Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Mustansir Dalvi is a poet, translator and editor. He has published three books of poems – brouhahas of cocks (Poetrywala, 2013), Cosmopolitician (Poetrywala, 2018) and Walk (Yavanika Press, 2020/ Poetrywala, 2021). His poems are included in the anthologies: Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry under Lockdown (Penguin Random House, 2020); Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (Bloomsbury India, 2020); Open Your Eyes: An Anthology on Climate Change (Hawakal, 2020); To Catch a Poem: An Anthology of Poetry for Young People (Sahitya Akademi, 2014); These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (Penguin, 2012), and The Best Asian Poetry (Kitaab, 2021). His poems have been translated into French, Croatian, Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi. Mustansir Dalvi was born in Bombay. He teaches architecture in Mumbai.
I write of people, places and things. Or so it seems, when I look back at the poems I have written. Some have been projects, like cycles of poems written on the later life of St. Thomas in India, on Ibn al Haytham’s explorations and back-handed triumphs in Egypt or most recently on the travails of unnamed migrants walking hundreds of kilometers home after being completely dispossessed by the state during coronavirus lockdown. Here too, subjects and locations, history and geography become intertwined in a poetics of exploration that becomes a fair pursuit for this poet. I am delighted frequently and surprised sometimes.
This means, so it seems, that the poems I write emerge from some innerspace and look out into the world beyond my body and mind. This is unidirectional, this inside-outness. This is a critique, for the poet, me, in my present guise as a delver into my own work – this observation: does the gaze ever turn inwards? Is the self elided completely in the making of poetry? A fair question, I suppose, one that I do not ask myself often. The act of poetry is the act of making, of self-trust, of putting one hand on the wheel, the other covering your eyes and the feet firmly on the accelerator. Contemplation, predetermination, design is not something this poet can afford while writing. One reason is that the output itself is sparse and I am happy with what I can get. It gets easier, I think, when there is a subject to be explored through my words, but that subject is not me.
But there are benefits to this approach: untold riches, hidden treasures to be excavated from the middens from which emerge stories, apocrypha, anecdotes, false trails and language. It is language, both in the variety of sounds and spellings that keeps me writing. Language that is never singular, always polyglot. Freed of the shackles of academic writing, poetry can unravel and analyze, classify and archive, debunk the past and present new knowledge in its compactness and its slanted approach. Here, since all bets are off, the passive voice holds equal space with the active in letting a subject loose upon the unwitting reader, sliding her into the morass of the poem down the sides of a pitcher-plant until there is no hope of escape from its digestive liquids.
Not good enough, you might say. Where is the disambiguation? Does the poet ever hold a mirror to himself? I am the wrong person to ask. Like the reader, I too try to find sense (never purpose) in what I have written. But this is always after the fact. I am moved to write by curiosity, not by the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Once the moving finger has writ, one can examine the corpse. It is through the contemplation of the poetic universe that knowledge about the poet may be determined. It will of course be tentative, mutable. Understanding the poet is a forensic exercise, even for the poet himself. I don’t put much store in this enterprise myself. Stay with the poems.
The voices you hear as you read the poems are very likely objective, deadpan like a newsreader from the 1970s, even passive as mentioned earlier. But this is a useful vehicle for humour. I don’t know if I can set myself to write a funny poem, but the poetics of doing so can evoke smiles or chuckles even when exploring subjects like optics in the work of a 10th century Arab polymath. In the course of a poem, when the wheels slip off the tarmac and go into the rough, when the brakes seem not to respond anymore, I go with the flow. Once again the gaze is inside-out, there is more curiosity than fear, the desire to see if/when/how the crash will take place, what kind of god-awful noise it will make and how badly the body/bodies will be mangled. When this works well, well, that’s when it all becomes worth it.
Prayer can change your fate, too
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