Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume II | Issue 6
Thank you, folks, for the warm response to my exhausted but celebratory note about editing Poetry at Sangam. This month we present poems and translations by Anupama Raju, Archana Venkatesan, Grzegorz Wróblewski and Piotr Gwiazda.
‘I really don’t know what triggered me to pen my thoughts. I wrote my first poem when I was fifteen years old. After coming to Trivandrum I started taking writing seriously. It was Poet Laureate late Ayyappa Paniker who motivated me to write. He introduced me to the poetry group in the city, ‘Kavita’. I was, probably, the youngest among them. I got my first poem “House of Dreams” published in The Little Magazine. This inspired me and I started writing a lot,’ Anupama Raju states in an interview. In the ingeniously titled Disorient Express she slips her way through compacted transformations that slide the reader into suprisingly different topographies, physical, conceptual and emotional. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Linger on thoughts/ of clouds slipping off a sky./ Nightmares climb in from a city/ seething amidst heartbeats./ Unwieldy passengers who dream// of homelands – dreamless,/ dazed by fields that grey.’ We present three new poems including a ghazal, Five Couplets For What Has Gone By, a form which heightens her imagistic, aphoristic style. Nightless Night and The Memory Maker are from ‘Une Ville Un Lieu Une Personne’, a poetry-photography collaboration between the poet and French photographer Pascal Bernard. She says, ‘Collaborating with another artist has been a fascinating experience. At one level, it has allowed me to enter my own world through a different door. At another – though less often – it has soothed chaotic or hysterical meanderings of poetry. Working with a photographer and the freedom his vision provides has also helped me explore new creative territories.’
Archana Venkatesan, poet-translator and scholar follows her rigorous translations of Tamil mystic/Goddess Andal’s hymns The Secret Garland with an even more astounding collection of mid 8th-mid 9th CE Tamil mystic Nammalavar’s poems. The book A Hundred Measures of Time: The Tiruviruttam Of Nammalvar traverses terrain touched on in A.K. Ramanujan’s celebrated translations, Hymns for the Drowning. Archana Venkatesan dives into this quest for the sacred by evolving a brave beautiful way to break through the coded breathless surfaces of ancient Tamil poetics. Keeping punctuation to the minimum she unwraps the condensed onrush of the metaphysical text with its seething densities in a startling manner. Here’s an excerpt: ‘She Said:// The lovely young moon that tears/ the unshrinking dense darkness/ of this endless swirling night/ tears through me. It strengthens// I am alone/ my heart fixed on the garland of tulasi…’ Her lucent translator’s note plunges us into the mysterious flowing heart of the poems. We thank Penguin (India) for granting permission to carry these excerpts. For ordering information see the New Releases section.
Yves Bonnefoy — who’s poems have lit our pages — once termed Baroque art as one of ‘impassioned realism’. Grzegorz Wróblewski, poet and artist, works with an opposing principle to confront the aesthetic of realism: he strips its jaded affectations, slicing through realism to reach the grinning abyss of the real. In Grzegorz Wróblewski’s prose poems the spare luminosity of living bites back with wit, compassion and dark humour. Of his poems, he writes, ‘… I tried to capture the phenomenon of life, full of many everyday visions, pain, or atomistic emptiness.… I came to the conclusion that… the only beautiful and decisive moment in life, is the proximity to another person, the meeting of another human being on Earth. A shared vanishing and dying.’ We carry excerpts from Kopenhaga, translated with exactitude by poet Piotr Gwiazda. These cut to the bone, exhibiting the poems’ stark fragility, its dark crystal. Excerpt: ‘I wake up in Copenhagen again. Rain, the sound of ship horns, smoked mackerel… Everyone has their own “decor.” A weakness for pickles or for the paintings of Tadeusz Brzozowski? You’ve got to fight it. Mix drinks, destabilize the mind. Yet even then you always return to the starting point. The Master Plan; your hard-wired appetites; people you are going to meet; death.” Used with the permission of Zephyr Press (www.zephyrpress.org) whom we thank.
Read on…