POET-CRITIC SNEHAL VADHER WEIGHS IN ON
The HarperCollins Book of
English Poetry
edited by Sudeep Sen
This anthology is a welcome addition to a line of anthologies
that have been challenging and expanding ideas about Indian English Writing.
This trend begins with A. K. Mehrotra’s illustrious The Oxford India
Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, published in 1992, a book that served
as a textbook for a generation of poets and helped establish Nizzim Ezekiel,
Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawala and A. K. Ramanujan as the first truly modern Indian
poets in their engagement with present realities in and through the medium of
English.
Then in 1994 came Ramanujan’s
and Dharwadker’s The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, opening
inner borders and familiarising English readers with poetry written in several of
India’s regional languages. More recently, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary
Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil and published in 2006, is noteworthy
for bringing together writers from different and distant geographies and
cultures whose writing is nonetheless closely knit with India’s languages and
cultures.
The HarperCollins Book of English
Poetry, published last year, comes close to the ideology of the
Bloodaxe anthology in presenting a wide variety of diasporic writing. Sen
spells out this perspective in the Foreword: “The poets who are presented in
these pages live in India and the broader Indian diasporas such as the United
States and Canada, United Kingdom and Europe, Africa and Asia, Australia and
the Pacific. This diversity and multicultural representation allow the poets to
have an internal dialogue between themselves and the varied topographical
cultural spaces they come from or are influenced by.”
Like the Bloodoaxe anthology, it
also brings together several well-established poets alongside relatively
unknown and unpublished ones. Thus one comes across familiar names in the
business, like Vijay Seshadri, Ranjit Hoskote, Daljit Nagra and Meena Alexander
alongside someone like Desmond Kharmawphlang, a poet and folklorist from
Shillong, whose poetry blends an honest voice with sharp imagery, as is evident
in a poem like 'Laami – 18 July 2002':
By the light of the bonfire
I sit quietly listening to
the murmur of branches.
Leaves fall like stars from
the sky and pile up on
the mossy floor. You say we
are condemned to witness
this theatre of guilt and I
yield my defence to your
knife-edged clarity. The hours
we have abandoned tumble
like spiralling doom to bury us
in the chill of sculptured
night.
Whatever happened to the pact of
the summer sun? Though
embracing, we shiver in the
garden
of syllables and groan
in the emptiness of
midnights’ luminescence.
Or someone like Aditi Machado,
whose poetry is refreshingly experimental with syntax and meaning, as in 'Learning
a Foreign Language', the opening poem of the anthology:
You
are attempting to describe your body.
There
are empty spaces where skin was, bone, muscle, fat.
You
would call them wounds if you had the word.
Absent organs if you were a poet.
‘There
was a lover with a great knife. There was thunder.
He
came and cut me. Then a count appeared, kissed,
healed
me back to speech.’
Or:
You’re
standing on a rock with fast water about you.
The
next rock is a leap too far and has the glint of scalpel.
The
wind rushes at you, full-blooded.
All
this ravenous water might consume you, leaf.
You’re
stuck in vocal paralysis till you’re shot with drugs:
a new word falling like a log
so
you can cross over, learn to say I love you/ have some tea?
These poets may be well-known
within their local or even national poetry reading circuits but often tend to
get overshadowed by the bigger names. The anthology remedies this scenario by
presenting them without any bias of literary reputation, good or bad.
In fact, this trait reflects the
outlook Sen has taken with regards to unpublished poetry, which occupies the majority
of space in The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry. “Over
ninety percent of the eighty-five poets have specially contributed new work for
this book,” Sen mentions in the Foreword. He continues, “Carrying new and
unpublished work is a major departure from other available anthologies, where
some editors of these volumes have shown a tendency to mostly pick work from
already published books or from existing older anthologies.” This distinctive
feature of the book—one that no doubt assists excellent online magazines and
journals in the slow but sure decanonisation of literature—also compounds the
book’s selection criterion for unpublished poetry. The editor’s intention to be
all-inclusive in his selection processes does not translate into an unbiased
picture, as eventually it passes through the filter of an individual’s
aesthetic.
The processes are specified in a
Hindustan Times interview with Sen. Here, we read that “Apart from poets from
his own generation like Vikram Seth, Jeet Thayil and Jerry Pinto whose work he
is familiar with, Sen scoured online magazines, followed up on recommendations
from young people whose work he had judged at competitions, and sent out an
open letter asking for submissions[1].”
These processes may be
considered unorthodox but they do seem to open up a dam of truly
interesting procedures to generate material for future anthologies. However,
the selection is finally narrowed down to a stream by the criterion of Sen’s
own aesthetic preferences and taste[2].
And here, the fact that these works are previously unpublished, that there is a
lack of editorial or critical response to these poems, does not come to the
rescue. This is not to say that the poetry chosen and presented is “bad in
quality.” Given the volume of the book—all of 500 pages—and its wide breadth,
it would be impossible to make any such generalising statement.
Another selection criterion was
to include work only by poets born during or after the year 1950, since the
book’s publication was projected to coincide with India’s fiftieth year as a
Republic. Though this allows Sen to make visible younger and therefore less
exposed talent, it also implies a decisive breaking away from tradition. The
value and significance of the work of poets like Arun Kolatkar, Jayanta
Mahapatra, Keki Daruwalla and Adil Jussawala, for example, exceeds the hallowed
but hollow status that Indians, especially, are too quick to bestow on anything
traditional. While the latter three are still alive and writing, none of them
is included in the anthology. Given the fact this decision follows from
imposing a criterion based on an arbitrary date—1950—and perhaps reflecting a
fondness for numerological niceties we all have, it becomes largely detrimental
to the overall selection presented here. In this light, it is perhaps
instructive to look at the Bloodaxe anthology, and note the Janus-faced stance
it adopts with respect to tradition, including even Ezekiel and Chitre along
with contemporary writers like Sridala Swami and Monica Ferrell.
The exclusion of a writer as
vital as Kolatkar, for instance, drains the book of the critical and creative
dialogue ongoing between his poetry and that written by the present generations
represented here. If we turn once again to Jeet Thayil’s selection, we find in
it, apart from a valuable extract from Adil Jussawalla’s second book, Missing
Person, an excellent short essay by A. K. Mehrotra which explores Kolatkar’s
American influences and inverts all conventional notions of “Indianness” in his
poetry. But this is just one artery in the network of cross-cultural influences
and references that remain unmapped in the anthology and may leave the reader clueless
as to the development of contemporary poetry.
Sen chooses to believe this is
an advantage over other anthologies that present a clearly outlined framework: “I
decided that I want the poems themselves to primarily create their own
aesthetic and critical discourse without the aid of someone hand-holding the
reader. I believe that eventually only the printed word and its success as a
piece of creative text or artifact on the page matter — and no critical jargon,
contextualization, footnotes, and explanations are really required.” However
tempting this picture looks, it is idealistic and far from the ground reality
of literary appreciation.
Critical
concerns aside, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry does introduce both
the uninitiated and initiated reader of English poetry to a surprisingly wide variety
of voices and styles. Between its covers there are many poets to discover and
refresh our notions of poetry originating from within and outside India, though
somehow still Indian.
There
are many poets that will speak out especially to today’s younger generations,
which thrive on the rapid cosmolopitanisation and assimilation of foreign
cultures into their own native cultures, traits that are visible throughout the
poetry presented here.
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