This week in Poetry - Episode Eight. In the coming weeks, we shall explore the amazing variety of poems in English written by Indian poets from the Pithamahan of Modernism, Nissim Ezekiel to the very young like Sivakami Velliyangiri, with their 'thoughts weaned in silence, but spoken as poems'. This is a whole new generation of poets exploring creativity with utter disregard for labels and canons, reading aloud, or performing their poems and expressing themselves on a dazzling variety of themes; provocative, transparent, and at times damning. In this episode, we shall read some of the poems of K. Satchidanandan, born in 1946 in Kerala, he believes Poetry is performance. Poetry is theater. He writes his poems in Malayalam. And he himself translates them into English. A bilingual, literary critic, playwright, social activist, and recipient of many awards, including the Sahitya Academy Award in 2012, Satchidanandan is heard and read with respect by his readers around the world. Now to his poems. STAMMER A stammer is no handicap. It is a mode of speech. A stammer is the silence that falls between the word and its meaning, just as lameness is the silence that falls between the word and the deed. Did the stammer precede language or succeed it? Is it only a dialect or a language itself? These questions make linguists stammer. Each time we stammer we are offering a sacrifice to the God of Meanings. When a whole people stammer stammer becomes their mother tongue: as it is with us now. God too must have stammered when He created Man. That is why all the words of man carry different meanings. That is why everything he utters from his prayers to his commands stammers, like poetry. GENESIS My grandmother was insane. As her madness ripened into death, My uncle, a miser, kept her in our store-room, Covered in straw. My grandmother dried up, burst, Her seeds flew out of the windows. The sun came, and the rain, One seedling grew up into a tree, Whose lusts bore me. Can I help writing poems About monkeys with teeth of gold? THE MAD The mad have no caste or religion. They transcend gender, live outside ideologies. We do not deserve their innocence. Their language is not of dreams but of another reality. Their love is moonlight. It overflows on the full-moon day. Looking up they see gods we have never heard of. They are shaking their wings when we fancy they are shrugging their shoulders. They hold that even flies have souls and the green god of grasshoppers leaps up on thin legs. At times they see trees bleed, hear lions roaring from the streets. At times they watch Heaven gleaming in a kitten’s eyes, just as we do. But they alone can hear ants sing in a chorus. While patting the air they are taming a cyclone over the Mediterranean. With their heavy tread, they stop a volcano from erupting. They have another measure of time. Our century is their second. Twenty seconds, and they reach Christ; six more, they are with the Buddha. In a single day, they reach the big bang at the beginning. They go on walking restless, for their earth is boiling still. The mad are not mad like us. GANDHI AND POETRY One day a lean poem reached Gandhi’s ashram to have a glimpse of the man. Gandhi spinning away his thread towards Ram took no notice of the poem waiting at his door, ashamed at not being a bhajan. The poem now cleared his throat And Gandhi glanced at him sideways through those glasses that had seen hell. “Have you ever spun thread?” he asked, “Ever pulled a scavenger’s cart? Ever stood in the smoke of An early morning kitchen? Have you ever starved?” The poem said: “I was born in the woods, in a hunter’s mouth. A fisherman brought me up in a cottage. Yet I knew no work, I only sing. First I sang in the courts: then I was plump and handsome but am on the streets now, half-starved.” “That’s better,” Gandhi said with a sly smile. “But you must give up this habit of speaking in Sanskrit at times. Go to the fields. Listen to The peasants’ speech.” The poem turned into a grain and lay waiting in the fields for the tiller to come and upturn the virgin soil moist with new rain. That's all we have in this edition of This Week in Poetry with Professor Nedumaran. Thank you for listening to some of the great poems of K. Satchidanandan. I hope you have enjoyed his poetry and there is more to come. And I shall meet you again next week with more voices from Indian Poetry in English. Till then, take care and goodbye for now. This is Professor Nedumaran signing off. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit poetryprofessor.substack.com
