Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume IX | Issue 3
Jean Clottes, possibly the world’s foremost authority on cave art, disagrees with the nomenclature we have given our species, Homo sapiens or ‘wise ones’. We don’t know much, he insists. Instead, he and other anthropologists and philosophers propose Homo spiritualis. According to him, humans are a species that contemplates the nature of consciousness. Imagination, belief in the fluidity of existence and permeability to the invisible forces of spirituality was a mark of these early people and continues to mark us today.
Kunwar Narain, (19 September 1927-15 November 2017) to whom we pay homage in this issue, firmly belongs to the tradition of Homo spiritualis. Sridaya or mindfulness of the heart map his austere, moving and cosmopolitan poems; these present to us a non-hierarchical world lit by optimism’s dark flame – that we are led by because love outstrips despair. As Apurva Narain, his son, translator extraordinaire and poet writes, Kunwar ji marvelled at “…the moral as an evolutionary counterpoise to the physical.” The calm magic of his poems stress both the fluidity of existence, as when tree and human converse, “I asked it the way to a rest house,” and the permeability of dividing walls, “there is only a curtain/between/looking inwards and outwards”. In the recently released – and outstanding – collection Witnesses of Remembrance: Selected Newer Poems, Apurva Narain accomplishes the challenging task of rendering these seemingly simple verses from the Hindi into English with precision, elegance and insight. His versions flow like a mountain stream, sparkling yet clear, inviting us to see into the textured bed of Kunwar ji’s moral universe.
I wish to live that love
immensely, in eternal time
creating an eternal space—
not torn by people and things
or trifling news from kith and kin,
standing aside
I wish to watch the world
We thank Eka, an imprint of Westland Publishers for permission to publish these poems.
Susanna Crossman, poet, novelist, performance artist and art therapist (among her other avatars) periodically hosts invigorating virtual dinner parties on the Lucy Writers Platform. Here, over a warm literary conversation I met the poets Alina Stefanescu, Elodie Barnes and Nancy Campbell; we are honoured and delighted to share their work on our platform as well. (Elodie Barnes in a later issue, though!)
Alina Stefanescu’s poems – like her beautiful artwork below – sing of amplitudes of gratitude and awareness, even as they splay their hungers through language’s play. The poet walks the dissolving edge of belonging, questing where one ends, and the other begins in the shadowy, shifting morphology of grace. Through these ‘imploding’ poems we experience a kaleidoscope of artistic lineage, personal memory and the passing moment.
Let’s organize every etc. to make the red hare feel at home in the rainbow. Fireflies reduce trees to illuminated manuscripts. Diacritics of driftwood lack verbs to address rising levels of ambient stress in Americanist schools. A uniform told me his heart bleeds raw denim.
Wonder, deep caring and minute observation soak the worlds of Nancy Campbell’s chiselled poems. In them, time and space contract and expand from an almost palpable immediacy to the mysterious textures of an unknown. Through this movement – which is akin to breathing in its organicity – and her unspoken intentionality, she gifts us an underlying silence that throbs towards the sacred.
Devise your own version of Mendeleev’s organizational chart of known elements. Believe in unknown elements. ¶ Believe in endless transmutation, have a vision of fission. Even as the world fractures, believe in integrity at the Earth’s core, believe in the future. ¶ Work with someone you trust. Build your laboratory where you can:…
Evidence of the everyday and the memory of myth scent Susanna Crossman’s prose-poems; they startle us with cross-currents of language in a range of registers and references drawn from a literary life. Layers of significance shift and collide as possible danger and damage line the ocean-bed of consciousness. But we are assured through her poems that we – and the worlds we live in – through frail, are worth cherishing. Each one; and every moment.
According to Hallmark, sympathy cards account for six percent of all total sales/tonight/caught in obscurity/she flips through the pages of a yellow book/wrapped in sheets/ buried in texts/ now grass grows deep on his grave yet she thinks the whole world still smells of corpses/ groundbreaking content analysis of American greeting cards finds the words death and dying are never mentioned/ she falls into language two thousand years old, consolations for each wail of grief/ philosopher Seneca advises Marcia, a Roman mother who has lost her son: Move On/…
Combining compassion with protest, poet-activist Indran Amirthanayagam explores what it means to be human in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st century in lyrical, and often, rousing verse. He tunes his ear and gaze to the savagery of the human heart, while throwing out sinews of hope. In these powerful poems anger, impatience and despair emerge as gestures of kindness. We are honoured to present his poems and three of his self-translations; this time from Haitian Creole.
I should have called earlier, written a note,
if just to say you have filled my mind since
we read each other aloud, that there is no
going back. To where?
Academic and literature- activist Sonya Nair presents poems that sway between touching childhood reverie and alert adult persona, the inexplicable and certainties, fact and fiction; each incident dipped in the inviolability of change, each coloured by humour that shades from the wry to the dark. Humour, we know, is a rare quality in contemporary Anglophone Indian poetry. Time blurs its distinct phases of past, present and future in a continuum of being.
Mother runs her fingers
through her hair.
She sees dark dandelions
catch the tail
of a stray breeze.
She leaves chiaroscuro
on pillows.
Her roots circle the drain.
We conclude this issue with Ranjit Hoskote’s stunning new translation of the Isha Upanishad that is terse as it is resonant and wise as it is tender. This is an important addition to the corpus of translated wisdom literature of the subcontinent. The passionate arguments in his accompanying essay unfold like a shimmering calyx around the verses that open wider with each reading. Together, they offer inclusive meshes of consanguinity that firm our tread, and reaffirm the Isha‘s livingness.
It moves it does not move
it is far it is at hand
It is inside everything
it is of everything outside
Priya Sarukkai Chabria
October 2021
Pune, India
Founding Editor: Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Deputy Editor: Mrinalini Harchandrai
Webmaster: Arpita Lulla
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