would be safe. The act of killing is so deliberate and yet so casual, so happenstance in a way. The death almost seems like a grotesque mistake. You want him to step back a few paces, choose a different place to hide, be somewhere else. As if he is an ant and what one is looking at is the simple, un-meditated act of someone stepping on him in error. Except that this is not the case. Firstly, he is not an ant. He is a man who has been made into an ant, forced to fear the boot at every step. And secondly, the boot is actively looking for him. So his chances are nil in any case. He cannot run simply because there is no place to go.

- I think she’s explored well the issue of confinement or the sense of being trapped inside or outside of systems (or in anarchy) not of your making. Confinement takes many forms. Munira has to stay holed up in her friend’s room, unable to go home because the police are outside her home. People must stay indoors during curfew or risk being hunted down by the cops. But more subtly, Sameer (Sanjay Suri) must keep his mouth shut about his surname and hope his first name gets him through. A Hindu housewife (Deepti Naval) must suffer the guilt of letting a Muslim woman die because she couldn’t let her into her house. Mohsin, a Muslim child who’s been orphaned by the riots, must choose between the freedom to look for his parents and the rehab camp.

- The Hindu housewife is also caught between her own conscience which she assuages by burning herself with driblets of oil, and her crude husband’s violence. In multiple scenes, she is shown looking out of the grills of a window, her helplessness and her failure circumscribed by the bars.  When she meets Mohsin, he represents a chance at redemption. She gently brings him into the house, lingering at the threshold, easing him in. But he is frightened when he witnesses her husband’s violence and leaves. He would rather flee violence, and the fragile love that he receives is not enough to keep him. Besides, he wants his real parents. Not that easy to replace.

- I like that there was no neat, hopeful message. Mohsin walks into the rehab camp, walks through masses of people. Some children are playing with marbles. They invite him to join them. I cringed wondering if she was going to tie it up with a kitschy picture of kids playing. But he refuses. He walks to a corner and sits down by himself. He is still lost and grieving. And it will take more than a bunch of marbles to distract him. Yes, eventually he will probably move on. But not yet. Not just yet.