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When we moved into this ground-floor apartment, the garden was overgrown with weeds and invasive plants that had been given the run of the place. Singonium, Peace Lily (which a lot of people mix up with Anthurium) and Snake Plant (Sanseviera) are all lovely but not when they’re filling every nook and crevice and threatening to choke the trees.  Okay, scratch that. I just don’t like the Snake Plant and that’s that. But for those who do, it is apparently one of the easiest to grow and hardest to kill, grows indoors and outdoors and requires practically no care. And it’s also called Mother-In-Law’s Tongue. Ahem. I think it can look quite nice when grown in containers but it was such a wild, overgrown thing all over one section of the outside garden that I’m now a bit sick of it. Taking out these guys is not fun. They multiply through rhizomes and tubers; long, crawling bits above ground and below. Anyway, I dug them up and planted flowering plants — Marigolds, Dahlia, Coxcomb, Allamanda, Shasta Daisy, Gladiolus, Passion Flower and Jasmine. Will post pictures when they flower. In the meantime, here is a picture of the Snake Plant in case anyone feels enthused.

Credit: Firehow.com

In another bed, I planted something I really do like. Hydrangia is nature’s litmus test–the flowers are pink or blue depending on whether the soil is acidic or alkaline. When I got this one, it was a tiny plant and I waited about three months for it to flower. I find these flowers very beautiful and was very taken by how in Sikkim, they grow wild on the side of the road. It needed similar conditions of cool weather and rain in Bangalore before it bloomed. But otherwise, it’s been a very non-fussy plant. To its right, I’m trying to grow a Mexican Flame Vine which has brilliant orange flowers when it blooms. Let’s see how that goes.

And here are red chrysanthemums or ‘mums’. It was another wet day so the soil was slushy but look at the flowers!

And this is a foliage plant that grows to an impressive height and really adds a tropical sort of niceness. The Dracaena Marginata or Madagascar Dragon Tree. It removes formaldehyde from the air and cleans it up s o it’s good to have around for more than just eye appeal. Mine is in a large container and nearly four feet tall.

Here is one I got on a sunny day which is the only kind of day on which African Marigolds look good. (They also look good on cloudy days.) On wet days, they look raggedy and dirty because the flowers rot easily. Marigolds are again hugely easy to grow which is why I chose them as part of my beginner plant course. I’ve heard some people spurn them in terms of landscape design because of the association with religious rituals or pujas. I don’t give a damn about that and I think they look pretty. Plus they repel aphids which is a big plus for me since I’m trying to be as organic as possible and not using any chemical pesticides.

As an aside, I also found this poem on Marigolds by Australian poet Rae Desmond Jones. And look at what he says in the last few verses: (the line breaks are refusing to cooperate here so please read the entire thing at the site I’ve linked to.)

but
speak the thing in any of
its parts to

suggest the ambiguous &
undefinable marvel of
the thing which

is not any one
of its definable effects
before the winter

sets in out in
the garden & someone
comes along to rip out

the marigolds because
he hopes that if he
plants roses

three feet apart then
he can order & control
in neat manured

little squares
the power of growth.

So much of gardening is about that really, the urge to impose order on that which is not within our control—nature. And here is another poem about Marigolds which I quite liked.

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In other news, I’ve been writing for a weekly column for the Bangalore Mirror again and here’s the latest piece which is sort of related to gardening and my adventures with making compost.

Beware of manifestos: they are the death of poetry.

A poet is a citizen, like any other. One of the obligations of citizenship is participation in the political process.

Place: Goobe’s Book Republic, Church Street

Date: Saturday, July 10.

Time: 5 pm

Do come!

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Also, three poems of mine, ‘Dolls’, ‘The Mouth’ and ‘The Vivid Stream’ were published in Asia Writes. Read them here.

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And Deepa Ganesh’s interview of me in The Hindu

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ps: What dreadful, short posts. What laziness. I’m going to do better soon.

