Saleem Peeradina's "Final Cut"

This review appears in www.enchantingverses.com

In Final Cut, Saleem Peeradina is the quintessential ironic observer, with an eye for meticulous layering of detail, chiseling away at his subject so we see its essence, its magnificent presence. Every little object, from a shaving brush to a rich array of tropical fruit, to the body, is the topic of his poetic gaze. Peeradina radically shows how the simple prose sentence can indeed become poetry, that the thin separation between poetry and prose is questionable. Some of the poems, like “Hummingbird” and “Blue Heron,” read like encyclopedia entries, but there is always something that lifts the piece deftly into poetry.

Humor enters this volume much more so than in Peeradina’s previous volumes. “Sparrows” closes with “At the feeder, their table manners / have a lot to be desired.” As for immortality, it belongs to, of all things, not poems, but the “tavva,” the Indian skillet, which announces, “I am meant to outlive mortals. I am iron.” And the dig at the Empire is inevitable in “Going Bananas: A Discourse,” where the poem culminates in the cartoonish: “the Empire, having lost its stride / and its nerve as well, was headed for a fall: triggering laughter, / the banana’s slippery peel does make clowns of us all.”

A realist, Peeradina plays with nostalgia without succumbing to it. What better way to approach the sentimental moments of your life than by describing inanimate objects central to your memories and ascribing them with the life of emotion. A shaving brush or a grater, the body, or a fruit becomes a transferred epithet of the poet’s concerns. His language is precise, rarely reaching for metaphor in some poems, allowing the object’s ontological condition to hold it in its place, without interference.

In Final Cut, we learn more about the lives of creatures, fruits and objects than we would from a dictionary or encyclopedia. Each is created with a personal touch, the speaker’s experience of holding and tasting and smelling it. Rich sensory detail, holding surprises in its similes (“Wings snapping open like an umbrella”), lines that knock at the boundary of prose, and a range of emotion and landscapes enthrall the reader. We are urged into a place of reverence through deep observation for the smallest things we are blind to.

 Woman Warrior

 

 

Do not count the hours::

Suppress the hardness rising up in your throat.                      

Breathe.

  

Pick up the task where you left off, blow the dust away

                        to see the world.

 

Engage every muscle of your soul to layer your pagoda—

                        first light, then color, then a pair of wings.

 

Will your thoughts to the elements,

your words, their animators.

 

Believe what-is-a-woman-supposed-to-do question is a yew

at your past funeral:

 

In recent lives it has become chaff

in the palm of your hand. 

 

Look wild; you are full of the un-maya, the light

                        in the far reaches of your limbs holding you up.

 

Wrest your image from the-wife-of, sharpen your trident,

                        tuck your sari edge into your waist,

 

Adjust your seat on the tiger’s brilliant spine,

                        readying for the fight.

Pramila Venkateswaran, Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008).

 February 4, 2022

Phyllis Wheatey's poem, "On Coming to America" draws us into its soulful plea for democracy in religion and for erasure of prejudice.

"Some see our sable race with scornful eye"

Anyone "can join the angelic train."

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

"Their colour is a diabolic die."

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

Celebrating Black History Month

 FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Langston Hughes' "Let America be America Again" is amazingly current even if it was written almost a century ago. 

Read it here and tell me if you are not moved! 

https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again

I admire how he moves to his final stanzas. It takes a lot of strength of spirit to be able to affirm the possibility of recovering the promise of what a land can offer.

"O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!"

"Final Cut" by Saleem Peeradina

This review appears in www.enchantingverses.org

In Final Cut, Saleem Peeradina is the quintessential ironic observer, with an eye for meticulous layering of detail, chiseling away at his subject so we see its essence, its magnificent presence. Every little object, from a shaving brush to a rich array of tropical fruit, to the body, is the topic of his poetic gaze. Peeradina radically shows how the simple prose sentence can indeed become poetry, that the thin separation between poetry and prose is questionable. Some of the poems, like “Hummingbird” and “Blue Heron,” read like encyclopedia entries, but there is always something that lifts the piece deftly into poetry.

