Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Kanishka Gupta is a literary agent, writer and publishing commentator best known for his hugely acclaimed series for Scroll.in called ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’. He is the founder of Writer’s Side, the largest literary agency and consultancy in South Asia. Gupta has been credited for singlehandedly popularising literary representation in the subcontinent. His first novel History of Hate (2010) was longlisted for the Asian Booker Prize.
The form I use in my poems came to me quite organically. Perhaps it was the outcome of years of quiet rebellion against formal tradition, not just that of boxing writing into specific genres but of the very act of sentence construction. I remember eschewing the use of punctuation marks in my first novel, which was published in 2009. However, my editor advised me to introduce punctuation in the book, perhaps to make it more palatable to readers.
The impetus for these poems, and some others that are part of a finished, edited collection of poetry, comes from social-media-speak and the vocabulary of Google, Facebook, Instagram, and so on. I have tried to employ repetition and iteration in my poems, since I have always been fascinated by repetition of any kind. I like how the senses respond to the cumulative effects of these techniques. Some of the poems might feel as if they have been written to deliberately provoke and shock, but this was never a conscious, premeditated decision. I am also an advocate of precision in all forms of writing, which is why one can find a conspicuous lack of imagery and lyricism in my writings.
I wrote a few poems during COVID with the intention of publishing a larger sequence of COVID poems, but it never came to fruition due to other work commitments.
How not to get attracted to people you should get attracted to
Hope-greetings in the times of Covid-19
How (only) a restrained sustained staggered rechristening of Covid-19 will give us victory over it
This site is designed and maintained by GONECASE