Vital Possessions is a collection of poems, haikus, monologues and photographs by award winning Singaporean poet and photographer Marc Nair. The content reflects the tussle between city life and nature.
Marc Nair takes us on a journey through ASEAN countries — Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and of course Singapore. He finds nature pushing its way through the crevices of city life. In one of his haikus, accompanied by a photograph of a worn out wall with grass growing out of the gaps, he writes,
“Nature never fails
to push against the grain
of forgotten cities.”
When I see the picture and read the lines, what springs to my mind is the St Paul’s church in Malacca, built in 1521, a forgotten church of a bygone era. The monument has vegetation growing out of crevices, which many old buildings would have. However, a sense unique hopefulness is brought to the fore by Marc Nair’s brevity of words to create a picture perfect perspective.
Adil Hasan was born in 1971 in Shillong, north-east India and has made Bangalore his home for the past eighteen years. He is a visual artist and freelance writer, having previously worked in the banking industry. Escape The Dark, an exhibition of his digital art was held in 2014. He is presently working on a mixed media project titled Great Industrial Dreams which pairs artwork with speculative prose and poetry.
Title: Green is the Colour of Memory Author: Huzaifa Pandit Publisher: Hawakal Publishers (2018) Pages: 64 (Paperback)
In a class on Mahmoud Darwish, we are reading aloud “Promises of a Storm” – a moment where the poet’s eyes search for flowers blooming beneath the ashes – ‘I will go on serenading happiness/ somewhere beyond the eyelids of frightened eyes.’
After class, I reach out for a borrowed copy of Huzaifa Pandit’s book of poems, looking for poetry as real as Darwish’s, and read the first poem, “A Kashmiri Fairytale”, pulled out as though from the same song of longing for happiness that Darwish sees in the future.
‘Green green grass will dance in the drowsy sun/ of warm, warm May/ we will quarrel and quibble night and day…’ writes Huzaifa in the poem which opens his debut collection, Green is the Colour of Memory. Consisting of 36 poems, this book stands out not just in the truth it aims to convey but in how it brings it to us through narratives that we don’t quite get to hear or read microscopically in newspapers or news channels that have promised a responsibility of recording history and have failed repeatedly. Little pieces of history are recorded in Huzaifa’s poems.
Huzaifa Pandit comes from Kashmir and writes poetry that deals with the everyday realities of those living in Kashmir, as well as what it is like to carry that identity into spaces like local train journeys, to having brief encounters with people outside Kashmir, to academic spaces, and it is themes such as these that appear most prominently in this collection as well.
Camus had once written, ‘Art cannot be a monologue,’ asserting that an artist cannot create in isolation and must speak of the ‘reality common to us all.’ Huzaifa’s work emerges as an excellent example then of this art, in the form of poetry that creates a tiny corner and opens its arms wide for a dialogue to begin; not only does he offer us a counter-narrative, he also engages with the reader through the sharpness of his language—sometimes you hear it from close quarters and sometimes it is a distant whisper making space for you to step in. Reciprocating then, it is in reading his poems slowly, that we’re in sync with their breathing, and it is in their breathing that we find our own lives momentarily paused. Yet there is transcendence, yet we are being transformed.
When the book opens, we find the poet addressing a denied harmony — a quarrel which is softened by love, a moment so far away, one may only see it in a fairytale. What does one do then? What does one do? It is perhaps in search of an answer to this question, that the poet begins many poems in the collection with dreams and returns to nightmarish encounters, or eventualities.
What is a poem? “A poem is a constant transformation of itself and every poem is a model of a possible world that only comes into being when reading is active, activated,” will be Charles’s answer. What is the relation between poetry and poetics? “Poetics is an extension of the practise of poetry, and poetry is an extension of thinking with the poems and also the reflection of poetics,” will be his answer. Bernstein doesn’t believe in any conventional poeticism, but his own Pataquericalism, as he explains in this interview, taken during the creation of the anthology, Bridgeable Lines: an Anthology of Borderless World Poetry in Bengali with American poets.
