Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Joshua Muyiwa, not yet 36, started writing because he was told, ‘it is time to stop seeming arty and pretentious and actually earn the tags by doing something’. He is queer. In Bangalore, he’s either drinking rum-water-ice with lots of lime at disreputable dives across the city or at home browsing through recipes planning elaborate weekly meals. He presently writes columns on the queer life and on television for News 9. He has worked as Editor – Dance at the magazine TimeOut Bangalore, has written a weekly column in the Bangalore Mirror – Gazing Outwards – that talked about race, sexuality and the police force in the city for seven years besides writing for publications like The Week, Tehelka, Hindu Businessline, Firstpost, Mint Lounge, Fifty-Two.in, Chimurenga, Conde Nast Traveller, The Goya Journal among others. He is a poet and has won the Toto Award for Creative Writing in English in 2012 for The Catalogue, a series of nine poems on the history of photography and poetry told through the relationship between a photographer and a poet. His poems have been published in Poetry with Prakriti, The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia and elsewhere. But, mostly, he likes to imagine that he spends all of his time streaming Scandinavian and British crime shows, reality TV competition shows and every single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
In the past few years, he has begun to take his fascination, fondness and faith in text and find different ways to present, perform and play with his poems. Telling Stories/Telling Lies was the foundational text for Come, Lie With Me, a durational poetry performance that was a desire to return, replicate and resonate with the real-life event of telling stories to a lover in bed. In this performance, the audience — one at a time — was invited to be the poet’s lover. They were invited to wait, to linger, to lie down in bed with the poet while they were being read a poem. Come, Lie With Me was a project within the framework of Five Million Incidents 2019-2020, realised by Goethe-Insitut / Max Mueller Bhavan in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective.
Telling Stories/Telling Lies – a series of thirty-eight poems – came from a desire to capture the single night that it took to fall in love with a man in Delhi many many winters ago. It came from digging for stories of myself that I’d tell him to delight him, so that he would never ever leave.
The fact that it took on this prose-poetry / story-telling style had to do with a technical glitch. Too broke to buy a new laptop, Kabir lent me his old laptop. While it worked amazingly eighty percent of the time, it had this strange glitch where the space bar would suddenly stop working. It was super frustrating to make or maintain line breaks or even simple spacing between words while writing this series. But, I was desperate for these poems to come out. So, I found myself, first typing out entire poems as chunks of text, then I’d patiently push the space bar and separate them out later. Part annoyance and part accommodation for the laptop’s lags steered the text, tone and technique of these poems towards this realm of story-telling.
I have come to love this gift of the glitch and it has become something I do more in my poems lately. I even think of the running-on lines, the spacing, and breaks as being truer to my excited, exaggerated and exasperated manner of speaking. I think it is reflective of the way I might have told these stories to that man on that single night so many many winters ago.
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