Anindita Sengupta

Hiroshima anniversary. Bombs in general, actually. Coincidentally, I saw this production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen over the weekend. I liked the play (and the performance) and it took me back to poems on bombs including Yehuda Amichai’s ‘Diameter of the Bomb’ which I’ve posted earlier. Also, a few days back The Guardian featured war poetry commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy. I’ve been very upset with the poems she’s written since she became poet laureate and the one she’s contributed here didn’t do much for me either. But war poetry is very difficult to do well — the stock images just overflow so easily plus one is battling general fatigue and inurement because they’ve become common on TV news. However, I liked:

Afghanistan
by Paul Muldoon

It’s getting dark, but not dark enough to see
An exit wound as an exit strategy.

In related thoughts, death and grief and so on, something in Jeanette Winterson’s column for July on her blog moved me very much:

So the book finished, I was just moving forwards, when I faced two deaths in the next 4 months: Pat Kavanagh, who had been my agent at the most formative time of my writing life, and with whom I had had a very serious affair. For me, if I love, it doesn’t stop, even if the shape changes. Love is as strong as death.
And then my father…

What a time… so if I say that I am in a good place now, and that everything has changed – both at a deep level, and on the surface… I keep remembering that the the opening line of my book Written on the Body, is ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’

At one time I could relate to the ‘love doesn’t stop’ bit, but over time, I find myself growing more cynical. Does it become easier to start and stop love once you “master the art of losing”, get used to measuring loss? There are people I can imagine loving all my life. But there are enough others who I loved desperately at one time and now feel a vast sense of fatigue and indifference towards. My mother says “what is true for a time is true for that time” — and post-loss fading should not blur or sully that truth. I lean towards this most days. I really like Winterson. I think her writing is luminous. A friend, who had the incredibly good fortune to attend a reading, tells me that she is as impressive in person. And the generosity and faith of this statement, the heart in it, lives up to all that.

I also find it amazing and very admirable when people notice and remark on beauty even when shrouded in grief. When my father died five years ago, I went into a fugue from which I took months to emerge. I don’t remember writing about a single thing, let alone about his death or the grief. Clearly, my coping mechanisms were not very evolved. I think, today, I would try to do it differently, turn more to things of beauty around me, and to writing. Because that is the best way to cope, isn’t it? To continue to do the things you love most, the things that nourish and nurture.

Winterson mentions the lunar eclipse in her column and I’ve been thinking about it too. Firstly, because I love the moon. I like putting it in poems despite being advised not to. I like reading poems about it even though it’s a face pocked with as many cliches as craters. And the actual eclipse may have been a damp squib but I’m excited anyway because Susan Miller, who is my secret vice and superstition(al) weakness tells me that it will bring me good things and make August generally fabulous. I’m not arguing with anyone who says such nice things.

And lastly, here are two poems of mine — one on war and one on the damned moon. They’ve both been published before (Mosaic, Unisun; Not A Muse, Haven Books) and will also be in my first collection City of Water, to be published by Sahitya Akademi some time soon (hopefully this year)…

Homecoming

You cried while telling me–
about the land, packed stone
under your boots, the air
dry as burnt bread, your skin
blistering like volcanic earth,
your head, a numb knob, stunned
by the monotony of the miles

and the village,
its cluster of homes
like a flock of sheep
in the open, its people
dim with terror,
and how you raped
the first woman you saw there,

how she crumpled like wet newspaper,
pounded your back with her hands
as the child in the corner
cried and cried without knowing why,
and crawled about
and knocked over the kerosene stove.

Your tea had gone cold.

I put my hand on the back
of your neck and said
everything would be okay.
I said that I understood.

But even after all these years,
when I close my eyes, hers
swim up, warm and brown,

and every time we make love,
I see her bruised hands
reach up like a prayer.

***

Moonsong

My love
shames rivals into oblivion,
obscures them
until all that is left in the sky is my orb,
its one gleaming eyeball
white as sand on foreign beaches,
hollow as dust.

You slid in
to find mountains, craters
and lava spew.
Now you are afraid
of my solitary anger,
the coiled serpent
at the base of my spine.

You are afraid
of its nameless hungers,
its slow uncurling down the length
of your body.

You are afraid
it will stalk you in dreams.

You are afraid
of my haunted face in the night,
my fragilities–
the soft space
at the base of my throat,
the fine line of my collar bone.

You are afraid they will unravel you.

You, who have spent a lifetime
simplifying yourself.

Jeanette Winterson on poetry:

So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

Let’s not confuse this with realism. The power does not lie directly with the choice of subject or its social relevance – if it did, then everything not about our own contemporary situation would be academic to us, and all the art of the past would be a mental museum. Art lasts because it gives us a language for our inner reality, and that is not a private hieroglyph; it is a connection across time to all those others who have suffered and failed, found happiness, lost it, faced death, ruin, struggled, survived, known the night-hours of inconsolable pain.

and on TS Eliot:

Now, when we are told that everything depends on our “personality”, it seems strange to hear Eliot saying, as he does in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of course only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things.”

Read the full story. Link via Silliman.