Monsoon in Kerala
We
had only five readers attending; three cancelled at the last minute,
and a number of others were on tour. Amidst this plentiful monsoon,
we had a meagre gathering. But five became eight, thanks to virtual attendance
via the Dropbox.
Shoba, Pamela, KumKum
This
was the first session designed to popularise the Dropbox file sharing
method, which avoids having to pass around copies of the poems on
paper for other readers. The copying expense is eliminated, and
saving paper saves forests.
A
general help for Dropbox is to be found at
Besides,
Joe has provided pointers on on how to record a voice file and upload it, in case the reader is on tour but wishes to participate virtually by
uploading the audio reading, a commentary, and biographical data of
the author. Moreover, the shared files can be made available offline at the reading,
on the readers' devices, even when there is no Internet
access.
Shoba, Pamela, KumKum
Three
of the poets had never been read before: O.N.V. Kurup, the
celebrated Malayalam poet, Calvin Triffin, an American poet given to
light verse and humour, and Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American.
The other poets have all appeared on our lips before: Shakespeare,
Byron, Vikram Seth, and Maya Angelou.
KumKum, Preeti
Talitha
was to put in an appearance from TVM but couldn't come on account of a
Delhi trip. Joe read her short submission, a meditation by a native
American of the Choctaw Nation, Rev. Steven Charleston.
Here we are five in number physically, enhanced to eight by Dropbox virtually:
Pamela, KumKum, Preeti, Shoba, Joe
Full
Account and Record of the Poetry Session June 3, 2016
Present:
Shoba, Pamela, KumKum, Joe, Preeti
Absent:
Thommo (called away to church at the last moment), Zakia (away on
tour), Sunil (Masonic Lodge work), Priya (away on tour), Talitha
(trip to Delhi), Kavita (last minute guest), Saras (last minute
guest)
The
next readings have been fixed and the dates are on the blog site:
Fri
Jul 1, 2016 – Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Fri
Aug 5, 2016 – Poetry.
Fri
Sep 24, 2016 – The Gropes by Tom Sharpe
1.
Gopa
Rabindranath Tagore
This is the beginning of the joyous monsoon season and Gopa decided to select a poem on rain, and who better to descant on the subject than Rabindranath Tagore? Gopa selected one of his monsoon poems and submitted voice files of her reading the poem on rain ( Rabindranath has written so many). It is called Brishti pore tapur tupur, and you can listen to the Bengali by clicking on the link. She recited the English translation, The rain falls pitter-patter, which can also be heard by clicking on the link.
Joe
took the liberty of adding a rather romantic Hindi song, on rain and
lovers. It is Zindagi
Bhar Nahin Bhulegi Woh Basaat Ki Raath, sung by Mohammed Rafi,
from the film Barsaat Ki Raath; Salil
Chowdhury is the music composer. Again you can hear it by
clicking on the link.
2.
KumKum
O.N.V. Kurup
ONV
Kurup was a celebrated Malayalam poet, lyricist, and essayist. He was
also a professor of Malayalam Literature, and taught two generations
of students at various Colleges and Universities in Kerala. His
success as a lyricist for Malayalam film songs may have overshadowed
his other achievements, and but it gained him great popularity. His
lyrics were scored by well-known music composers like Devarajan
Master and Salil Chowdhury.
Kurup
died on February 13, 2016 at the age of 86. He and his wife enjoyed a
long married life. They had two children, a daughter who is a
practicing medical doctor in the UK; and a son, who works for the
Indian Railways.
ONV
received many awards for his literary achievements; the Jnanpith
Award and the Padma Vibhushan were among them. Interestingly, he also
received the Filmfare award 13 times for the Best Lyricist. Besides,
he got the National Film Award for the Best Lyricist, twice. ONV was
honoured with numerous other awards for his poems and lyrics. I met
poet ONV at the Hay Festival in Trivandrum in Nov 2010. I listened to
him recite his poems and answer questions from the audience. One of
the poems he recited had this beautiful analogy, describing the Sun
as the husband and the nine planets as his wives; the fruitful Earth,
being his favourite among them.
