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.