Poetry Session – 25 October, 2024

 Arundhaty chose a prize-winning poem by Marilyn K Walker called The Clothesline, lamenting the obsolescence of that humble backyard device which allowed neighbourly information to be passed on unwittingly:

When neighbors knew each other best

By what hung on the line!

Marilyn K. Walker – The Clothesline cover

Devika featured one of India’s best known poets, Keki Daruwalla, who died recently in Delhi on Sept 24. You may read his obituary here. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1987 and the Padma Shri – the highest civilian honour – in 2014. His poem on Migrations conveys the deep anguish of things left behind, including precious memories, when people are uprooted, as his family was from Lahore where he was born in 1937.

Somebody said cats are the only animals that look down on humans. Geetha’s poem by Vikram Seth concerns a cat endearingly observed with its patronising actions recorded; it takes full advantage of the narrator to avail of goodies:
He is permitted food and I
The furred indulgence of a side. 

Vikram Seth – Spoiled Cat

Joe thought the time was ripe to hear from poet Thien, when dissents across the world are being put down in societies as varied as USA, UK, Russia, and Germany. In India too a series of speech cancellations of well-known scholars in the name of conformity, has given rise to censorship. The Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien was willing to suffer years of imprisonment for exercising his right to speak freely. Why are poets so feared by mighty governments?

Kavita presented Philip Larkin in a much-anthologised dark poem which negates the joys of expectations with which lovers wait and gamblers hesitate. Contradicting the proverb All things come to those who wait, the golden future never arrives, but what is certain to come is that one black ship (of death) towing
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

Philip Larkin with his Rolleiflex camera, 1957

Philip Larkin, England’s laureate of despair, is ironically observing the absurdity of society and culture, and thinking that all expectation will turn cold, which runs counter to WS who has Helena say in All’s Well That Ends Well:
Oft expectation fails and most oft there
Where most it promises, and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.

Emily Dickinson, the monastic poet of Amherst has been a great favourite at KRG. Joe once wrote about a visit he and KumKum paid to her haunts. That blog post has exhaustive biographical material as well, including the online digital availability of her work from Harvard University in collaboration with other institutions. She began a famous poem of hers (#1263):
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Here KumKum presented a second one (#320) where the poet writes:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons:
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –

Priya’s poem Shades of Anger by the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah was very relevant to the contemporary woes that beset her people whose homes are being destroyed and people killed by American-made 2000-pound bombs that continue to be delivered on demand to Israel in order to reduce Gaza to rubble:

I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
And did you hear my sister screaming yesterday
as she gave birth at a check point

…
Yes my liberators are here to kill my children
and call them “collateral damage”

Saras took up the master poet W.H. Auden whose first submission to Faber & Faber was rejected by T.S. Eliot (who was its Director) in 1927 only to have Auden’s first collection Poems published by the same firm in 1930. The poem Funeral Blues was recited in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) by Matthew (played by actor John Hannah) who is mourning the death of his partner Gareth, a much older man played by Simon Callow:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,

Shoba recited two wonderful poems by Elizabeth Jennings, who was popular with the general reader for writing about the things that preoccupy most readers – family, faith, love, loss, illness, hope, atonement, redemption. Her Catholic faith comes through and animates her poems. Of the self-portraits by Rembrandt in old age she writes:
Self-portraits understand
And old age can divest,
With truthful changes, us of fear of death.

Rembrandt self-portrait 1659 from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond.

Our last poet was Rudyard Kipling whose most famous poem is Gunga Din in which he exalts the compassionate role of a bhisti in the army at the battlefront. Zakia chose If—, a poem that is almost mandated in middle schools in India for elocution contests.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
…
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

When all these conditions are fulfilled Kipling assures us your manhood is guaranteed. Kipling wrote this poem as a piece of advice to his dear son, John Kipling, on how to navigate life with integrity and character. He was killed in World War I at the age of eighteen during the Battle of Loos on September 27, 1915.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien – Sep 24, 2024

 

The Hobbit 1937 First Edition

Tolkien in The Hobbit was writing a high-fantasy adventure whose origins, linguistic as well as mythological, lie in Old English and Nordic tales dating from ca. 1,000AD. He himself translated Beowulf, an early work completed in 1926 but Tolkien never considered its publication.  His son Christopher edited and had it published by HarperCollins posthumously in May 2014. 