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1
Date and time: Friday, 7 May 2010 at 6.30 pm

Anindita Sengupta’s poetry has been published in several journals including Eclectica, Nth Position, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya, and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing, annually given to two writers under thirty in India. In 2010, she was the Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at University of Kent in England. Sengupta, who lives in Bangalore, is also a freelance writer and journalist and has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror. Her personal website is at http://aninditasengupta.com.

Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals including Chandrabhaga, Pratilipi, New Quest, Wasafiri, Asian Cha, Desilit and the Creative Writing Issue of The South Asian Review (28:3, 2007). Her work also features in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2008); in the anthology, Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (Penguin Books, 2009). Her book of poems The Reluctant Survivor was published in 2007.

“City of Water is remarkable for its supple language and tensile strength. Her images are sharp and there is integrity about the core of feeling that propels the poem. One cannot spot any weak moments either in terms of emotion or language….Anindita Sengupta never lets a poem run away with her. Like all good poets, she is original both in her way with words and her personal angle of vision.”

–– Keki Daruwalla in the Preface to City of Water

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Okay, I’ve been lazy and just pasted the official invite but really, would love to see you there. It’s more fun to be nervous in front of people one knows. Even if it’s online. Know what I mean?

Last days in Canterbury. The sky holds its light longer each day. These last months have been both rewarding and freeing. I had burrowed into a rut and I’ve been breaking out of it, I think. It’s all the time and the poetry, the solitude, the detachment from currents.

I did a reading of my work at the university last week. I was nervous and exhilarated as usual. Some of my older, and what I think of as ‘less crafted’ poems still seemed to move people the most. This and the second one on this page have never been revised and so in essence, are what I wrote as first drafts. I’m puzzling over what this means (and hoping it doesn’t mean I should just retire). Of course, sometimes poems that work well in a reading are not the same as those that work well on the page. A poet brings certain things to their own reading of a poem that make it more than the words. But I wonder if that’s all it is.

As a reader, I like a lot of poets whose work is polished. But there are others I like whose poems are looser or even flawed. The truth is I’d rather read a poem that I get something out of — feeling or thought — even if it’s  imperfect than a lovely construction that left me cold in both ways. Even one sparkling or memorable line, image, thought trumps a series of words that sit in the right place but glisten dully.

On the note of rules, I lurked at a workshopping site for some time last year. The site is pretty strict about what makes good poetry and what does not. Obviously this has its uses, especially for beginners, but it can also lead to neat poems with the intelligence and emotional appeal of frozen meals. More harmful is the fact that they stress a singular way to write poetry. This can become a comfort zone, an old couch you grow fat in. It’s very tempting to stay there. Poetry is hard to pin down and it’s easier (less risky) to follow a set of rules than to figure out what works or doesn’t as one goes along, poem to poem, moment to moment. How messy that is! How uncontrollable. How dangerous. How much like life.

So how much revision is good revision? Somebody said (I forget who) there’s an optimum amount after which you need to stop, save the poem from your own mind or something like that. Where’s that point? I think of it like that dot in a painting by Miro, the one poet Moniza Alvi talks about, ‘Barely distinguishable from other dots, / it’s true, but quite uniquely placed.’

The dot knows where it is. And once you see it, you know where it is. But until then, it’s a a bit elusive.

Here is the poem and here is a video reading of the poem by Moniza Alvi which shows the painting.

I Would Like to Be a Dot in a Painting by Miro

I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro.

Barely distinguishable from other dots,
it’s true, but quite uniquely placed.
And from my dark centre

I’d survey the beauty of the linescape
and wonder — would it be worthwhile
to roll myself towards the lemon stripe,

Centrally poised, and push my curves
against its edge, to give myself
a little attention?

But it’s fine where I am.
I’ll never make out what’s going on
around me, and that’s the joy of it.

The fact that I’m not a perfect circle
makes me more interesting in this world.
People will stare forever –

Even the most unemotional get excited.
So here I am, on the edge of animation,
a dream, a dance,a fantastic construction,

A child’s adventure.
And nothing in this tawny sky
can get too close, or move too far away.

~ Moniza Alvi

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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.