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 3
We continue. Under new circumstances. We are fortunate.
On a minor scale one shift at Poetry at Sangam is that our three-year grant from the Raza Foundation is over. For the time being. Our guest editor, the remarkable poet Arun Sagar and the brilliant contributors to this issue do so without the customary honorarium that was offered as material tribute to the transforming passage of poetry on the body of writer and reader. My deep thanks to the poets, and those who will follow. As Arun Sagar–whose earlier work is featured here–generously mailed me thus: ‘…while I understand the symbolic importance of the payment (in a different world, poets would be able to earn a living off their writing!) …under the circumstances…’
This edition, in many ways, is a dream issue for me: poets who I wanted featured on these pages for a long time are finally presented, for the guest editor takes the call. Thank you, Arun.
Another feature is that we’ve long wanted to use this platform to celebrate the publication of stunning poetry collections. Fortuitously, Arun Sagar’s A Long Walk in Sunlight (Copper Coin Publishing, Delhi) is just out.
We’re delighted to present two poems from this book here. To term his poems as possessing a minimalist aesthetic doesn’t, to my mind, quite do justice to their quiet beauty, though their spare lines cut deep into the mind. Rather, the reflective nature of his poems welcomes us into an expanding roominess of experience that becomes our own to fathom. Take these lines from his poem, Voyage, ‘An absence becoming so present/ it loses itself/ like something turned so far inside out/ it becomes inside in/ again.’ Or these from Eyesight, ‘I too have distant fires/ on riverbanks,/ far points of light refracted.’ These poems, planted on the edge of knowing, shine with steely luminosity and enquiry, sensuous exactitude and wonder; wonder both at the landscapes being explored and the formal rigour of these explorations.
Read on. Stay safe. Stay well.
Priya Sarukkai Chabria
According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, poetic language is special in that it is not mere reference to some other thing, an external meaning towards which the words are simply pointers. Ordinary language is purely transitive, it disappears on sending us towards its meaning; in poetic speech, words resist this disappearance, insisting on a presence. Gadamer says, “In poetry, when one is directed away from the word, one is also at the same time directed back to it; it is the word itself which guarantees that about which it speaks”. The poet James Schuyler beautifully expresses the same idea: “How the thing said / Is in the words, how / The words are themselves / The thing said”. Poetry more than any other speech is where we encounter the tension between word as thing and word as meaning, between sound and sense. We are always stretched between the two, unable to be free of meaning yet unable to be at one with it; halted in our tracks by a rhyme, yet unable to hear the word as pure sound. Poetry occurs within this tension and because of it—the best poets make us feel it more acutely.
The poets featured in this issue offer us an experience of the materiality of words, as they move within this charged field with surety and grace. Ranjani Murali brings out the word as physical in the body—“your throat loves the uphill / intonation” (“Standard IX: English Lesson 5”) —but also as object moved around the page (“Diaspora”). Her work makes us see reading as participation, most clearly with the fill-in-the-blanks “Standard IX: English Lesson 5”, and the empty lines waiting for the reader to repeat the poet’s words—like a student learning from her master—in “Workbook Cursieve II”. The reader is already within the text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte. And this conversation is interspersed with moments of lyric beauty, like speech suddenly breaking into song: “You / must not forget the fruit lying desolate and dripping / on the sideboard”; “What mother, what bushels of lush-toothed corn, what promise of leather” (“Triveni Interlude#1 Katherine Mayo Transcribes from Mother India Remake”).
Mukta Sambrani’s poems achieve a startling movement from wordplay to epiphany. “Wind Fall” is put together like a jigsaw puzzle, the words becoming pieces moved around from one stanza to the next, until the affirmation of the meaning of this playfulness (“Only this is real- / To see poetry in all things.”). Again, “Inherent Poem” ends with the astonishing declaration “Word is God”—a declaration that would have been a cliché if it did not feel earned by the spare, delicate lines and luminous images that precede it. The word is God but it is also light, flower, flesh. In “After Vestiges”, the philosophical is reduced to the feel of the word in the body: “Without doubt, this is what we become- / Running my mouth around culvert, cul de, / Only sound remains and desire to document”.
Not just the desire but the imperative, existential need to document emerges in Aditi Nagrath’s work: “It’s enough / that I am whole / here at last— / the poem is proof.” (“We Survived, As We Did”). Here, the word constitutes being:“dark pith of my own self to whom / I write and pry : immortal.” (“Hoist the Larger Grief Along”). In “Archival I”, the lines are physically dislocated like the dislocated memory of the absent daughter in the poem; language does not merely eulogise but creates, gives birth. The word’s power is affirmed again and again in these poems, where we encounter what C.S. Lewis has called “The poet’s inward pride, / The certainty of power”: “You should know / I made this / happen” (“Anti-theft, or Meditations on a Pink Wall of My Own Making”).
By contrast, Nandini Dhar’s poems are self-conscious of the limitations of language and the politics of speech: “I would reserve certain words / for more elevated purposes.” (“Pastoral”). Yes, words can construct our experience of the world—“a city sculpted out of doggerels” (“Re-Reading”)—but when it comes to “the torched mosque, / the sweet-shop razed to the ground”, they are helpless. There is indeed a hors-texte, and the poet is riven by the impossible gap between word and world: “A / metaphor of desolation would demand / that I make the birds leave” (“Map Making”). And yet within this desolation there are moments of grace to be found: “A fragile ensemble of colours – yet to become a cacophony” (“Unfinished Elegy”); “the tip of the shivering coconut leaves / a new kind of green unsullied by dust.”
“Grace” is the apt word to use in describing Aishwarya Iyer’s work, in which the lines are somehow weightless yet solid; material—“words that fall off tables” (“The End of a Workday”)—yet lighter than air: “the clouds wavered like threadbare sheets of dust” (“The Language of Duration”). “The Language of Duration” is at once discursive and lyrical: “But who has not noticed the lengthening of such and so afternoons into the intermediacy of evening”; “morning unfurls like a Chinese fan”. In these poems, the poet is both creator of morning, evening, light, shadow, and chronicler of how this world—the day—is coloured by the heart: “reticence is not for the evening bird— / faithful register of your absence, finally absent”(“Absence”); “The day’s figures collapse into night’s bowl: / I think of your death” (“The Turning Year”).
This continuity between pain and sky—“the wind has sung this dirge already. you / can write loss in this” (“The Slow Turn of Water”)—is also a feature of Srishti Dutta Chowdhury’s poems, where once again language forms a web that is both all-encompassing—“the correct summation of his life, a series of verbs” (“Call it Dreaming”)—and gossamer-thin (“the wisp of soft drawn meaningless in the ear.”) Here, alliteration brings out the thingness of words: “the snail slide soft off the small of her inside” (“Bite the Dust”); “the mouth that wilts like / a wildflower over the wound” (“Two Places Ago”). This play of sound along with the poet’s mastery of form—from the broken lyricism of “two places ago” to the taut lines of “Glass Body Mine”—gives these poems a mysterious, resistive presence.
And now, after this series of fragmented comments and quotations (trailers for the main attraction), I would like to conclude my mini-introduction by thanking these poets for so kindly agreeing to be a part of this issue. The literary world we share is small; some of them I count as friends, with others I have had chance encounters or second-hand connections: a publisher in common, poetry readings at the same venue a few days apart, one’s poem selected by the other for a long-vanished journal. But whether friends, acquaintances, or (until now) strangers, I feel that I know them in the very limited yet intimate way that a poet is known to her readers. It gives me great pleasure to be able—thanks to Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s generous invitation—to introduce them to you.
Arun Sagar
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