What is a poem? School led us to believe that it was anything that rhymed. Lyricists still seem to think so. Poets, however, see it differently. A poem finds new ways to express an idea. It puts vague feelings into words. It needs no hero or villain to separate good from evil. A good poem, in fact, reveals its secrets slowly, over multiple readings, offering interpretations long after you’ve turned the page.
Poems record history, spark revolution, tear you apart and put you back together. For this issue of Brunch we asked poets across India to compose work about new beginnings. Virat Nehru’s works, in Urdu, help him stay connected to his roots. Janice Pariat’s poems are the blueprint of modern-day love, loss and life, Akhil Katyal’s verses, posted online, bring a sense of permanence to everyday emotions. Akhila Mohan CG’s haikus are almost a form of therapy. Get a little poetry into your weekend here:
SESTINA FOR NEW JOURNEYS
By Janice Pariat
In a new month, early in the morning,
the colonist and you go onto shore;
now you must walk, leaving the river
and the small boat behind.
You are here to inquire after a guide,
a native Laplander. But finding an empty
hut, you proceed to the next—also empty,
almost a mile distant, seemingly mourning
a death unseen. But might you find a guide
half a mile further? Third hut, near the shore?
You meet with as little success. Stay behind
here, dispatch your fellow traveller, upriver,
to a fourth, while you stare at the river,
filled to the brim with blue and empty
sky. At your feet, large stones; behind
you, tall fir trees scattered, fresh morning
dewed, while you wait alone ashore—
but where do you wish to be guided?
No one has returned, colonist nor guide,
And you must decide by the river
whether you’ll venture away from shore
or wait. How might it be this empty?
Not a soul whether night or morning,
the water in front, the forest behind;
though do directions—front, behind—
matter? Unaccompanied, guideless,
your path lies fresh and free as morning;
you may set the boat adrift from the river
and walk away with hands light and empty.
But you don’t, clinging steadfastly to shore,
for all ways may be taken from the shore.
You can hear the redwing calling behind
you. Are you tempted by paths emptied
of past travellers? Will you play guide
to yourself? You stand silent by the river
knowing that soon you’ll see morning
empty itself of light, water drain from shore,
mourning now for time left long behind.
Perhaps the only guide is the river.
Meet the poet
Janice Pariat, 39, is based in Shillong. Her first book, Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (2012), shot her to instant fame. She has handled delicate topics such as love, trauma, healing, self-care, growing up and grief with depth. Her most recent work, Everything the Light Touches, a novel, combines prose and poetry.
“Poetry still does what poetry has always done, help us think about the world in new and startling ways, obsesses over love, give shape to grief and loss,” says Pariat. “It gives voice to protest and offers resistance and community.”
She says that poetry, like almost everything else, is being shaped anew by social media, sometimes literally. The square or portrait mode of an Instagram post affects how a poet breaks their lines or plays around with form. “Many people think social media has dumbed down poetry, which I’m not sure is true,” she says. “There has always been bad poetry and good poetry, it just feels as though it is more visible somehow.”
Today, poets have the licence to write in free and blank verse. There’s also a welcome resurgence of poets using formal structures (rhymes, couplets, sonnets) but in casual, everyday language. “So, there’s a delicious tension between contemporary, almost colloquial language working within quite strict metric verse and rhyme schemes”.
On her reading list: Jeet Thayil, Tishani Doshi, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Robin Ngangom, Shrikant Verma, Vijay Nambisan, Namdeo Dhasal and Mamang Dai.
Ghazal: After you
By Virat Nehru
(English translation)
The nest that’s in tatters since you’ve been gone;
Look! A dove flies in to build it anew once more
Our destinies are intertwined such that;
Whenever your name is mentioned, mine follows right after
The pain — who can say — whose is greater?
The one who leaves or the one who gets left
Why this wall of propriety and formalities, you ask —
Some walls are meant to keep people out, others to keep people in
At times — a sadness — that loneliness is what awaits this heart for eternity;
At times- – a fear — what if this heart falls for someone again?
Ghazal: Tumhare baad
By Virat Nehru
Jo tinkā tinkā nasheman huā tumhāre baa’d
Use bunegī phir ik fāKHta tumhāre baa’d
Tumhāre naam ke aage nahīñ paDhī fehrist
Hamārā naam likhā aa.e.gā tumhāre baa’d
Tum KHush-nasīb rahe jo chale ga.e pahle
Ke zahr ho ga.ii aab-o-havā tumhāre baa’d
Takallufī kī ye ‘aadat tumheñ kahāñ se lagī
Jab us ne pūchhā to maine kahā tumhāre baa’d
Kabhī ye Gam ke ye dil ab kahīñ lagegā nahīñ
Kabhī ye Dar kahīñ lagne lagā tumhāre baa’d
Meet the poet
Virat Nehru, 30, was born in Delhi, grew up across Lucknow, Prayagraj, Meerut and Bhopal, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. He turned to poetry, he says, as a response to bullies, when he was growing up. “ You want to know what our history truly is? Read poetry,” he says. “I like to think that astute poets are actually historians. The world around us is constantly in flux – how we interact with each other, socio-political issues, the language we speak, surviving a pandemic – poetry is a witness to all these changes.”
