Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Divya M. Persaud is a planetary scientist, writer, composer, and speaker based in the U.S. and U.K. Her upcoming book do not perform this: a song cycle won the 2017 Editor’s Choice Award from The ‘Great’ Indian Poetry Collective, and her poems have appeared in Anomaly, The Deaf Poets Society, The A3 Review, and elsewhere. She released her debut album, THEY WILL BE FREE: a song cycle, a fusion of classical music, post-modern electro-acoustics, and epic poetry, in 2017. Divya is also postdoctoral scholar supporting missions to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, and has been completing her Ph.D. in applying 3D imagery to probe the geology of the Curiosity rover landing site on Mars. She has performed and spoken about her art, science, and advocacy internationally. Find her at divyampersaud.com.
These poems from do not perform this—an instruction for these musical pieces, as well as a title—constitute a larger project of mine concerning how we make and hold in sound, and why, which seems an apt descriptor of many aspects of poetics. As a modern composer, I work on what sound means, and what positionalities we bring with ourselves when we listen to a piece of music and how to challenge them or destruct them. As a scientist, I work with post-Enlightenment imagination of objectivity which is not intrinsic to the natural world but one we impose on natural systems. In the grip of C-PTSD, reality shifts in a moment. Is silence the opposite of sound, and is this rational? What is the disabled, queer, feminist, marginal, post-colonial disentanglement of silence?
In writing these poems I strived to challenge these types of dichotomies of the post-modern canon—rather than tension of silence vs. mundane sound that John Cage sought to capture in his 4’33” , I am fascinated by the sounds we create deliberately and silence with intent. We not only choose but carefully cultivate silences every day; in a trauma-bound world, silence can mean safety, the preservation of self, or a fear response. The silenced sounds can also be inner color that we foster, communities that we hold close to our chests, or truths that are only growing as seeds within us, but ones to which we must tend quietly. These paradoxes—communal interiority, the escapist bravery—inspire me, as I seek the words, musical directions, or experiments to best convey my own ideas after many years of being afraid to express my thoughts to even myself. It is in these moments of self-sublimation that I wonder at our ability to constantly create and re-create ourselves.
Accidentally took escitalopram instead of folic acid
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