Anindita Sengupta

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.

The toxic seethes. Lip wound,
split bone and the blood brays
at noon. A tourist walks in, opens
his mouth. Like a snake swallowing frog,
he can devour history whole.
The children are patient as gods,
watching grey noise up red,
listening to metal innards clink
through the night, shrill kingdoms
of sound. They stitch gapes
opening in skin. Their hands are tidy
with practice. Down here, we’re not tested
for rot. The barometer
only measures what it must—
the length of memory, the depth
of forgetting. Watch for the stampeded step
at the entrance, the broken tooth
glinting in mud. These
are your souvenirs. Pack flesh
tightly in boxes. Face the click
without trembling. See,
here is your grin
turning to grimace.
Here is your face
filling the hole.

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Because we are all Bhopali. Don’t forget.

of mine is up at Poetry Friends. Do read.

Swim across this strip of sea.

After all, what separates us
is brief as an eyelash–
only continent, only colour,
only language,

and a zone marked
by the thin, thin fingers
of a clock.

I’m back and still reluctant to sink into regular life. How wonderful it would be if life was a poetry festival! But then, anything permanent loses charm, I suppose. Anyway, longer posts about Poetry Africa and Kruger National Park coming up soon but in the meantime, two bits of news that made me happy as soon as I got home:

Ultra Violet has been featured in the feminist magazine make/shift. Mostly good stuff but they have said the site would benefit from a greater variety of voices, something I entirely agree with. So please, please, spread the word and ask people (men and women) to contribute with their stories, essays, poems, vignettes, whatever. No bars whatsoever. I received a copy of the magazine and it looks really good. Do consider subscribing.

Also, my poem ‘The Kitchen God’s Mistress’ has been republished in the latest issue of A cappella Zoo. (It’s been published previously in the anthology Not A Muse by Haven Books). I don’t think I’m going to send it anywhere else so here it is:

The Kitchen God’s Mistress

Did you always smell of cinnamon?

It reminded me of a long-ago kitchen.
Mustard seeds. Mutton crackle. Hot air
condensed on window mesh while I shelled peas
on stone cool enough for sleep.
I should have barred the doors

when you nuzzled in
but a weakness for spices and memory
stopped me. Besides, I glimpsed
your feet, smooth and brown, with an arch
I could fit into. The night you drowned,
I was deveining prawns and drinking beer. I thought

it would be like any other night: we’d chew
slowly, listen to the cicadas sing. Later,
they would leap indoors and crawl
under our bed where we lay side by side
in the dark, entering each other’s dreams.

I was so happy watching the kitchen
simmer in pools of light. How could I know
they would gulp you down without a ripple?
And who would have thought you’d be so
hard to pull out? You always looked so light
with your thin beard and gossamer cap.

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