Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume IX | Issue 4
Mrinalini Harchandrai, Deputy Editor
As our marble-blue home does its heliocentric revolution, we choose to mark time with poetry. Poetry at Sangam shifts into its ninth year this 2022; a feat in tenacity and interstitial-deep love for poetry and translation by our founding editor Priya Sarukkai Chabria.
As we evolve into the new year, the January issue of Poetry at Sangam is guest-edited by awarded (The “Great” Indian Poetry Collective, Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award…) poet and professor Ranjani Murali. She curates this issue with the spectroscope she uses as a practitioner (see her new poems here)—honing in on the coloured strands of embodied experience—as well as an educator—faceting the reader’s engagement through specific virtue. The purpose of poetry finds tidal stretch as much as it is pinpointed with the accuracy of a fraction of a second.
As you season your moments with the bounty of voices here, remember that your reading itself is meter. Breath in. Breath out. Eyes flickering with the promised lights of renewed connection with unmasked expression. This issue, as is this year, is now yours to hold onto.
The privilege of curating this issue comes at a very important moment for me—through the pandemic, over the span of nearly four semesters, I have taught a poetry survey class for my undergraduate students. One of my favorite lectures—one that I regularly teach and prescribe to my students as a means to navigate the complexities of engaging in the deep and close reading of poetry—is Carolyn Forché’ Blaney Lecture “Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness”. She says: “Composing poems and writing stories is a meditative, spiritual act of resistance. It requires a capacity to sustain contemplation, to be attentive to all that is about us, and to hold within ourselves an awareness that we are here, in our living moment, between two unknown realms—before our births and after our deaths.”
It is by centering this idea of poetry as “spiritual act” that I have, thus, chosen six poets whose voices uphold, enact, and clarify the idea of witness and resistance. Joshua Muyiwa’s poems are luminous in their rootedness in the body, in queer experience, in love and violence as essentially human and painfully interwoven into the fabric of the human experience. The speaker revels in the embodied experience, even as they explore the fragility of it. In “Arms,” the speaker is situated firmly within the body (of the self and others), looking closely at the seams and the cleaving, even as they attempt to “steal a moment of speechlessness.” “Phenyl Cleaner” paints a gutting and poignant portrait of the speaker’s mother and her love for her dog; this rich prose poem draws parallels between both losses by evoking the smell of phenyl, which then becomes a deeply personal sensory marker. Muyiwa concludes this bouquet of poems with one that speaks of the simultaneous universality and specificity of love; one line that enraptures us with its near-casual tone unfolds thus: “Eventually, it became easier to transgress the lines between aggression and tenderness.” The speaker leads us gently into another revelation, slowly: “Today, I don’t want to roll into or out but submit. I want this mattress to become our world.”
Satya Dash’s poems are similarly rich in the ways the self emerges, articulates, and even dissolves in relation to others. As I read “What Started Out as a Dream,” I was haunted by the speaker’s questions, the way they ask: “Did you realize we were more or less regular beasts/ when at the airport, tears trickled down both our cheeks?” This poem, and the others, is a deeply breathtaking meditation on the nature of separation and borders, on “moisturizing the dialect/ of the colonizer,” and “glorious desolation.” The experience of desire and detachment are both central; I invite readers to experience this in lines such as these: “When placed in the lap/ of a clock’s rotating bed, we saw the angularity of our nakedness/ mirrored on the fan’s metal blades.”
Shobhana Kumar’s poems exist, similarly, at the liminal edges between lived experiences (the domestic, the seemingly mundane) and resistance to the very norms that underlie these experiences. In “Botox” we see Kannan, endlessly tasked with fixing broken home appliances; “he bends over, fixing, mending,/ repairing, seaming, hemming, tinkering.” The act of resistance that this poem models is one rooted in the everyday—beauty lies in functionality, after all. A machine that controls the ebb and flow of domestic life becomes a work of art in its repeated renewal, until, of course, the day that the artist himself pronounces it complete in its disrepair.
For me, Devanshi Khetarpal’s austere poems, much like Forché’ says, are an exercise in attentiveness. The speaker is remarkable in the way they move within and outside the body and the self; loss becomes a physical and spiritual process to stand witness to. “In Asking for the Doctor,” the speaker entreats the doctor to excise grief “like a floret of pencil shavings.” Elsewhere, we are presented with a simile that underscores the role of poetry as witness and resistance—the speaker’s house is compared to a breast that is undergoing a mammography, trapped behind “windowless walls.”
Meanwhile, Divya Persaud speaks of silence in her note, and how we “make and hold in sound.” Persaud speaks of the fear of expressing the self and concludes: “It is in these moments of sublimation, that I wonder at our ability to constantly create and re-create ourselves.” Hers are poems that instruct, “exitlude,” and require us to ponder. “Think” becomes both an exhortation and a pause. These are poems that imagine, shape, and reshape conversations. We see a call and response; on one hand, we hear a voice that speaks of how “the stones/ led me to you,/ and the road was/ long…” and on the other, we have a response, or even a counter: “The forecast/ reads bones/ placed into each/ other and left/ at the roadside.”
Finally, I chose a poet whose investment in popular culture, specifically Tamil popular culture and cinema, is in keeping with my own affinity for visual media as an entry point into poetry. What better ways to catalog the peculiarities and particularities of the specific socio-political and cultural moment we find ourselves in? Vivekanand Selvaraj opens with a poem featuring Bob Christo, who starred regularly as one of the villain’s henchmen, and later as a villain himself, in a range of Indian-language films. The speaker speaks of the “shot inside the shot,” and yet subverts our expectations in the end with the “perfect/ scene where he goes off script without a glitch.” Rajinikanth, Kamal Hassan, and Dumas converge and engage in an intertextual space. Using a popular song, “Chinna Chinna Aasai” from the film Roja as a springboard, Selvaraj’s eponymous poem speaks to the reader of the tropes employed by ‘90’s Tamil cinema: “otherworldly sounds blending with ours/ propping us before our mirrors, hands// reflexively reaching for Ponds Talcum powder/or Gokul Santol.” Finally, the poet leaves us with poems with Chinese titles; Madurai and China converge in the same poem and to sing “the longings of the landscapes—/ flesh, blood, other distant beasts.”
Thanks to Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s generous invitation, I was able to invite and engage with these voices, all of whom have spoken to me at various points. These are writers and individuals I have admired and wanted to read more of. I have attempted to curate poems that are accessible yet complex, and layered yet extremely focused on the (real and imagined) boundaries between the self and the world. I place my faith in these remarkable voices; I am grateful to them and to everyone at Poetry at Sangam for the opportunity to showcase them.
With my best wishes for a creative and fulfilling 2022,
Ranjani Murali
December 2021
Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Founding Editor: Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Deputy Editor: Mrinalini Harchandrai
Guest Editor: Ranjani Murali
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