Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume VIII | Issue 5
Words to clean the air
In early 2013, Arshia Sattar, founder of Sangam House, invited me to curate a poetry section for them as an affiliated but independent journal. I accepted, with a sense of joy. Here was a chance to repay my debt to poetry which we turn to for distillation of thoughts and emotions, to help clear a space for attentiveness, to touch us through language with precision and song; and I also hoped to help build an international community of poets. As Founding Editor, I decided to make Poetry at Sangam a monthly, featuring in each issue, six poets with six poems each. What determined the selection process? Poetry I loved. Friends and acquaintances whose work I admire featured alongside poets I came across on the Net and could contact for contributions. My choices were eclectic, but tended towards experimental and lesser known work, especially from India. With luck and without my quite realizing it, Poetry at Sangam became among the most prestigious literary journals of the subcontinent.
With our success, it seems resentment at not being included in Poetry at Sangam also grew. I realised I wielded more power as Editor than I cared or intended to have. I needed to devolve this power. I also disliked any hint of cliques, claques, coteries & caucuses shaping the journal. This was, and remains antithetical to my appreciation of the art, indeed to its beauty, rigour and underlying spirituality. Further, I wished to widen the presentation of poets’ work, more than my own resources would permit, to offer readers –who are the reason for Poetry at Sangam’s existence — thrilling and unexpected choices. Therefore, in April 2016, I decided to invite Guest Editors to curate each issue. At the same time, we also became a quarterly.
I chose Guest Editors from among remarkable poets across the globe who do not otherwise edit online or hard copy journals, write poetry blogs, organize poetry festivals and the like as such poets have venues to showcase poetry of their preference. Each guest editor is given a carte blanche: freedom and responsibility to make all aesthetic and editorial decisions. From choosing poets they wish to feature to making it a themed issue or not, throw it open for submissions or not to the final edits. I don’t encourage consultations with me and re-enter the frame to write an Introduction and check the final edit. Though a tad risky, this method offers readers the Guest Editors’ truest choices, and once again, we – you, dear reader, and I – have been fortunate. Luminous poets have curated issues, offering poetry that makes us go Ah!
Therefore, suggestions to the contrary –that I’m gatekeeper – are misinformed, unwarranted and mean-spirited. This, sadly, in spite of several of my earlier Introductions elucidating the process I have outlined above.
Poetry at Sangam does not have a Submission link though unsolicited submissions are forwarded to the Guest Editor with a request to consider submissions that come in within ten days of a new issue.
In Anthologie de la literature Chinoise Classique Jacques Pimaneau* writes, ‘To create an anthology is to commit a crime, to select some authors and send others, even if they are not without interest, to the hell of oblivion. And it is a mutilation of the texts from which one selects a single passage.’ Whilst this might be an extreme view, there is some truth in it. Scores of poets whose work I admire, cannot, unfortunately be accommodated on the pages of Poetry at Sangam.
I trust this sets out, with complete transparency, the selection process behind Poetry at Sangam. And we can return to celebrating poetry and building our community of poets I am deeply grateful for your attentive readership that makes the work worthwhile. My heartfelt thanks.
*
This issue’s Guest Editor is interlingual poet, author, editor and translator Sophia Naz. Her poems startle us with their velvety intensity and the interconnectedness she sees in life, alongside a haunting sense of memory as in ‘late spring pollen spilling fine/ as moss of myth’; her deft play with languages, here Urdu and English, which reach, ‘…grabbing /meaning by the throat, tap/ root to tongue earth’ as she writes elsewhere, and possibly most of all, suggestions of the liminal sought and lost and sought again as, ‘….in the foaming// tides of the body, its teeming fog/ banks of remembrance // softening into oblivion with each/ drawn breath’.
Over to Sophia Naz. Her poems and her choices.
*extract from Great Books of China, Frances Wood, Head of Zeus Ltd., 2007
I would like to thank Priya Sarukkai Chabria for inviting me to guest edit the year end issue of Poetry at Sangam. It is an honor both exhilarating and humbling.
For this issue I sought work that explored liminality, including but not limited to, form, subject matter, open rather than closed meaning/s, straddling two or more languages at once, fluidity of genre, gender and persona, the juxtaposition of lived and surreal worlds, sacred space, “time out of time” The contributors responded in unique ways, in keeping with their poetic raison d’etre to produce an issue that is as stylistically diverse as it is geographically dispersed.
Uma Gowrishankar’s poems dwell simultaneously in supernatural and everyday realms. Elemental in their imagery, mythic in scope, earthy in their environs they shapeshift effortlessly between real and imagined worlds. The mound of rice on a plate turns into tilled earth, then a newborn’s soft pulsing crown before turning back into a ball of rice offered to the Goddess in the lake in The Cycle, Uma’s poem on creation and dissolution. Elsewhere we encounter the female saint poets Andal and Avvaiyar, the latter’s image dances as grains of sand on the screen in Kabali Talkies. Gowrishankar weaves science, myth, history and the present into a beguiling web.
Usha Akella’s poetry is passionately feminist and deeply mystical. In many of her works these disparate streams come together in magnificent confluences. Her work is fully engaged in the pressing issues of our fractious times but it is also in constant dialogue with the past; informed by it and transforming it in the refining flame of her alembic.
Birds, those delightful creatures straddling stillness and speed, nesting and freedom swoop in and out of Zilka Joseph’s poems, reflecting her own history of living in Eastern and Western cultures, as well as the influences of her Jewish Indian roots. The caged parrot fortune teller becomes the emblem of patriarchy. Elsewhere Joseph in conversation with an ailing father talks of the impossibility of packing the birds of her native India into a suitcase yet paradoxically this is precisely what her poetry does, an avian flight path though invisible forms the connective tissue linking us to history and possibility.
Huzaifa Pandit hails from Kashmir, a place whose very existence is the synonym of the liminal. His work is rich with irony and has a biting surrealism which is the perfect vehicle to convey the absurdities of a daily life incomprehensible to most outsiders. As an ancient rusted artifact rusted his words bleed on the page, made fresh by the wounds of each new rain
Barton Smock is the poet about whom Kazim Ali said that “All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.” Barton’s poems are diaphanous enigmas and the fact that they defy logic and can’t be neatly boxed into this or that category is precisely their beauty. God appears a lot in Smock’s poetry, but he is always a lower case god, disconcertingly intimate. The saints and Sufis of yore would recognize Barton Smock as one of their ilk.
Sascha Akhtar conducts experiments constantly sometimes with language, movement, image, sound – it depends where she is called. Underpinning her practice is a resonance with ancient ways and learning always, how to lean further into what she calls Natural Magic¦K¦. Butoh left a huge impact on her & she credits the philosophy with informing her poetry to a large extent.
Companion arose from the latin words com (with), and pan (bread), meaning someone you break bread with. Poetry, like bread, is the stuff of living cultures. As we bid adieu to an annus horribilis of global proportions amid a future full of uncertainty I am more grateful than ever for the bread of poetry bringing us to the common table of our humanity even in our enforced distance.
Sophia Naz
Founding Editor: Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Guest Editor: Sophia Naz
Webmaster: Arpita Lulla