Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume X | Issue 5
Mrinalini Harchandrai, Deputy Editor
This year is delightedly flagged by Indian Anglophone poets as the 70th anniversary of late Padma Shri Nissim Ezekiel’s first book of poetry, A Time To Change and Other Poems. (A title that once alluded to a shift of Indian poetry in English from the Romantic era but somehow feels as relevant post-COVIDicene). His later poems like ‘The Patriot’ and ‘The Professor’, usually first discovered in classrooms, are remembered gratefully not only for making poetry accessible in the Indo-English spoken vernacular, but for rendering poetry seasoned with homegrown humour. Lines like ‘I am the total teetotaller, completely total’[1] and ‘I am living just on opposite house’s backside’[2] may appear as punchlines bringing bemused focus in a student—especially one skeptical of the practical pursuit of English literature in a capitalist economy, while waiting for the bell. However, they succeed in bringing bazaar English into the general literary conversation, converting postcolonial into colloquial, making room for a commoner persona in a terrain mostly dominated by the pedantic persona. Nissim showed us how poetics can step into a Modernism belonging to an individual voice, pincoded with very local quirks and preoccupations.
Therefore when Founding Editor Priya Sarukkai Chabria suggested I curate the April 2022 issue, I knew it would have to be a tribute to the Nissim legacy of an individual satire. Each of the poets are handpicked for their poetry and their voice. Some are adepts in the humourverse and some will be attempting it in their poems for the first time here. I’m pleased to add that we have a balanced gender ratio when it comes to funny bones.
A psychologist by profession, Scherezade Siobhan places the subjects of her poems in the therapist’s chair for amusing catharsis. There’s relentless scrolling on social media seeking a furball-cuteness high, state-sanctioned spyware as god and sexts rendered less-than sexy when subject to autocorrect. She presents the image of Mother Earth on prozac, an ecopoem figleaved in irony to elicit a nervous giggle. And prods at the structure of caste through language. Here is humour that is sophisticated and seriously does the job.
Mark Waldron gives us more of his “furious old fellow persona”, first encountered in ‘Trees, Breeze and Rabbits’, an ecopoem sitting askew on the head of a lampoon. In these vignettes, he shakes his word-fists at the mundane that would make Camus proud, railing against the absurdities of shopping, language and even copulation. His conspiracy-theory-exaggeration is wacky, and you can’t stop reading on for the tickle.
Once bitten, twice wry, Maithreyi Karnoor says that the pandemic made her “seek refuge in humour”. She utilizes the earthy wisdom of wit in her poems as she sneezes at an essay claiming that third world literature is a national allegory/allergy, points to the class divide in classrooms and the humble afternoon tea turns into a riot for Independence. The pun is strong in this one.
Danielle Rose spins jaded into gold on the spindle of “[t]ruths, stitched together with thread fashioned from our little lies and aggrandizements” in a suite of poems about a present-imperfect husband. Tones of indignation and exasperation are cookie-baked into her poems like ‘Husband as a Kitchen Sink, Full of Grease Overflowing’ and ‘Husband as an Eyeball, Wandering’. Metaphorical hyperbole are the chocolate chips in her satirical take on the social structure of marriage and gender politics.
Kanishka Gupta’s poem ‘The House Party’ repeats phrases that could easily be punctuated with an Indian head-nod, rather closely springboarding off Nissim’s cariacatured expressions of a desi English. And they are full of character, as seen in ‘Days of the Week’ where a cast of planets have their way with the narrator’s daily disposition, creating a satire on human frailty. With tongue within cheek too, he calculates the pitfalls of self-googling as well as the now-hashtagged rinse-and-repeat attitudes and conventions on the COVIDicene abacus.
Mustansir Dalvi says, “I have stopped italicising non-English words completely in my poems. I do not other them, nor put them on a pedestal…language for me is always polyglot.” So his “Bambaiya argot” tangos with English in poems with crossed Whatsapp lines and a somewhat preachy makapao narrator. In a subversive encounter with Putin at the bhelpuri stand, humour is Dalvi’s weapon of choice exposing the incongruity between nuclear-war ambition and mumra. Do you hear that? That is a proud Nissim dryly chuckling over his notes and a steaming chai.
I’m very honoured and delighted to present these unique voices that boldly use satire as a critical lens to look at broad themes – human behaviour, political structures, social institutions or cultural traditions. And with the news of a megalomaniac threatening the world with nuclear war on the heels of a pandemic, which is nothing short of a dark joke, I believe we need humour more than ever (in the words of Nissim, ‘Why world is fighting, fighting’[3]). As a form of intelligence, a sign of kindness, and the possibility of moving beyond the grim and difficult knots of our lives, with the hope of creating awareness and, dare the poets dream, a time to change.
“When things went wrong I pulled through with a jest”
– Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Robert’, A Time to Change and Other Poems
(London Fortune Press, 1952)
SPECIAL PREVIEW
D Nurkse, featured poet and friend of Poetry at Sangam, has been awarded by Whiting Writers, The Poetry Foundation, The Tanne Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He’s also received one Guggenheim, two National Endowment for the Arts and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. We are honoured to share six poems from his latest collection of poetry, A Country of Strangers (Alfred Knopf, 2022) as well as his audio recordings of three poems. Glittering in imagery and pulsing with the shapes that language can take, each of his poems are characteristically an exploding universe.
Mrinalini Harchandrai
Mumbai
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[1] ‘The Patriot’, from Very Indian Poems in Indian English, Nissim Ezekiel
[2] ‘The Professor’, from Very Indian Poems in Indian English, Nissim Ezekiel
[3] ‘The Patriot’, from Very Indian Poems in Indian English, Nissim Ezekiel
Special Preview
Founding Editor: Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Deputy Editor: Mrinalini Harchandrai
Poetry at Sangam is supported by art and cultural organisation Raza Foundation and Padmini Divakaran
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