Poetry itself is changing. In India, protest poetry, hip-hop, and spoken word or performance works have emerged as popular genres. “One reason why protest poetry in Urdu has emerged so strongly is because of the othering of Urdu as a language seen as one solely belonging to Muslims,” he says. “That’s a dangerous lie.” Varun Grover’s Hum Kagaz Nahin Dikhayenge was written amid Citizenship (Amendment) Bill protests in 2019. Aamir Aziz’s fiery Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega, came out of the 2020 attacks on students at JNU, Delhi.
And the lines between some art forms are blurring, again. “People can no longer recognise if something spoken has lyrical or poetic meaning unless it’s accompanied by guitar!” he says. “I say this facetiously, but there’s some kernel of truth to it. No one has time to read poetry. No one actually buys poetry books anymore. Performance poetry, at least, gets bums on seats. But my goodness, 90% of it is goddamn insufferable!”
A collection of haikus
By Akhila Mohan CG
I
virgin mojito
my first day of
abstinence
II
house warming
end of age-old
rituals
III
new home
a koel’s relentless
yearning
IV
new home
till its scent
gets into my skin
V
full moon night
the lovers
consummate their love
VI
a sparrow on the sill…
her phone chimes
one last time
VII
empty bed
she sprawls over
once again
Meet the poet
Akhila Mohan CG, 36, is a Bengaluru-based poet and author. She took to poetry during the pandemic, to process her experiences as a survivor of domestic violence and a miscarriage. Mohan works with haikus, a Japanese form in which a poem has three lines, with five syllables in the first, seven in the second, and five in the third.
Her debut collection, Tamarind: Sweet and Sour Poems About Love, Loss, Longing and Life, released in 2021. “Haiku is not very mainstream, but a lot of experimentation is being done in this space as well,” she says. “Haiku poets are more open to experimentation with their syllabic count and structure. Poets translating English haiku into regional languages, a welcome sign for the form.”
The form seems especially suited for the short attention spans on social media. And haiku clubs and poets abound on Twitter and Instagram. Mohan warns against chasing numbers at the cost of one’s craft. “The only Instagram poet I follow is Aditya Rahbaar whom I have recently explored. I read his works almost every day,” she says. She prefers haiku by Shloka Shankar, Kala Ramesh, and Lee Gurga, and poems by Kamala Das, Jayant Mahapatra, Urvashi Bahuguna, Jerry Pinto, and Ranjit Hoskote.
Forgiveness
By Akhil Katyal
I carry it
like a paper-pressed rose,
like an old stamp,
like a ticket stub
to a forgotten show.
Whenever I hold it
I am careful
that it does not fall
to pieces in my hands.
One day
you might ask for it.
Meet the poet
Akhil Katyal, 37, published his third book, Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, in 2020. He also teaches the creative writing Master’s programme at Ambedkar University’s The School of Culture and Creative Expressions. But it’s Katyal’s poem posts on platforms like Instagram that have catapulted him to the limelight in the last few years.
Don’t confuse contemporary poetry with just what appears on online feeds, he says. Social media is also giving a boost to names that would otherwise have echoed only in college classrooms. “From Langston Hughes to Dorothy Parker, from Mahmoud Darwish to Mary Oliver, from Vinod Kumar Shukla to Uday Prakash, poets who are deeply influential in their original printed book forms, acquire a new circulation, a new distributability, if I may, on the digital,” Katyal says. “Their poems are … spliced into new contexts, read by new readers, they jump through hoops and reach places.”
Katyal is drawn to poets such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Ruth Padel and Agha Shahid Ali. He started writing poems while in school in Lucknow. He began sharing his work on Facebook in the late 2000s and enjoyed the softer interface the platform allowed. “It allowed me to say things other genres didn’t allow” he says. He also posted poems on Twitter, but found his niche on Instagram.
A persuasive poem, he says, will create its own magic circle, regardless of where it is being read. “As long as we don’t replace the library with the digital, as long as we can keep both those forms of reading and thinking alive and coexisting, I think there is no reason to be looking only towards or only away from the past,” he says.
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From HT Brunch, May 20, 2023
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