O
mother Earth,
Most
favourite bride of the blazing sun,
You've
lost your pristine bridal dress.
It
was reported in our blog at
Since
I do not know Malayalam, I missed a great deal that afternoon.Yet, I
think the encounter was thrilling. I found ONV to be a very patient
and mild spoken man. Unfortunately, I could not find English
translations of his poems online; but there is a collection of his
poems, titled This Ancient Lyre, translated by various people,
published by the Sahitya Akademi, edited by A.J. Thomas:
However,
I have a copy of his long (150-page) fiction-poem called Ujjayini
in an English translation by A.J. Thomas, editor of the Sahitya
Akademi literary magazine, Indian Literature. The poem is
about Kalidasa's unrequited love for Malavika. Yes, the same poet who
composed the long poem Meghadut in the 5th century AD. I shall
read two passages where Malavika is introduced to the reader.
The
first passage begins
Is
there, on words, the fragrance
of
soil after fresh showers?
Kalidasa,
invited to the court of Vikramaditya, was one among the Navaratnas at
his court. He catches sight of Malavika and this verse marks his
first introduction to her and notes:
Is
it the rising thrill
of
the earth cuddled by rain?
Or
a rustic Malwa maiden
in
wet clothes after menstrual bath
and
disentangling her hair,
bashfully
bending her head?
In
the second passage the news has reached the emperor that Malavika,
whom the emperor coveted, is secretly meeting the poet, Kalidasa.
Vikramaditya ruminates
Is
she the sweetheart of
the
poet, whose fame's
cool
moonbeams make this
Ujjayini
shine brighter?
Whatever
that be, can he
forfeit
the maiden he coveted?
3.
Talitha
Steven Charleston
Talitha
could not come but submitted a short meditation to the Dropbox, by a
native American poet of the Choctaw Nation, Episcopal Bishop Steven
Charleston. He has made a habit of daily writing down a prayerful
reflection, and over time the reflections have been collected in a
book called Cloud Walking.
Joe read the poem, reading for Talitha.
Charleston
instructs the weary soul
… you
are more beautiful than sunrise.
Don’t
stop now.
There
is so much more for you to be
and
so many surprises just around the corner.
4.
Saras
Vikram Seth
Saras submitted a number of poems of Vikram Seth from his recent collection Summer Requiem, but being detained at the last moment by unannounced guests, she was not there to express her appreciation. Fortunately, Joe had heard VS recite the villanelle Can't at the Hay Festival in TVM. There's a picture of the poet with KumKum in the blog at
with
the ending lines of the delightful villanelle inscribed:
I
must, I simply must get out of bed
And
press that reset button in my head.
You
must read the poem. And look on the page at the signature of VS in
Malayalam!
5.
Shoba
Maya Angelou
Shoba chose Maya Angelou as her poet, perhaps after Shakespeare, the most recited poet at KRG sessions. It is titled When Great Trees Fall, and tells the effect on us of great personages falling away from our lives. They leave a feeling on un-feeling and the poem describes this state and ends by saying
Our
senses, restored, never
to
be the same, whisper to us.
They
existed. They existed.
We
can be. Be and be
better.
For they existed.
So,
though they are gone they leave a residue that lives and inspires us.
6.
Joe
Calvin Trillin
Calvin Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935 and graduated from Yale in 1957. He wrote for Time magazine and published an article on civil rights in 1963 for the New Yorker about integrating the university of Georgia. Ever since he has been a staff writer there. From 1967 to 1972 he wrote a series of articles for the New Yorker about USA, travelling around the country.
But
what made him a poet was a piece he published in The Nation titled If
You Knew what Sununu. The poem works because Americans pronounce
'knew' as 'nu.' John Sununu was elder President Bush’s chief of
staff, and Governor of New Hampshire before that. It goes like this
If
you knew what Sununu
Knows
about quantum physics and Greek
And
oil explorations and most favored nations
And
the secret handshake of Deke,
Maybe
you, too, like Sununu,
Would
adopt a principal rule,
That
you are the brightest, your light the lightest,
And
everyone else is a fool.
