This poem is part of a series about Asifa Bano – the Kashmiri Muslim girl who was brutally raped and murdered earlier this year in Kashmir.
Manu Kant was born at Patiala, Punjab but brought up in Chandigarh. He also lived in the erstwhile Soviet Union from where he did his post-graduation in TV journalism from the prestigious Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow in 1993. He is a freelance journalist and a committed Marxist. His articles have appeared in The Tribune, Chandigarh, The Indian Express, Pioneer and Kolkata-based weekly Frontier. He has published seven poetry books. His latest poetry book is titled Asifa Bano’s Smile which is about the little Kashmiri girl who was killed after a horrific gang-rape in Kashmir in January, 2018. Manu keenly follows Indian art and theatre.
(By Keki N. Daruwala. From The Hindu. Link to the complete article given below)
Glorious autumn! Even Delhi becomes pleasant in this season of amber, never mind the political shenanigans. Forget them. Think of flowers — white-petalled harsingar, also known as night jasmine or parijat, and that flower which sprouts on alstonia scholaris, the tree from which blackboards are made, and pencils. Its fragrance is heavenly. Indian poets went wild this season, once the 10 heads of Ravana were burnt with fiery arrows, the feats of Hanuman recorded, and the Chalisa sung. Now the stage was set, with the sugarcane ripe for the sickle, rivers and streams shrinking, water fowl descending on sand banks, farmers building machaans to keep wild boar and monkey from the crops. Poetry couldn’t have asked for a better setting.
Living nature
The Sanskrit poets, bound to their rigid traditions, left their amours and all the romantic wrestling with rain-wet women to the months of Sawan and Bhado. Sadly, autumn poetry was devoid of sex. For poetry in the months of Ashwin and Kartik, we need to turn to the great man, the author of Meghaduta himself.
Robert Flinn holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, USA. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Languages at Zaman University in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he teaches various English courses as well as Business and Professional Communications.
He is also the director of the university writing center. His poems travel across a wide spectrum of social commentary and popular culture and often speak to injustice and the under-represented.
His previous poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Asian Signature Review, Atom Mind, Microkosmos and The Beacon, as well as on the debut CD of touring band ULU.
Patricia J. Miranda is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Columbus, Ohio, USA. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in apt, Frontier Poetry, Hunger Mountain, Hyphen, Winter Tangerine, and several other literary journals. Her picture book, Leaf Man, with husband-illustrator Chris O’Leary, will be published in 2019 by Albert Whitman & Company.
Ritwik is a student of literature and theatre. He spends most of his time writing or reading. Currently he is pursuing his education from distance mode and hopes to move to university next year for further studies. Writing is his sole passion but he does it for himself, not to make a career in it; he doesn’t write for others, nor does he hope to write for commercial purpose. He hopes to study up to Ph. D after which he will take up teaching. Ritwik lives in Mumbai in his parent’s house.
Title: A Clock in the Far Past – Poems Author: Sarabjeet Garcha Publisher: Dhauli Books Price: INR Rs 250/ $14/£ 11
Human bodies are heavy, slaves of Earth’s gravity. Human hearts, on the other hand, weighing little more than sparrows, are still strong enough to pull the weight of memory. Perhaps this is where poetry is born.
Sarabjeet Garcha’s book of poems, A Clock in the Far Past, leaves one immersed in a certain feeling. Something more like residue, or a whiff of a sensation, almost like distant memory, or the memory of a memory, ticking away for the sake of what is here and now.
As the titular poem of the volume says:
It wasn’t 10:10, as images of clocks
are fond of showing, but some hour that’s been swallowed by some windy darkness of a tunnel, now extinct. But what you can’t figure out now
Is the sudden urge to make That stopped clock tick again- As if a few tweaks to it in the far past would set at least something in your present right.
The clock’s hands move. Sarabjeet Garcha’s poems ferry the reader across like a time machine, albeit an astral one. This can be, and is already, disconcerting. These memories do not belong to the reader; and at times they seem not to belong to the poet. Then why this recurring sense of turning back the hands of one’s own clock? Is it because Garcha has made
a handful of lines out of a lifetime’s work shine…
These lines speak to me of Garcha’s humility before his muse. And this too – when he recognises with thanks that
seated figure of some rare unknown reader of his paltry work, he wants
to snoop on the underscores and thank her for doing what was almost undoable for him…
‘Like Earth to Stars’: Forthcoming from Poetrywala, Mumbai
Heracleion and the City of Shiva Prakash
Thank you, archaeologists, for excavating
the great ancient city
of Heracleion,
hidden in the depths of the Mediterranean
for one thousand and two hundred years.
Our stone children,
gods and goddesses,
still lie there
dreamy-eyed and smiling
though heads and limbs are broken
and eroded by sea salt.
Why did this city drown?