Beowulf- A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell

That classic Old English epic poem tells the tale of how Beowulf the warrior  kills Grendel, the marauding sea monster and its mother, but dies in the end fighting a dragon driven to fury by a servant stealing a cup. This bears a resemblance to Bilbo Baggins stealing the Arkenstone from the hoard of treasure that Smaug the fiery dragon was guarding in his lair.

Smaug the dragon laying waste Laketown

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in 1937 in a dialect of English that is unlike anything a reader will encounter in modern prose. Many of the verbs are conjugated in an ancient fashion, for example: “he knew how evil and danger had grown and thriven in the Wild.“ 

Tolkien as a schoolboy

Tolkien was early introduced to Anglo-Saxon grammar at his school and his interest in Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Welsh, remained strong throughout middle and high school. No surprise then that he became a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and brought out editions of the Old English classics. When he invented the hobbits they seemed to him to embody the gentleness, understated reliability and courage he loved.

About how the tale arose in his mind he wrote to fellow don and fabulist C.S. Lewis: “All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On the blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why."

‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit‘

Romantic Poetry Session - 19 August, 2024

 

Four of the major Romantic Poets were on exhibit at this session: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron.  Women poets of the romantic era were included – Mary Robinson and Felicia Heymans, and one who belongs to the Victorian age of poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. William Cullen Bryant was the only poet from outside Britain.

Collage of Romantic Poets – Byron, Hemans, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Robinson

The poems were all new and captivating. Keats marvelled at Byron:

Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!

Attuning still the soul to tenderness,

Byron lamented the separation from his wife Milbanke, and especially from their daughter Ada. She was to become famous in her own right as the world’s first programmer – of an autonomous computing machine called the Difference Engine invented by Charles Babbage. Byron writes to Milbanke:

When her little hands shall press thee,

When her lip to thine is pressed,

Think of him whose prayer shall bless thee,

Think of him thy love had blessed!

Shelley – The Esdaile Notebook (the original volume)

Shelley – The Esdaile Notebook published in 1963

Shelley likewise is writing to his first wife Harriet from whom he soon separated. But before the break he wrote several poems filled with romantic sentiments in his Esdaile Notebook of 56 poems which remained unpublished until 1964. This one to Harriet tugs at the heartstrings:

For a heart as pure and a mind as free 

As ever gave lover, to thee I give,

And all that I ask in return from thee

Is to love like me and with me to live.

Wordsworth came alive with his sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us, which emphasises humankind’s lack of attention to things that matter, instead being preoccupied with

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Modern time wasting on mobile phones

This provoked thought among the readers on similar but not identical activities in which moderns fritter away their time, ignoring Nature –  ‘we are out of tune,’ Wordsworth says. Joe was engaged to write a modernised version of Wordsworth’s sonnet referring to our Amazon buying, and our fixation on mobile phone screens. Which he has done and included in the blog below.

Setting aside the childhood poem Casabianca which everyone must have learned in middle school, Saras chose Felicia Hemans’ poem The Spanish Chapel. A mother who has lost a child is commiserating her in a chapel’s cemetery:

The soft lip's breath was fled,

And the bright ringlets hung so still—

  The lovely child was dead!

It is a tender moment when the mother is descried nearby, yielding

  An angel thus to Heaven!"

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

From Hemans we veered to the marvellous poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had the good fortune, though, disabled, to find a kindred spirit in another great poet, Robert Browning. The sonnets she wrote for him must rank as love poetry that will live forever. Fortunate are those young lovers even today who have read Sonnets from the Portuguese, in each other’s company. 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng – July 19,2024

 

The Garden Of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, first edition Nov 2011 by Myrmidon Books

Aritomo Nakamura is the Emperor’s ex-gardener who was let go for some reason went to Malaya, and made his own garden, Yugiri, in the Cameron Highlands, a tea-growing area similar to our Munnar in Kerala. Later the heroine of the book, Yun Ling,  who was taken prisoner with her sister Yun Hong by the Japanese military in WWII, comes to live in the Cameron Highlands during the time of the Communist insurgency, and decides to build a Japanese garden in memory of her sister who suffered as a ‘comfort woman’ for the Japanese and was ultimately killed in a mine explosion.