Charles Bernstein’s poetic idea is similar to the “Notun Kobita (New Poetry)” movement of Bengal, which was started in the ’70s by a group of Kaurab poets – Barin Ghosal, Swadesh Sen, Kamal Chakraborty, etc. in Bengal.
Charles Bernstein lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the Donald T. Regan professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as co-editor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978-1981), the Electronic Poetry Center and PennSound and co-founder of SUNY- Buffalo poetics program. He was awarded both the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry and the Muenster International Poetry Prize. Bernstein is the author of Pitch of Poetry (University of Chicago, 2016) and Recalculating (Chicago, 2013), among many other books. In 2010, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. More information at writing.upenn.edu/authors/bernstein
Charles Bernstein
Runa Bandyopadhyay: Tell us something about how you started your journey in poetry.
Charles Bernstein: The journey never started and so doesn’t end. It feels like it is an active presence. A river of words flowing through me, which I tap into, or perhaps which taps into me (which traps me).
Runa: Is there a relation between the poetic language and the body language of the word? Is a poetic idea revealed in the physical body of the poem?
Charles: Yes. Yes. I am interested in the body of the poem. This is not “material” body but as Blake says, “Spiritual Body”. That is to say, the poem is symbolic space, an imaginary space, where the value lies in not “representing” the world but exploring the “real” in and as language.
Runa: Poetry is form, or process, or [de-]construction or idol-making –– which one of these is closer to your way of writing and why?
Charles: I am interested in intensifying metonymy and iconicity. Not fragments but constellations of particulars. Not de-construction but re-constructions as a process without endpoint. In the Jewish tradition there is a prohibition of “graven images,” which is to say, images of idols. In my secular mutation of this idea, I would say –– in place of images are actions and processes that allow the readers/listeners a space to project their phantasies/desires/anxieties. But I do this not by minimalism or abstraction but by rhythm and association.
Runa: Poetry requires space, where the reader participates in the poem while at the same time remains outside it. What is your opinion on this dichotomy?
Charles: It’s possible to try to break down the divide between viewer/viewed, that is break down the voyeurism by eliding word and object. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is a key work in this respect, part of a “dialogic” space opened up also (in American poetry) by Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, and H.D. and also such second-wave modernists as Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff. I explore this issue in Artifice of Absorption (http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/books/artifice/), in particular the possibility for rhythmic oscillation between inside/outside.
Runa: Is poetry a search for “reality” and existence, or a search for mystery? Or none of those? Then what is it?
Charles: Poetry isn’t one thing, even for an individual poet. “Reality” is perhaps always at issue, but whose reality, what aspect of the real? I don’t accept the “realities” imposed upon me by family, state, literary history, and convention; but then I can’t fully reject them either. In poems, I explore these “controlling interests,” to use the title of an early book.
Runa: Is Poetry more than resonance of ideas in the mind? If so, if more, what is it? Is poetry to be understood?
Title: Best Indian Poetry 2018
Editor: Linda Ashok Publisher: RLFPA Editions Page: 180 (Paperback) Price: INR 475 | USD 15
‘This entire pursuit is only a goodwill initiative for the poets of my country and Diaspora—an organized activity that keeps me in the know of poetry as it evolves in its private space,’ says Linda Ashok in the introduction to the Best Indian Poetry (BIP) 2018. As the series editor, she has worked through a wide arena of our culture, linguistic subtleties and poetic forms, and what she has brought out is a rare gem, with beads of pearls interwoven in poetic texture.
The hiatus between English poetry and poetry from India, or more distinctly, between foreign writers writing in English and Indian writers trying the same, has been a debatable topic and will remain unfathomable for years to come. This anthology is an earnest endeavour to bridge the gap and ‘bring the tectonic plates of the west and the east closer than ever… heralding a borderless celebration of poetry across colours, languages and cultural quirks.’
‘Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting.’ Tagore’s words sound prophetic as poets try to create an alternative reality with subtle strokes and try to incorporate it in a culture-specific poetic spectrum.
