Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume VIII | Issue 1
Here’s wishing each of you a harmonious, joyous and creative 2020! May the year bring us better listening, understanding, action and reflection in the turbulent, often unjust and even cruel times we’ve witnessed worldwide. May we not have to say, ‘Things will get worse before they get better’. May the better have begun within and around us already.
Take the small instance of Poetry at Sangam. There are times when it eats into personal time for writing, and I am exhausted to the point of bewilderment. But then — an issue like the current one curated by Brian Turner comes along and electrifies! I’m deeply glad and honored that he agreed to be our guest editor.
This issue is a gift. Read it. Share it. Widely, wildly.
Brian Turner and I met years ago, at Chennai’s Prakriti Poetry festival. There was in him, I sensed, a ready co-feeling that perhaps births in us only after we witness great suffering – something so altering that it shreds our armor and exposes wounds that are not only our own. Therefore, maybe some of us try to transform ourselves. But I had already loved his work earlier thanks to an issue guest edited by Sonnet Mondal.
Read Brian Turner’s new poems, six of them, here. Each one is a contemporary hymn to the everyday sacred. Each one is word perfect, and profoundly moving. Each one is a poem you wished you had written but are still immensely grateful to read.
On a different note, I reiterate that Poetry at Sangam doesn’t follow an open submissions model. Rather, we entrust each guest editor to bring her distinctive flavour to the issue. Nevertheless, the occasional submissions are forwarded to the guest editor whose decision is then final. If our journal survives another year, we may consider bringing out an issue entirely based on submissions.
With the last issue we began publishing new poetry by previously featured poets. In this issue we are delighted to present poems by Naveen Kishore who has also guest edited earlier for us. These are from his ongoing cycle, Poems on Kashmir post 5th August. Ember-eyed grief, startling beauty, shadows, the immutable sanctity of life, resistance and, always, abundant hope layer his work. This isn’t surprising considering the risks Naveen Kishore often takes with his iconic publishing house Seagull Books. With passion he wades into the deep end of literature to gift us books of glimmering luminosity, like fireflies that burn through the darkest dark and burn into memory. The images that follow are from his recent work, photographed at sites where more than a million were killed.
There’s more: a link to Only Voice Remains, a short film on legendary Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad sent by poet and translator Sholeh Wolpe who had edited a memorable issue on Iranian poetry for us.
– Priya
I’m pleased to serve as the guest-editor for the January edition of Poetry at Sangam. I’m grateful to Priya Sarukkai Chabria for the opportunity and the challenge. I say challenge because we live in a time of tremendous poetic abundance and vivacity. Of all the poets in the world, who would I ask for their beautiful and necessary poems? Rather than choosing a specific theme and seeking out poets and poems that might sing their verses toward a given idea, I elected to invite poets the way one might dream up the perfect round-table of dinner guests—knowing these poets would spark thought and delight with the surprise of their verses.
In this edition, you’ll find a suite of poems exploring and questioning intimacy with an almost allegorical lens by Nathalie Handal—a poet I’ve always thought of as a global citizen.
Luisa A. Igloria transports us into the natural world with the same ease and grace with which she transports us deeper into the landscape of our interior lives.
Adrie Kussorow, who has done ethnographic work in several countries, including India, inhabits the Dalai Lama and brings us a vision of our world that could only be viewed from the other side.
We’re also fortunate to have a glimpse into a book that Baghdad-based poet Sadek Mohammed is working on—with verses from Iraq that are heartbreaking in their beauty, pain, and lyricism.
I recommend reading all of these poems aloud so that they can be felt and experienced within the instrument of your body. In this vein, the poems Tim Seibles brings us are especially musical and his love of language sparks and crackles off the page.
Siddarth Dasgupta’s poetry is new to me, but I’m excited to see his work in years to come. The language is confident and Dasgupta oscillates between the wide sweeping gesture and the recognition that some of the very best poems dive down into the life of this world—so that we might experience Abdul Chacha’s café on Diyafah Street, for example. There were other very fine and accomplished poets who sent in work for this edition, but, in keeping with that round-table conversation I mentioned before, I opted to invite Siddarth Dasgupta to the conversation (with the hope that many more poems will come to us from him in years to come).
Priya Sarukkai Chabria asked that I include work of my own, too, and so you’ll find six new poems from my own pen alongside the wonderful and surprising poems of this wide-ranging gathering of human beings. I hope that you’ll be transported by this edition of Poetry at Sangam, and that, like me, you’ll fall in love with their voices and visions. I encourage you to consider reading their books from first to last, too, so that you might explore the longer arc of their poetic journey. Lastly, I hope there are poems and fragments of language here that might pique your love of language and help you to find your own way, verse by verse, into poems that only your pen can illuminate. As my uncle once said to me: The world waits for all that you will bring it.
Brian Turner
Orlando, Florida
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