Anindita Sengupta

Three poems are up at pyrta journal. I haven’t been submitting for the longest time so am pleased to break that hiatus with pyrta which is easily one of the prettiest journals I’ve seen. It’s run and edited by poet Janice Pariat.

Also in the issue: Nicholas Wong’s ‘All About My Mother’ strikes goose-pimply levels of sadness, longing and shame. And Abhimanyu Singh’s Amsterdam poems are haunting me. (I’ve been trying to do a series on Durban and god, it’s hard to get the essence of a place.)  I also like the photo essay Gods Lonely People by Nishant Ohri. There is one picture of a boy blowing a bubble gum bubble (is that what it’s called?) with a distant, pensive expression on his face. I like. Go check it out.

Totally fab journal Pratilipi has now started their own publishing house. See Pratilipi Books for a list of their books which include three Swedish novels translated into English and Home From a Distance, an anthology of 19 Hindi poets translated into English. The book covers look very snazzy too.

Kuzhali Manickavel on a subject close to my heart:

It saddens me to say that I speak from experience when I say that sometimes I would see these “mistakes” and turn into the Benevolent EnglishSpeaking Despot. Benevolent EnglishSpeaking Despot royally points out the mistake even though nobody asked. This is often done with a very Jesus on the cross air, like ‘forgive them father, they know not that their English is all rong but don’t afraid babay, I fix everything because I am awesome’. The Benevolent EnglishSpeaking Despot then writes out in nice, big letters the right way (AFTER taking picture of the ohsoprecious English to post on blog or generally show everyone because it’s so lololo and also proof that we hast been among the great unwashed and its unwashed English).

I suspect a lot of people are not aware of what they’re doing when they’re doing this. I’ve been there too.

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City of Water has been reviewed in Asian Cha. I’m very pleased because Asian Cha is a nice place to be and because I’ve been very lazy about sending the book to people and this is one time I actually made the effort.

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Uncle Pai died. Amar Chitra Katha comics were really my first insight into so many things–apsaras, talking animals, the perfect body, Buddha, god in general. And love. Don’t forget love.

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On handwriting and fonts, Nell Boechenstein at The Millions:

Pens are often considered a fetish item of neurotics with disposable income, but a Mont Blanc sensibility is not my point. Despite being reliably cash-poor, writer-types are often as particular about their pens as they are about their fonts. (When Helvetica—the trend, the font, the film, the MoMA exhibition—was the rage, Slate published a piece asking writersabout their favorite fonts and those queried had cultivated preferences at the ready; Courier, mostly, since those writers who may not fetishize the pen fetishize the typewriter instead.)

Confession: my handwriting sucks (at least I think so and I’m hoping someone will convince me otherwise) and I hate writing by hand. This leads to intense fear that I’m not really a writer because real writers, you know, they love pens.

I do love fonts. But even here, I’m commitment-shy so I like to change from time to time. I like serif fonts like Times New Roman or Book Antiqua while writing and Arial (10 pt) while editing. I switch back to a serif font for the final draft. For blog posts, I love Georgia which is convenient since that’s the default WordPress font.

Gosh, how nerdy is this post? But yeah, just to finish, I’ve been through my Courier phase and exactly for the reason that it looks like typewriter font.

On the subject of nerdiness, I recently discovered I have become more short-sighted and I found a strand of white in my hair. I also recently had a birthday. How is someone to cope with such profusion? No really, it has been all upheaval and discovery in the last few months. What is helping now is flower season. Look at the gorgeousity here. My street has some Golden Trumpet and some jasmine. They’re lovely. It’s been raining a little and in the early morning and the evenings when the air is cool, the world seems soft.

It’s interesting that this tuesday’s poem at Tuesday Poem (link in sidebar) is ‘Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree’ by Sarah Lindsay:

He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming

of a tree, dreaming of a tree

and its sound like a hush,

and it seemed he could open

his mouth when he woke and make the others

know something they didn’t already know…

Let me exclaim a little bit about some joyful things that have happened in town recently. First, there was Swar Thounaojam’s Fake Palindromes which premiered here. Swar is part of a writers critique group I belong to and it was such fun to see her writing come alive on stage — and in such surprising, unusual ways. Catch it when it happens next or if it comes to your town. The name comes from Andrew Bird’s song of the same name. Swar is a huge fan of Bird and has inspired me to start listening to him as well.

The Toto Annual Awards happened earlier this month and the English creative writing awards  went to Deepika Arwind and Ishita Basu Mallik. Both received the awards for their poetry so despite all the lamentations about poetry being dead, people continue to write it. Some damn good poetry too. Also, read Eunice D’Souza’s piece in Mumbai Mirror on an Audience of One.

Several centuries ago, the classical Sanskrit poet Bhavabhuti understood the concept of an audience of one.  He wrote, “If learned critics publicly deride/My verse, well, let them. Not for them I wrought/. One day a man shall live to share my thought:/For time is endless and the world is wide.”

I find all this moaning about the “decline of audiences for poetry” a little mystifying. I don’t believe it is true because there are so many people creating an interest in poetry: through workshops in schools, writing workshops, the internet, festivals, and so on.  I feel that those who do the moaning don’t see the contradictions in what they are doing. Instead of using endless words and newsprint to moan about decline, they could write about a poem or poet in a way that draws in readers.

And Kent Johnson in Almost Island on ’33 Rules of Poetry for poets under 23′:

5. Ask yourself constantly: What is the worth of poetry? When you answer, “It is nothing,” you have climbed the first step. Prepare, without presumption, to take the next one.

This year, they also introduced a Kannada creative writing award which I think is super. Full results here.

East Bangalore finally got its own full-fledged theatre with Jagriti opening its doors. I feel sentimental about this because I lived in east Bangalore for a decade and had to make a two-hour drive every time I wanted to watch a play. So even though I was quite meh about the opening play — Anita Nair’s adaptation of her own novel, Mistress (yes, good grief) — I am happy that Jagriti is there and that my mother and other people who live that side will be able to watch plays easily. It’s funny living in a growing city. Every now and then, something happens that makes you jump and squeal. A theatre in the eastern suburbs is definitely one of those moments.

I went for an evening around the Kabir Project at the Suchitra Film and Drama Academy. Writer Linda Hess talked about her book Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Poetry of Kabir (Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2009). I’ll try to write more about the book later but what was striking about the event was the importance of the music — there was a lot of lovely singing — and how easily Kabir’s work gives itself to music. How much of today’s poetry would, I wonder. I’m not talking about concrete poetry and other types of poetry that are clearly not written to be musical. But even lyric poetry.

Hess talked about the concept of singing from a place of formlessness, ‘shunya’ or emptiness. More about this later, if I understand it a little better, and if newfound blog-zeal doesn’t disappear. UR Ananthamurthy, who was in conversation with Hess, read a poem he wrote after meeting Kumar Gandharva for the first time. The poem was about the singer eating a hearty meal right after singing. Watching him, the poet  realises that he needs to do this to ‘come down’ to normal state. This implies that he is in a transcendent state while singing. There are references to divinity as well in the poem. URA talks about God having become a ‘tenant’ in KG for that time. Some people have a problem with this general idea of creativity being attached to God or being divine in some way. What do you think about it?

Okay, and the Attakalari Biennial 2011 is here. Full schedule here.