The harbour is beautiful — fishing nets and rope, blue boats, mossy ramps leading down to the water, huge bags of whelk shells outside the whelk shops. Here’s a picture of whelks being steamed to take off their shells easily. Winter is not the best time to be there because many places are closed during the week. And I had gone on a Monday, which is the day the famous Crab and Winkle is closed. I did go and stare at the offerings in the fish market though. It was a moment of longing. It must have been my Bengali blood singing. Or something like that.

I’m fascinated by fishing nets for some reason. And there were plenty of those around. I won’t inflict all the photos on you but here’s one. Aren’t they pretty?

Some more photos from around the harbour.

Weak with hunger at 5.30 pm after not having eaten all day (having been lost in photographs and seagulls and so on), I wandered into a Mr Fish and Chips. The man behind the counter was from apna Punjab.

It was a bit of a shocker, frankly, especially when he asked me to speak to him in Hindi, why don’t you? I ate my cod and chips while listening to sikh kirtans in the background. It was an odd coincidence because the last time I went traveling in India, it was to Amritsar and the music instantly transported me to the Golden Temple. I had not expected to be reminded of the Golden Temple while eating fish and chips in a seaside town in England.  Anyway next time, I’ll have a more authentic experience eating oysters.

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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

*

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?

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/02/the-seductive-snowball/feed/ 5 http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/02/the-book/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/02/the-book/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:30:48 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=2160

So yes, City of Water is out. It’s my first collection of poems and do write to me if you’re interested in a copy. Or you could look for it in the Sahitya Akademi shop in your city. Under the matter-of-fact tone, there’s a swell in my throat. It could be happiness and not the remnants of a sore throat. One can’t be absolutely sure though.

The cover photo is by Sohrab Hura, one of last year’s winners of the Toto Funds the Arts award for photography. I really like his work in general and this photo in particular because it has crows by the water, the ocean to be exact, flying into the wind. Are they a murder? I’m not sure. But they are a certain number of crows in flight and crow flight is a measure of things. Then there’s the thing that they are flying into the wind. Walking into the wind is difficult for us so we may impose a connotation of struggle to the picture. But  for some birds, it’s what helps them fly.

The glib assumption that life’s difficulties lead directly to mental illness is a problem on two main fronts. Firstly, it simplifies this extremely complex field, and thereby acts as a barrier to understanding specific cases of mental illness, diverting expertise and resources away from those who need them. Secondly, it contributes to a brittle and one-sided understanding of normal human emotion, which implies that happiness is the emotional norm and all deviations from this should be pathologised as illness.

And:

….an attempt to regulate women’s emotions according to how they ‘should’ be feeling is profoundly unhelpful. Most would agree that it is unreasonable to expect that a woman who has had an abortion will be ‘happy’ as a result. Abortion is not a choice women make to improve their lives, but a resolution to the unexpected problem of unintended or unwanted pregnancy – the least bad option in the circumstances.

If the negative emotions that may follow this event are pathologised as markers for mental illness rather than accepted as normal and understandable reactions, this de-contextualises women’s experiences and dehumanises their emotional reactions. The question should not be whether a woman feels happy or sad immediately following an abortion, because all women may feel differently and there is no ‘right’ way of feeling. Rather, the question should be: was that decision the best one for her to make in terms of the rest of her life?

The decision being hers to make. All this should be easy to understand. Why is it not? The reason I’m linking to this is because even though abortion is legal in India, social myths and attitudes persist. I once had a conversation with someone about this. I asked what he thought happened to women who have abortions. I was very young at the time so the question was a bit clumsy but he was a bit older and his answer was ‘they probably become mentally disturbed, commit suicide maybe.’ Right.

I don’t blame him for this view really because it’s symptomatic of the larger ideas drilled into many of my generation. Men, especially, often have wide-eyed and hypersensitive ideas about what it means to get through certain tough life events. I’m not sure where they get these ideas but I think it would help if they had actual conversations with women who’ve been through them. There is a fine balance between diminishing someone’s pain and defining them by that pain. Neither extreme does a woman any favours.

This Ultra Violet post talked about how we should be able to talk about abortion more openly (though not casually). This is necessary, I think, in pin-pricking some notions or at least discussing them. Achieving this in actuality is far more difficult because it remains a society where sex and sexual mistakes are quite stigmatised. Some women may not want to talk about something that was probably traumatic or emotional but others would not have a problem if they were assured there’d be no backlash. Like a host of cyber-stalkers who think they’re ‘loose’, for example.

Things may have changed in the new gen of Indians (those in their twenties now) but clearly, the assumption that someone who undergoes such a ‘terrible thing’ really has no way to live a ‘normal’ life ever again is/was quite common. There are levels and levels, different reactions and a lot depends on what attitudes shaped you before and the coping mechanisms you had access to after. The one-size-fits-all thing is so ridiculous that it’s surprising feminists have to keep refuting this.

So is the belief that you’re meant to be feeling whoop-dee all the time or you need psychological fixing. Frankly, I would find permanent happiness dreadfully boring. Not to mention, it wouldn’t help the writing any.

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.

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 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!

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/01/ostrich-resolution/feed/ 8 http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/12/ruth-padel-reading/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/12/ruth-padel-reading/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:36:03 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=1943

Toto Funds the Arts
in association with

The British Council
& the Association of British Scholars

is delighted to invite you

to Ruth Padel’s reading of her poetry and fiction.

Ruth will also be in conversation with poet-novelist Anjum Hasan.

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1

Date and time: Friday, 8 January 2010 at 7.00 pm

Coffee/tea and refreshments will be served from 6.30 pm onwards

Ruth Padel, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, is a prize-winning British poet. Her seventh poetry collection, Darwin – A Life in Poems, is an intimate verse biography of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, bringing out connections between his personal life and his work. She has written an acclaimed book on tiger conservation, Tigers in Red Weather, for which she explored forests in South East Asia, Sumatra, Russia, China, Bhutan and Nepal as well as India. She is visiting India on a British Council Darwin Now grant, to complete research for her first novel, which will focus on king cobra conservation. She will read from Darwin – A Life in Poems, Tigers in Red Weather, and her forthcoming novel, Where the Serpent Lives. To find out more about Ruth and her work, visit www.ruthpadel.com

Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels Neti, Neti (2009) and Lunatic in my Head (2007), and the book of poems Street on the Hill (2006). Her poems, short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies, magazines and journals in India and abroad. She is Books Editor, The Caravan.

Annie Finch on how women poets changed in their attitude towards each other:

Jane Dowson and Gilbert and Gubar have pointed out that for generations women poets renounced and ignored the women poets before them. During the last decade that pattern seemed to change as, in new physical, textual, and virtual spaces, women poets increasingly took control of the development and maintenance of the canon and poetic tradition.

And Ron Silliman on how the technology changed access, tools and poet-reader relations:

The poet’s relationship to his or her audience is undergoing a profound transformation. The poet’s relationship to the institutions and even to the tools of her or his practice is doing likewise. Everything is up for grabs.

Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this….What’s apparent is that (a) this joyride isn’t over, and (b) we’re all in this together.