The Best Indian Poetry has tried to bring together myriad shades of life within a single canvas, cutting across diverse cultural ethos. The poets hail from different socio-linguistic backgrounds and their poems certainly add a different flavour to this collection. ‘You cannot tie me/to any one religion, to any one relationship,/ to any one post, don’t put a noose around my neck.’ And ‘accept me the way I am. I am not a goat,/ you will not be able to tie me to a post…’ These self-revelatory lines from Abha Iyenger’s poem “You Cannot Tie Me” (p 20) unobtrusively pinpoint the defiance of a woman in a male-dominated, patriarchal society where women are enslaved, tied to societal norms, meant only to subdue, in the name of religion or age-old customs, and treat them as a sacrificial beast to appease men. Her pen has virtually challenged this myopic vision. Her poems appeal to our intellect and build up an alternative reality in terms of poetic texture. As Mary Wollstonecraft says, ‘I love my man as my fellow, but his scepter, real or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage, and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.’
New Brazilian Poems: A Bilingual Anthology after Elizabeth Bishop is a labour of love. When I came to Brazil in January, 2016, I had no idea about the rich world of Brazilian poetry or literature. I had read poems of Vinicius de Moraes and João Cabral de MeloNeto, fellow poet-diplomats of Brazil, thanks to The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry edited by J. D. McClatchy. I was also e-introduced by poet-diplomat Indran Amirthanayagam to Marcos Freitas, a Brazilian poet whom I had requested to contribute a poem on Brasilia for CAPITALS – An Anthology on Capital Cities, I was editing those days. I had also read a poem on Brasilia by Sylvia Plath.
In my earlier stint in Nepal (2012-2015), I had been regularly hosting Poemandu, a monthly poetry reading event at the Nepal-Bharat Library in Kathmandu. I wanted to start something similar in Brasilia. So, upon my arrival in Brazil’s capital, one of the first things I did was to invite Marcos for coffee. Savouring aromatic Brazilian coffee I broached with him the idea of Chá com Letras, a monthly literary event at the Indian Embassy in Brasilia. This meeting proved to be of great value. I asked Marcos to invite poets for the first edition of Chá com Letras in January 2016. He invited Antônio Miranda, a well-known poet and the director of the National Library in Brasilia and a number of other poets for its first edition.
I moderated the program in English. Marcos introduced the poets and they read their poems in Portuguese. I did not understand or speak a word of Portuguese then, but I listened to their poems and paid attention to their sounds. After the readings, we enjoyed Chai and samosa and chatted, posed for photographs, exchanged books and became friends. This is how I became familiar with the works of contemporary Brazilian poets. I kept safely all the books I received as presents for reading them carefully, hoping someday I would become proficient in Portuguese.
I started learning Portuguese with a Brazilian teacher who came to the Embassy three times every week. I supplemented my learning by reading the Correio Braziliense, Brasilia’s leading daily, especially its art and culture section edited by José Carlos Vieira, a poet himself. In its pages, he regularly published poems by contemporary Brazilian poets. I read these poems and tried to translate them. After a year and half, when I started to get a hang of Portuguese language, I started thinking of reading all the poetry I had received as presents from Brazilian poets.
Later, I took Chá com Letras to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where I had the opportunity to meet poets from these two lively cultural centres. During the course of three years, I travelled to Manaus, Porto Alegre, Salvador (Bahia), João Pessoa, Recife, Belo Horizonte, Ouro Preto, Tiradentes, Paraty and interacted with local poets and learnt about their work. Most of the Brazilian poets continue to have some other job. Some are diplomats just like me, some teach at the universities, some are journalists, and others are lawyers. Nicolas Behr, a poet who has written mostly about Brasilia, runs a nursery called Pau Brasilia. Publishing poetry is difficult and most poets publish their poems with small publishers and sell them at supportive restaurants in Brasilia. There are no literary magazines of repute in Brasilia which publish poetry. Large publishing houses are mostly based in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Some of them occasionally publish poetry. The idea of editing an anthology of Brazilian poems came to me after an anthology titled 100 Great Indian Poems edited by me with poems spanning over 3,000 years of Indian poetry and written in 28 Indian languages was translated into Portuguese and was published by the University of São Paulo. It felt natural to take Brazilian poetry to India and the rest of the world. So I decided to translate poems of Brazilian poets into English and the idea of this anthology was born.