Humor enters this volume much more so than in Peeradina’s previous volumes. “Sparrows” closes with “At the feeder, their table manners / have a lot to be desired.” As for immortality, it belongs to, of all things, not poems, but the “tavva,” the Indian skillet, which announces, “I am meant to outlive mortals. I am iron.” And the dig at the Empire is inevitable in “Going Bananas: A Discourse,” where the poem culminates in the cartoonish: “the Empire, having lost its stride / and its nerve as well, was headed for a fall: triggering laughter, / the banana’s slippery peel does make clowns of us all.”

A realist, Peeradina plays with nostalgia without succumbing to it. What better way to approach the sentimental moments of your life than by describing inanimate objects central to your memories and ascribing them with the life of emotion. A shaving brush or a grater, the body, or a fruit becomes a transferred epithet of the poet’s concerns. His language is precise, rarely reaching for metaphor in some poems, allowing the object’s ontological condition to hold it in its place, without interference.

In Final Cut, we learn more about the lives of creatures, fruits and objects than we would from a dictionary or encyclopedia. Each is created with a personal touch, the speaker’s experience of holding and tasting and smelling it. Rich sensory detail, holding surprises in its similes (“Wings snapping open like an umbrella”), lines that knock at the boundary of prose, and a range of emotion and landscapes enthrall the reader. We are urged into a place of reverence through deep observation for the smallest things we are blind to.

Translating the Divine Woman: Usha Kisore's and M. Sambasivan's translation of Kalidasa's Shyamaladandakam

Shyamaladandakam Kalidasavirachitam. Translating the Divine Woman: A Translation of Kalidasa's Syamala Dandaka. Trans. by Usha Kishore and M. Sambasivan. Rasala: Bangalore, 2015. 96 pp.

Most of us know the poet Kalidasa's work, Shakuntalam. But his work Shyamaladandakam is popular perhaps among musicians and religious folk. Why did Usha Kishore choose to translate this poem? This work is unique in its emphasis on goddess as woman; she is Mahadevi, the great goddess, combining the powers of many Hindu goddesses; most importantly, she can be invoked and be made part of the human female. As Kishore explains in her introduction: "We have translated the Goddess as the divinised form of womanhood." Therefore, the translators address her as "woman" throughout the poem, instead of "goddess" to show that the goddess as woman is a Hindu concept.  In our contemporary context in the West, this transposition creates our feeling of connection with the possibilities available to the woman. "Woman" combines all the qualities ascribed to goddess-as-woman.

The Divine Woman is the daughter of sage Matanga. She is known by various names, Matangi, Uma, Syamala, Kalika, and so on. She is"woman," "muse," "mother," "daughter," "beloved," "maiden," bestowing and fulfilling--thus always acting and communing with her worshipers.

The book is visually beautiful, with each single stanza of the Sanskrit text placed on the left page and the English translation on the opposite page, therefore leaving plenty of white space for the reader to contemplate each verse both in Sanskrit and in English.

The English translation is unique for it tries to capture the essence of the original text while leaning on the poetic possibilities available in English to express the essence of the stanza, its metaphors and imagery.

For example:

"Your alluring eyes
       feigned blooms on tendril brows
arching like the frolicking flowered bow of Kama;

woman,
watering the world with your wined word of wisdom."

The translators pay attention to the alliterative lines, the imagery, and the economy of words of the original text,  At the same time, they make the lines contemporary by their use of line and stanza breaks, other kinds of spacing, English imagery, use the word "woman" instead of "goddess," and verbs such as "watering"and "frolicking" to highlight the stylistic conventions of Sanskrit poetry.

Here is another example that highlights the interesting syntax and line arrangements in the second stanza of the first section:

"Woman,
rapt in the cadence of celestial melody,
its rising notes swaying  your nipa-twined hair around your hips:

O maiden of the mountain."

The word "woman" is a line by itself, drawing attention to the object of the images of her sensuality suggested by the cluster of images--"nipa-twined hair," "celestial melody," "cadence," "rising notes"--transferring our attention from the swaying hair to the swaying hips.