Tea Growing in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

That leads to the unique association of Yun Ling with Nakamura Aritomo, who promises to teach her how to build a Japanese garden. They labour  with helpers daily and ultimately become emotionally close. Aritomo is not only a gardener but had established himself as a wood-block print artist, in the tradition of the great Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). The Great Wave off Kanagawa by him, is among the most well-known works of Japanese art. It is one of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of landscape prints made by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist.

Hokusai (c1831) 'The Great Wave' at Kanagawa – the stupendous work shows the great azure wave rising and flexing its claws over a dauntless little Fuji in the distance

Ukiyo-e is the genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as 'picture[s] of the floating world.’

The novel deals at length with the ideals and aims of garden design in Japan, as these gardens get replicated in Malaysia. There are not only religious principles like Zen Buddhism, but philosophic principles of minimalistic design that pervade the structure of Japanese gardens. Rocks are distributed to emphasise some aspect of what is being commemorated in the garden. The planted trees are placed to extend the human imagination beyond the immediate physical limits. Ponds and basins of water are strategically located so that it is only upon accessing a definite point of eminence that a sudden view emerges, combining the far distant objects with the  surroundings.

Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco

The charm of restraint is an essential aspect. Beauty must be concealed so that it surprises the onlooker. The Sakuteiki (作庭記), or A Record of Garden Making, is the oldest known Japanese text on gardening practices in the shinden-zukuri (寝殿造り) estates, and dates from the late Heian period (794-1185). Aritomo in the present novel is the exponent of that tradition and brings it to bear upon the garden Yun Ling wants to design in memory of her sister, Yun Hong who perished in the war. He takes her on as an apprentice to construct the garden.

The horimono takes shape on Yun Ling's back – from the movie

Horimono refers in this novel to the practice of traditional tattooing in Japanese culture, usually describing full-body tattoos done in the traditional style. Considerable attention is given to horimono; it deepens the association between Yun Ling and Aritomo. The details of the design may also conceal something. Many ukiyo-e artists also did horimono, and the tattoo artist of such intricate body designs was called a horoshi. The multi-talented Aritomo is not only a gardener, but a ukiyo-e artist and a horoshi. In the concluding act of the novel Aritomo completes a horimono on the back of Yun Ling. It is an act of supreme artistry as well as amorous intimacy.

Poetry Session, June 14, 2024

It is marvellous to think a Sufi poet from the 13th century, Jalal al-Din Muḥammad Rumi, is a best-selling poet today. A death poem of his was recited, full of aphoristic couplets, translated by Farrukh Dhondy, the British writer of Parsi Indian origin. Rumi wrote his famous work, the Masnavi in six volumes over a period of 12 years. Here is a manuscript dating from 1461 of the first book:

First book of the six-volume Masnavi of Rumi, which was written over a period of 12 years

Rumi writes in the poem that was read:

The grave is not the sum of a life complete 

It is but the veil beyond which bride and groom retreat. 

A long poem by a forgotten poet Robert Service commemorated the final resting place of a gold prospector Sam McGee who was frozen stiff in the northern wilds of Alaska. He made his buddy promise to bury him in a warm place. It has a surprising end, written in a racy ballad metre.

Another forgotten poet Edward Thomas from the WWI era was resurrected to demonstrate the tender feeling he had for nature. His description of trees is surprising: 

The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

 

Aspens are one of the more popular forest trees in the West. They add a brilliant yellow glow to the collage of fall colors

Thomas talks about the silence of the woods and nature’s ability to captivate the meditative soul; this gives him a place among the important minor poets who preceded the great ferment of modernism. A wonderful paean he wrote for English words is a reminder that poets, above all, are devotees of words:

You English words?
…
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,

Our own Vikram Seth was represented in the session with two poems from his first book of poems, Mappings, published in 1980 by P. Lal’s Writer’s Workshop; that publication house is still going strong after 60 years, with P. Lal’s son, retired professor Ananda Lal, guiding it. The first works of authors as varied as Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Asif Currimbhoy and Ruskin Bond, came out in those distinctive hand-set, hand-printed and hand-bound covers with old saree fabrics.

