INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM

Indran Amirthanayagam (www.indranmx.com) writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published 20 poetry books, including The Migrant States, Coconuts on Mars, The Elephants of Reckoning (winner 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize), Uncivil War, The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems and Blue Window, translated by Jennifer Rathbun. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly; curates www.ablucionistas.com; writes https://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com; co-directs Poets & Writers Studio International; hosts a Poetry Channel; and writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento. He has received fellowships from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture, the Macdowell Colony, and is a 2021 Emergent Seed grant winner.

Note on Poetics

I inhabit many homes, engage the world in five languages, would like to relearn my original tongue, Tamil. I am homeless in that I am no longer tied to a particular geography. Ceylon has fallen into historical archives, survives as a tea. The island has become Sri Lanka.

I am a Ceylonese-American lyric poet. I believe in word music. I look for rhymes, off-rhymes, rhythms, alliterations, iambs and four-beat blues, all intended to please the ear as much as the eyes and mind.

I believe in political poetry, that responds to events on the street and in the boardrooms, in congress, in the fields, poems that rise and fall like shares, like the prices of salt and butter.

I believe in translating the poem, bringing metaphors across seas and oceans on sailing ships, ocean liners, aeroplanes. I build bridges with musical words.

I believe every heartbreak, every book read, every thought distilled can be hammered into a line, made into a stanza, and eventually a poem.

The poem may be a fragment. What we remember is key. If one can write a memorable line, a “let us go then you and I”, one has achieved immortality, become part of the language.

Hence, the poem as a song matters to me. I want to sing and be sung. I don’t want to disappear. Even if the singer does not know who invented the tune I would be content looking back at Sodom, looking down on Earth, knowing that I have left a tune or two humming from the mouth of a current resident. I  am an optimist. I believe I will go up when I explode or decompose.