Experts reason:
It stood on the foundation of sand
that could not bear and support
its ever increasing weight of buildings
and statues of gods and people,
poor sand gave way…
But a lot of the city’s glory still survives poignantly
hidden in water and surrounded by unmindful fish
waiting to be discovered and admired…
My heart too is a city
bursting with palaces, temples and gardens
I built for you.
So many pilgrims and merchants come here day and night
and most settle down
as they cannot say goodbye to a city so exquisite,
because of you and my art
but, alas, I have built all this
on the foundation of wet sands
of your ever dwindling faith in me.
So the City of Shiva Prakash too will collapse
due to a great error of the builder:
He never thought of the strength
of the foundation.
But,
once it goes under the sands of the ever-changing world
will someone discover its wonders
when neither of us will be around?
O my Kannada words
You became my companions
In far-off Peru
Thanks for keeping me company
From day dreams amidst clouds
To the heights of Machu Picchu
Where eagles circle
And from there
To the cities of the ocean-goddess
And of a god with thunder’s name
With bricks and stones stained with blood
And from there
To the depths of Caral the mother city
And you, voices from the Machu Picchu poem
By my elder brother Pablo
Beloved hearts of my dear readers
That befriended me on my lonely journey;
The fruit of our journey
Was not sand, stone or ancient Peru’s mother city
But these few proverbs I stole from primordial dreams:
Peace is inevitable; not war
Dying is inevitable; not killing
Worship is inevitable; not sacrifice
Mating is inevitable; not longing
Trade is inevitable; not cheating
Enchanting flowers, the dreams of rocks;
Beauteous forms, the dreams of deserts;
Exquisite cities, the dreams of void;
The joy of all, the longing of the soul
Write these down in the slips of paper
Of our dying worlds,
Tie them to the claws of dream doves,
Let them go flying
Into all times
Into all spaces
Into all worlds
— From “Heights of Machu Picchu, Depths of Caral” by H. S. Shiva Prakash
Poet, playwright and translator, H S Shiva Prakash (born 1954) is among the foremost living writers of India. He began as a poet and playwright writing in Kannada and eventually became a bilingual poet and a translator across multiple languages. He teaches English at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and has served as the Director of the Cultural Centre at Berlin, known as the Tagore Centre.
He has nine collections of poems, fifteen plays, and several other books to his credit in Kannada. He has also published a collection of poems in English and many of his plays are available in English translation. His works have been widely translated into French, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, German, Polish, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. His plays have been performed in Kannada, Hindi, Meitei, Rabha, Assamese, Bodo, Tamil and Malayalam. Shiva Prakash has also translated the Kannada vachana literature into English. His interests include Bhakti movements of India, and Sufi and other mystic traditions. He has to his credit many ‘best book’ prizes for his books of poems, plays and translations accorded to him by Sahitya Academy, Delhi, Sangeet Natak Academi, Delhi and Karnataka Sahitya Academy. He is also the recipient of many awards including the Rajyotsava Award given by the Karnataka government and the Kusumagraja Award given by YCMOU, Nashik. While he has been invited to read his poems or present talks in various countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and America, he was also invited to the International Writing Program in School of Letters, University of Iowa.
Shiva Prakash began his writing career when ‘navya’, the modernist literary movement was dominant in Kannada. No doubt influenced by some of the major modernist Kannada writers, when he began writing, Shiva Prakash, wrote out of the many memories housed in him through the years of his growing up. In so doing, in his initial output, he marked a distinct poetic manner – both in form and content – from the one that was then popular. By the time his second collection was published, this difference began to be celebrated by his readers.
Kamalakar Bhat:Your poems forsake the path of obscurity that much of the navya Kannada poetry had chosen though you began writing during the period. Was reaching out to the reader important to you?
Shiva Prakash: When I first started writing, I thought that my business is to write without bothering about reach and accessibility. Because I was influenced by modernist poetics and thought that one writes for a discerning individual. That was my belief at that time. Later, I discovered that when I read my poems in person, well-read people expressed admiration but the common people were not feeling good. Then I said no, I must write for these people, not for the scholars and critics. I decided I should make the simple style my model.
Looking at the whole tradition of Kannada poetry and what kind of relationship exists between the poet and the audience, I discovered that in the best of Kannada poetry, even in classical Kannada poetry, the most memorable lines are very simple and they are immediately communicable. Whether it is Pampa, Ranna, Raghavanka, Kumaravyasa, all are very simple.
See, once a poet establishes a kind of rapport with the audience, people remember him.
Because poetry is not a communication of meaning. It may be the discovery of meaning for the critic and the scholar, but for people poetry creates an impact. And nobody reads poetry for accessing meaning. I think I endorse the classical notion that poetry is about impact, not communication.
