Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume VI | Issue 4
Poetry at Sangam is delighted to present this Diwali’s Special issue: Sumana Roy, the marvellous poet, essayist and novelist, curates an archive for us. Our first. Poets on their mothers. On the women who brought us to light from the dark glow of the womb. Like so many oil-wick diyas, earthen lumps and lamps , floating down a river of ink Each one of us a tremulous flame, fortunate to be born.
Sumana’s theme, then, is a serendipitous choice for this issue on the festival of lights. In more ways than one. As I recall, our friendship began over mails about mothers, on poems and the pauses in our lives, sometimes comforting as a snooze in a hammock, at other times sudden stops when flesh turns stone, and one stalls in this singular relationship that is of blood and breath, beauty and death, and the flicker of wisdom. Without more ado, read Sumana’s thoughtful and deeply felt introductory note here and head on to a truly touching and significant issue.
My heartfelt thank you to each one of the poets who’ve contributed to this special issue, to our curator Sumana Roy and trusted webmaster Saurabh Agarwal for the effort, the love, the gift of words.
— Priya Sarukkai Chabria
I have an ambivalent relationship with the archive – while I love its ability to keep the disappeared alive for us two-dimensionally, I find its neatness claustrophobic. Life is not arranged like that; or that it’s not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, as someone needed to remind us about a hundred years ago. And yet, when Priya Sarukkai Chabria asked me to guest-edit an issue of Poetry at Sangam, I immediately felt the desire to create an archive, however tiny, of Indian English Poetry, instead of a general volume. As both readers and researchers know, there are hardly any archives of our poets – not just their poems, which are often difficult to find, the books having gone out of print, or magazines and journals where they were published not being in publication anymore. My complaint – and even frustration – as a reader was how little we knew about the forces that had led to the birth of these poems, forces and energies personal, social and intellectual. Ideally I’d like to create – curate, if you must – an archive of poets that includes all these delicious details. But funds are, as always, lacking, particularly for poetry. No patronage, no publishers, no prizes – and yet it survives, as it has, our oldest voice, our oldest form.
With Priya’s kind and active encouragement, I decided to choose the subject of mothers. The reason, while it might seem outwardly sentimental, was emotional and intellectual. Even as a confused and ill-read university student many years ago, I’d been struck by poets and philosophers and thinkers writing about mothers, particularly after their death, in a way that, apart from being moving, gave us an insight into life itself. Nietzsche, Barthes, Buddhadeva Bose, among many others – writers across genres, writers across cultures. There was also the immediacy – that only emotion can produce – caused by watching many of our poets included here losing their mothers in the last few years.
Among all the editorial and curatorial work that I’ve done, this has been the most rewarding. The emails written to the poets, their responses, their kindness, the gift of these poems, and the photographs, most of them never revealed to the world before this. They bring to us the remembrance of a world that no longer exists – an India that is as much a loving surprise as the hairstyles of the poets and their mothers, a world as raw and unpolished as the human heart, a colour that has now been replaced by the light and gloss of capitalism and globalisation, a world that abets our imagination and desire, and love. Yes, these are indeed love poems, not just to the woman who brought our poets into sweetness and light, but love poems about the certainty of love, its existence and its hinterland.
Here it is, then – an archive of poems about the poet’s mother, mother who is both an archive and a secret, the oldest one we know.
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