Trillin
has been writing for The Nation since 1978, and contributed a
poem a week (published as Deadline Poet in 1994); there’s a
book of poems called The Bush Administration in Rhyme, which
came out in 2004.
Trillin
was married to his wife Alice since 1965; she died in 2001. He has
two daughters, and has published over 30 books, including 3 novels.
He was awarded the Thurber prize for American Humour in 2012.
He
said he always felt he was a bit off-centre and it started with one
time in school when he heard a verse from the Bible, and got up and
did a parody of it, which got him ejected from the class. Trillin
says being funny in print is a whole different game from being funny
as a stand-up comedian where timing is everything; lines which when
written out don’t sound funny can be so when mouthed by a
professional. His father who became a restaurant owner used to write
2-line rhymes about food, and have it displayed.
As a
columnist with deadlines to meet he said he would start writing and
eventually think of something. All subjects are game for humorous
verse, even the Holocaust, with the passage of time, according to
him. Exaggeration is a tool in the hands of the humour writer. For
example, he once wrote that the language laws in Quebec are so strict
that in a school assembly in that province you can’t show a film of
English-speaking mimes!
Two
poems were planned but only the one about the varieties of Chinese
cooking was read by Joe. The other one about the Y2K bug (which was
to bring civilisation to a halt in the year 2000) is in mono-rhyme,
i.e., a single rhyme runs throughout the poem at the end of every
line; that poem is even better in its humour.
7.
Pamela
Naomi Shihab Nye
Her choice was Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian American poet who has spent time in Jerusalem. Her poems issue from everyday life in the streets, and she is considered an international poet. She was educated in San Antonio, Texas. Her first collection Different Ways to Pray (1980), explores experiences of different cultures. She has continued to publish poetry and one of her collections won the Voertman Poetry Prize. In another collection she has confronted the Palestine-Israel conflict.
She
is an active voice for Arab-Americans and made a collection of her
poems to reflect that experience, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems
of the Middle East (2002) . She has also made poetry recordings
for children and done translations. She is an acclaimed children's
writer, and wrote a novel for young adults called Habibi. The
word means 'my love' or 'sweetheart' in Arabic. She claims
that to counteract negativity “writers must steadily transmit
simple stories closer to heart and more common to everyday life. Then
we will be doing our job.”
8.
Preeti
George Gordon Lord Byron
Preeti arrived late and we did not have her poems in our Dropbox. I put it there later. The two poems are, She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron, and Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? by William Shakespeare. Preeti drew her pairing of the poems from the 1989 film, Dead Poet's Society (the late Robin Williams was the teacher, who repeated the slogan 'Carpe Diem' to the the boys in school). She said she would justify her pairing and its connection with the film later.
The
first poem eloquently etches a picture of the woman in the reader's
mind and one cannot help asking: who was she? It was Anne Hathaway,
his cousin by marriage whom Lord Byron met at a gala event, and being
overawed by her beauty wrote this poem that very night. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_Walks_in_Beauty
We
have no idea of the provenance of Sonnet 18. About whom did WS write
this?
But
thy eternal summer shall not fade,
William Shakespeare, the Cobbe portrait
But what we can say is the lines are eternal and the woman will not fade from memory because WS has graven this ending couplet:
So
long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So
long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Readings
The poems are available to KRG readers in the KRG Dropbox on the Web. They will be transferred here shortly to make them accessible to everyone who reads the post on this blog.
1. Gopa
Her introduction to the poem by Rabindranth Tagore is here.
Here is the recitation in Bengali of the poem Brishti pore tapur-tupur
And here is the English translation.
2. KumKum
3. Talitha
4. Saras
5. Shoba
6. Joe
7. Pamela
8. Preeti
1. Gopa
Her introduction to the poem by Rabindranth Tagore is here.
Here is the recitation in Bengali of the poem Brishti pore tapur-tupur
And here is the English translation.
2. KumKum
3. Talitha
4. Saras
5. Shoba
6. Joe
7. Pamela
8. Preeti
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