Vanessa Crofskey is a mixed race Chinese poet, born and raised in New Zealand, who misses Malaysia often. Her writing has appeared in Cahoodadoodling, Uptalk Mag, Kate Mag, Dear Journal and The Machinery. She has performed across Auckland, and was the 2015 UoA’s Slam Champ. Her work is introspective, identifying everyday racism, diaspora and what it means to search for home.
Saubhik De Sarkar, is a Bengali poet based in Alipurduar, West Bengal, a major district in the eastern Himalayan foothills of India. He has six books of poems of which the first one Sheet O Bayosandhir Haspatal was published in 1995. Other collections include Ekti Mridu Laal Rekha (2005), Jatrabari (2011), Dokholsutra (2013), Anugato Buffer (2015) and Punorbashoner Chil (2016). He is also a prolific translator. His most significant translation projects include but are not limited to the works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Roberto Bolano, Federico Garcia Lorca, Julio Cortázar, Namdeo Dhasal and Rudhramoorthy Cheran. His translation of the much discoursed Dalit chronicle My Father Baliah by Y.B. Satyanarayana into Bengali is set to be published in 2018. His selected poems translated into English, The Evening Gnome is also scheduled to be published from Authorspress in 2018. He is the recipient of Kabita Pakshik Award (2005) and Mallar Award (2017).
Dolonchampa: What encouraged you to be a poet? Can you think of a particular set of moments that still haunt your memory as the initial spark?
Saubhik: I grew up in the cultural and literary ambience of Alipurduar which had some artistic and traditional inheritance. The Little Magazine Movement also played a significant role in shaping and sharpening me up as it has had tremendous impact over the progression of Bengali literature. Since a young age I got to know the avant garde litterateur and poets of North Bengal who were involved in little magazine movements and an experimental writing process. Taking part in the movement provided the opportunity to access different avenues of literature and I chose poetry as the medium to express myself. Not any special incident or spark, but as a whole many features of poetry enticed me toward it. I found the essential freedom and a sense of unrestricted liberation within the realm of poetry.
Dolonchampa: Tell us about your literary influences.
Saubhik: A poet is indebted to many other travellers of the labyrinth of poetry. According to my recollection, Jibananda Das, Utpal Kumar Basu, Manindra Gupta, Swadesh Sen, Bhashkar Chakraborty, Nitya Malakar, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Sajal Bandyopadhyay, Shyamal Kanti Das, Samar Roy Choudhury, Shyamal Singha, Jahar Sen Majumder and Rahul Purkayastha are those few Bengali poets who had initially impacted my nous of poetry. Among the ones who wrote in other languages, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ana Akhmatova, Frank O’Hara, Julio Cortázar, Charles Simic, A.K. Mehrotra, Namdeo Dhasal, Agha Shahid Ali, Mahmud Darwish, Martin Espada and Kim Hyesoon influenced me a lot.
Dolonchampa: The unique elements of North Bengal—the landscape, languages, folk tales, myths, music have influenced your already rich linguistic inheritance. How do they shape your poems?
Saubhik: North Bengal, where I have lived so far has some particularly distinctive features. Located amid lustrous natural landscape within the range of three international borders, it is a unique multicultural, multilingual and multi-ethnic confluence. Populations hailing from separate ethnic clusters native to this place present themselves in different forms of myths, folktales, customs and rituals, and music different from each other. In congruence with the changing dynamics of the rivers flowing through the mountain range of North Bengal, the disposition of the people here also changes its form. People constantly move in and out of North Bengal. A larger phase of history has been a witness to this shifting identity and its restlessness for a rather consistent period of time. When I try to capture that particular identity in my poems, it appears with all its restlessness.
Political and economic contexts are not the same either. They are altering at a rather slower pace, but the transformation is indeed visible. Against the backdrop of the marginal and rural practices transforming towards a pro-urban formation, the decadence in the local colonial set-ups primarily established through the railways and tea-gardens become more prominent. The conservatively rural and marginal folk elements are developing themselves in an innovative manner, which to certain extent is definitely and more inevitably contributing to the degeneration of an old customary set-up.
All these shifts and changes, anomalies and transformations present themselves subtly in my poems. Although I feel the limitation of the standard lingua franca in expressing these conflicts, struggles and the confluences of the beauty, silence and serenity of North Bengal which appear in my poems. Hence, it is only reasonable that I should use words from the dialects, sub-dialects and other languages of North Bengal in my writing.
The other and more significant reason for me to use the elements of North Bengal is the responsibility to represent an aware and alert society which registers a systematic and sensible resistance in favour of the liberation of a language no matter how apparently insignificant and distant it is from the power hub of the premier language. Every language practises a kind of monopoly over its dialects and sub-dialects. So when I use a local word in my poem I do not want it to carry its local flavour only. I enable it to stand strong against the monopoly and aggression of the premier language.
