Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Vivekanand Selvaraj’s primary delusion is that he is a poet. His other preoccupations include trying to convince himself that he is not a diplomat. Of late, his primary delusion is wrecking him apart. He hopes to survive.
His work has appeared in TBLM, Nether Quarterly, Bengaluru Review, Sonic Boom, Vayavya, Pop the Culture Pill, EKL Review and The Freedom Review. His debut collection of Tamil poems, Sudhandhiram Oru Dabba was launched in January 2021 (Manalveedu Publishers). He currently lives in Beijing.
After a few years of believing that my high school doggerels were poetry enough, one morning in 2003, I chanced upon a poem titled, “curtains” in a Tamizh literary magazine I had bought while waiting for my bus back to college. I don’t remember how the poem went. It was by Lakshmi Manivannan. I only remember that I could not make head or tail out of it even though the vocabulary was very much within my limits. I just could not grasp the fact that language, when used in a certain slant way, could push the envelope of experience and ‘strangefy one’s’ perception of life’, like Matthew Zapruder mentions in one of his essays. After 18 years, I do realize that those closed curtains have indeed let some sunshine through them. I write poetry because I did not really exert my choice to not write them. Every other thing in my life is arriving on the conveyor belt. Poetry seems to be the only carry-on baggage I have traveled with. Only poetry isn’t shit, like Bolaño says. Only poetry glows with the light of the immediate in a manner that cannot be reduced by logic, common sense or any such tool.
Last year I was watching a documentary on the life of Ellis R. Dungan when I first realized the possibilities held within the histories of those specific and well loved moments of mainstream cinema—within and beyond their glitter—even if some of them are now completely redundant. In a way, I felt that although those cinematic moments were about particular people, they could very well help reconstruct those truths which were in themselves, universal. That’s how I ended up writing poems on Ellis Dungan, J.P. Chandrababu, Bob Christo and Swamikannu Vincent and a few others. Often times, I did try and approach those moments as a consumer or a fan or as a political observer as well.
The Chinese character titled poems began as an earnest experiment which I undertook along with a fellow poet Anesce Dremen—who herself is very proficient in Chinese—to explore what poems could be written using ‘the Chinese character and how it was written’ as prompts. In many occasions, I thought I used the characters as jumping off points to write about my own landscape rather than my actual experiences in China.
I do believe that through writing, we are embarking on some impossible journeys—beyond the horizons of forgetfulness, hatred and the cruelties of survival—and while we are at it, these journeys somehow seem possible and tangible. This summing up is one such impossibility.
Oru Naayagan Udhayamagiran (or) Bob Christo Goes Off Script
Press 1 for Rajini (or) onnum onnum rendu
Naan dhanpa Rajinikanth (I am Rajinikanth)
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