Vikram Seth‘s Mappings, published by Writer's Workshop

Frank O’Hara was a seminal poet of New York City in the fifties and sixties when he became known as a poet and art critic. He met his longtime partner Vincent Warren, a handsome Canadian ballet dancer, in the summer of 1959. Warren became the inspiration for several of O'Hara's poems. We read a poem about the cityscape of New York detailing its life, much of it ordinary:
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin.

Sometimes one has trouble finding the poetry in such lines.

But such trouble does not arise when you contemplate Matsuo Basho’s 17th century haikus. Six moments in nature, captured and frozen in the briefest of lines, were exhibited at the reading; here is one
How admirable!
To see lightning and not think
Life is fleeting

In Japanese:
inazuma ni
satoranu hito no
tattosa yo

Haiku by Basho ‘How admirable, to see lightning, and not think life is fleeting’

We are the fortunate few in KRG whose spirits are restored from time to time at these sessions. Read on.

Educated, by Tara Westover, May 26, 2024

 

Educated by Tara Westover, first edition cover

The book is a memoir, a biography, and since we do not read anything except fiction and poetry at KRG, an exception had to be made to accommodate this account of a young girl surviving a harsh childhood. All her individuality was undermined and she had to do whatever her domineering father and completely submissive mother told her. In the process she was denied even the basic free education that is everyone’s right as a child in America.

How she survived that repressive and culturally impoverished childhood and made it out of a small town to gain a foothold toward education, with texts borrowed from libraries and her brother, is the main thrust of the book. She takes the Aptitude Test (ACT) for college to make it out of Idaho to the Mormon inspired university called Brigham Young University (BYU); this forms an inspiring part of the memoir.

Brigham Youg Unviersity (BYU) campus with Y mountain and Kyhv Peak in the background

Along the way we learn that her father’s main source of income was ‘scrapping’, that is, dismantling junked vehicles, stripping them for parts and selling these in the grey market. Scrapping is a dangerous job, and involves the use of heavy machinery, blowtorches, cranes, and so on. The father employed his children as labour from a young age. Not only did this deprive them of time needed to pursue home schooling, but it also exposed them to the physical dangers of scrapping. We read nasty accounts of her and her sibling Shawn falling from heights and being gashed by projecting sharp edges of machinery, and suffering concussions. Ultimately, the father too suffers third degree burns from an exploding tank of gasoline and barely survives.

Tara's brother Shawn and wife, Emily

The family does not believe in modern medicine or hospitals. The mother makes a career of crushing and bottling herbs to sell them as remedies for all manner of ills. Later, it becomes such a thriving business with hired hands that they can afford a complete renovation and extension of the family home.  But like the Patanjali range of health cures, it all seems to be a scheme based on the gullibility of people for naturopathy.

After graduating from BYU where she is helped by a Mormon bishop to fund her studies, she gets a scholarship to go to Cambridge University in England, where she pursues historical studies. She wrote an essay which was praised by her tutor and she earned a Master’s degree from Trinity College, Cambridge being funded by a Gates Cambridge scholarship. After a brief stint in Harvard as a visiting fellow she returned to Cambridge University and secured her PhD there in 2014.

Tara Westover in Cambridge, England, 2018 Credit: Vogue

In 2018 Penguin Random House published her memoir written mainly while Tara Westover was in England. Many points were contested by her family; this prompted her mother LaRee to write a rejoinder, Educating, in 2020. 

LaRee and Val sit for an interview at home in Clifton, Idaho – she wrote her own memoir called ‘Educating’

The main issue was: did she suffer abuse at the hands of her brother Shawn in the book, as she describes, and did her parents neglect to do anything about it when she reported it to them. This is the most troubling aspect of the memoir: the physical abuse to the point of choking and dunking her face in a toilet bowl that she suffered on several occasions from her brother. The utter domination of her life by her father was a case of bipolar disorder, she alleges, never diagnosed and never treated.

The Tabernacle Choir of the Salt Lake Temple

There is a lot about Mormonism in the book, but what her family practised was a dangerously cultish form of the religion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and cannot be reconciled with the conservative, but non-extreme, beliefs of present day Mormons.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, April 23, 2024

AMND – The title page from the first quarto, printed in 1600.

