Anindita Sengupta

I will be reading from City of Water at Goobe’s Book Republic on Church Street. This is also called Church Street Inn and is in the same line of shops as KC Das. The reading will be on the terrace.

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.

The next TFA reading is tomorrow: Deepika Arwind and Biswamit Dwibedy will be reading from their work at Crossword, Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, at 6.30 pm. Arwind writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in various journals and magazines, and she’s been doing theatre since she was in school. Dwibedy is a poet/artist. He has an MFA in Writing from Bard College, New York. His first volume of poetry, Ozalid, was published by 1913 Press in 2010.

Toto Funds the Arts
is pleased to invite you
to the launch of Anindita Sengupta’s
first volume of poetry, City of Water, where she will be
‘in conversation’ with poet/writer Sridala Swami

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

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.