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.