We were celebrating the 460th birth anniversary of William Shakespeare. Many of us will remember the major way in which KRG celebrated the 450th birth anniversary with a week-long festival at David Hall, beginning with an opening ceremony on April 21, 2014.

This comedy from 1595 has one plot line about the marriage of Theseus, ruler of Athens, with Hippolyta, and two sub-plots. The major sub-plot involves two pairs of lovers who are confused about whom to marry because of the magical love juice spread by Puck, at the command of Oberon, King of the Fairies. The other sub-plot is a play within the play conducted by rough working men called ‘mechanicals’ concerning the story of Pyramus and Thisbe which they want to perform for the wedding ceremony of Theseus. Puck’s character is so memorable that ‘puckish’ has become a word to express playful humour.

The business about the wall in the play (the occasion for a very rude scene) is because Pyramus and Thisbe as mentioned by Ovid lived next-door to each other and spoke through the adjoining wall, after being forbidden by their parents to marry. The origin of the Romeo and Juliet story also lies in the same tale of Ovid.

We see many kinds of love on display: unrequited love (between Helena and Demetrius), love quarrels: (between Oberon and Titania). There’s passionate love too, parental love and mad sexual love. Shakespeare depicted them all in this short play. But one thing is assured:

The course of true love never did run smooth (Lysander)

Theseus speaks another truth:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

                                                                      

Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom (1848) painting by Edwin Landseer.

We even hear Bottom (the working man player who becomes the ass of Titania’s affections) exclaim after his other-worldly experience in fairyland:

The eye of

man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s

hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his

heart to report what my dream was.

He is employing a vision of St Paul from the first letter to the Corinthians, verse 2:9, expressing the epiphany that will be revealed to the blessed in the life to come, surpassing all human imagination. Though, being Bottom, he gets the quotation mixed up between ear and eye. Incidentally, the name Bottom comes from the next verse in Tyndale’s translation of the Bible (recall that the St James version came only after Shakespeare’s death): 

But God hath opened them vnto vs by his sprete.

For ye sprete searcheth all thinges ye the bottome of Goddes secretes.

(In the KJV this is rendered

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.)

After many mixups and fruitless pursuits Oberon intervenes with more love juice to pair the correct lovers, and his own beloved Titania too has been cured of her fascination for the ‘changeling’ and is content to please her husband with a gift of the boy.

All is well and the working men with their play and the lovers with their new-found happiness grace the occasion of the duke’s wedding. 

Puck delivers the parting oration

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:

if you pardon, we will mend:

You have but slumber'd here

Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut – Mar 26, 2024

 

Slaughterhouse-Five  First Edition, First Printing 

One of the strange facets of the novel is that there is no vivid description of the central event, the Dresden fire-bombing carried out by American and British bombers on the nights of Feb 13-15, 1945 when hundreds of planes dropped thousands of tons of bombs and incendiary explosives that destroyed the city of Dresden, and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants. 

Vonnegut perhaps found himself unequal to describing the horror directly that was visited on the city when he was there. They went down  two floors below the pavement into the big meat locker Schlachthöf-funf. Vonnegut said “It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.”

He continues:

“Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large, open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease.”

This is the view we do NOT get from the novel. Instead it is irony, satire, the gentle comedy of a soldier who has lost his marbles in the war, and hallucinates about aliens who have captured and taken him to their distant planet, and shown him how to do time travel, which allows him to go back and forth in an imagined fourth dimension. 

The trauma of Dresden is filtered through the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) of an American enlisted soldier, Billy Pilgrim. There is absolutely nothing about the trauma of the civilians who were burnt alive in Dresden, while Billy Pilgrim and his cohorts were cooling off two floors below in the cellar of the meat locker.

Of course, there is a lot of humour which Vonnegut extracts from the crazy situations in which war puts people:

“Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. 

An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. 

Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.”

Some have called it an anti-war novel. Perhaps it is better to characterise it as a novel that shows how people who have to endure war come out of it twisted and shattered by its horrors, and will possibly lose the equanimity needed to live a normal life, even if they end up on the victorious side. It is doubtful that Vonnegut takes a negative view of WWII at all, seeing as he enlisted and joined the war on his own. Recall that WWII in the European theatre was seen as pitting the forces of good against the Nazi evil.

