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
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.
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.
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.