These two pics will suffice to capture what Dresden was for centuries, and what it became within two days in February 1945. 

Dresden before the allied fire-bombing

Dresden after the allied fire-bombing on Feb 13-15, 1945

Poetry Session, 26 February, 2024

Kuttippuram Bridge over the Bharatapuzha is in the Ponnani region of Malappuram in Kerala. It was inaugurated in 1953 and built at a cost of Rs 23 Lakhs.

When readers at KRG choose their poems they cast a wide net. On this occasion we had a Malayalam poet, Edasseri Govindan Nair, represented by a poem. Malayalam poems are usually sung or chanted as chollal, but here it was delivered as the English translation of a modern poem of hope and longing; hope for the future made possible by a new bridge to transform the countryside, and longing for the old days. Other Malayalam poets who have been recited at KRG are K. Satchidanandan, Balachandran Chullikad, O.N.V. Kurup, Sugatha Kumari, Balamani Amma (mother of the poet Kamala Das), Kumaran Asan, and Chemmanam Chacko.

When one of our readers, Kavita, chose the ever popular Maya Angelou, Joe raised the question of who has been the most recited poet at KRG – after William Shakespeare, of course. The answer is Keats (13), then Eliot (11) and numerous Romantic poets with 8 occurrences. But how is it that Rumi, the most widely published poet in modern times, scarcely finds mention in the pages of KRG’s blog? He wrote lines like this (translated by Farrukh Dhondy)

Tomorrow is a hope – the dreamer’s way

The Sufi lives the moment, rejoices in today!

Amal Ahmed Albaz, born 1994, Canadian performance poet of Egyptian descent

Benjamin Zephaniah was the first performance poet we heard recited at KRG, way back in 2011 by Amita Palat. The music and rhythm of speaking comes naturally to someone of Barbadian-Jamaican descent. Britain has had a bright new wave of performance poets, for example, Kae West. At the session we heard a Canadian poet of Egyptian origin lament the bombing of Gaza in rap rhythm. When she recited it in Dec 2023 the destruction had been going on for 3 months, killing close to 20,000 Palestinians (mostly women and children), reducing much of the enclave to rubble and making the people homeless, facing starvation.

T.S. Eliot portrait by Gerald Festus Kelly, 1962

T.S. Eliot, ever popular at KRG was represented by two short poems that did not require the usual annotation to lay bare obscure meanings. In the first poem the poet hears the noise of plates in a basement kitchen rattling somewhere as he gazes on the street from a window, and then

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,

The second poem featured a fictional cousin of modern mores who smokes and dances all the fashionable dances. The poet holds up the censorious sight of Matthew and Waldo (that is, Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson) trained on Nancy Ellicott – not that she cares. The last line (‘The army of unalterable law.’) is taken from another poet, Meredith, but Eliot is contrasting his reference ironically with modern devil-may-care attitudes.

Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet whose rapturous odes to nature and animal life brought her critical acclaim

Mary Oliver was another outstanding presence at the session when Saras chose two of her poems. We know her poems from three earlier occasions when she has been presented. She is also the marvellous author of a handbook of poetry, that lays bare the mechanics of how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, being imbued with sound and sense. Mary Oliver employs wonderful examples, ancient and new, to illustrate her exposition. It will surprise no one that six of the ten poets chosen at this session were women.

Most prominent of these is The New Colossus, a Petrarchan sonnet (rhyming abba abba cdc dcd). The entire sonnet is engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and lines 10 and 11 are often quoted:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free


                                                                             

1903 bronze plaque engraved with ‘The New Colossus’ sonnet by Emma Lazarus is located in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

These words are a tribute to the diversity of America, which has been under threat from the masses who seek to enter America from its southern border. The press of poor people entering from Mexico is no longer a welcome sight to Democrats or Republicans. The original Colossus of Rhodes was a towering statue of Helios the sun god, built in 280 BCE to commemorate the defence of Rhodes against the attack of Demetrius. The sonnet of Emma Lazarus contrasts this ancient colossus with the Statue of Liberty presented by France as a symbol of liberty illuminating the world (La Liberté éclairant le monde).