At times, Kishore weaves definitions into the lines, thus eliminating any need for an end note. For example, stanza 5, in section 1, ends with "Rame" in the Sanskrit original, which Kishore translates as "Rama, / goddess of grace," thus accentuating the alliterative beauty of the line. In the following stanza, she does something similar: "susvare" in the Sanskrit original is translated as "woman, / melody manifest," again drawing the reader's attention to the holder of the attribute.

Attentive to sound patterns, nature imagery, mellifluous cadence of the lines, Kishore creates a poem that is pleasurable to read.

Divided into 5 sections, each section offers the reader enough space to ruminate the essence of the meaning of woman: What does woman mean? Who is she? What are her qualities, both physical, psychical, and emotional? How is she connected to nature and the elements? Interestingly, the woman / goddess is associated with water:

"The profound circle of your navel,
darkly ornamented by a ring of fine moss-like hair,
is a lake whirling in eddies."

The navel is suggestive of the umbilical cord which connects us to the source. The lake suggests womb. And woman as water, fluid, ever-flowing, not fixed.

The rapture of invoking her finally highlights her as the icon of verse. She holds the richness of language.She bears the "crystal rosary, book of knowledge, rope, and goad" in her "lotus hands." She is endowed with "sweet speech."

The chapter on Kavya or Sanskrit poetry is a synopsis that is informative, as is the glossary at the end of the book.

Usha Kishore--U.K. Indian poet: Night Sky Between the Stars

Usha Kishore's Night Sky Between the Stars,   exploring stories of goddesses in Hindu mythology, is a powerful testament to female power and energy. She retells the stories of goddesses and places them in the milieu of everyday experiences of women. She writes about women planting trees, laughing, celebrating the birth of baby girls, all this despite misogyny. The baby girl "chuckling in her cradle" becomes the icon of the mother goddess; myth transformed into reality. In fact, Kishore's poems blur the line between myth and reality. For every creative venture to flourish, the universe depends on the goddesses. They are the rain makers--"As rice bowl / after rice bowl dries up in the blistering plains..."--and the truth tellers--"Do the hands that build nations, wreck them beyond repair?"

Invoking Sita and Mira, two goddesses who are separated from their spouses, the poet commands Sita: "Banish him, as he banished you," for Rama has not been her grand savior--"Arms of power / have pierced man's heart / and bled it to stone." Thus Kishore sums up her indictment against patriarchy--it is inscrutable and appears invulnerable.

Kishore manages interesting twists in her explorations, one being "Five Virgins"--Ahalya, Draupadi, Tara, Kunti, Mandodari, "star-crossed women" who "fan fires of revenge." They are fiery stars defying their fate. Kishore shows the underbelly of the myths that are presented traditionally as romantic, female power glossed over in the telling. Kishore's retelling brings the hidden powers of the goddesses-as-women to the foreground. The poet desires "to extol them," not to redeem herself but to enlighten us about their power.

Yet she does not abandon the strength of tradition that lend power to the female voice, as in "Kamakhya." It is the icon of Shakti, the mother goddess, whose yantra or iconography is the yoni or vagina, a triangle. In this concept poem, written in the form of the triangle, Kishore brings to life images of the goddess:  she is "stone.../ incarnadined, fecund," "lush labyrinth of triangles," "fluid spring," "psychic song." Goddess and speaker merge in "My psychic song flows in your veins;" the elements enter the speaker and she is endowed with the richness of the cosmos, thus myth becomes demystified in "laden cloud," "twilight rain," "breath", "fertile hum," and inhabits the speaker composing the words.

In the ekphrastic poems, based on Raja Ravi Varma's paintings, Kishore pursues her quest to understand and reawaken within her and in her poetry the meta-stories of the goddesses. Ahalya's story does not end in her being transformed into stone; she awaits her transformation into "fluid feminine form." Thus Kishore seems to hold on to the hope of a changing patriarchal attitude toward women.  Woman is also part of nature, as we see in the poem addressed to goddess Ganga ("Decent of Ganga"). Woman is not a fixed concept. She is not stone. She is fluid. Kishore asks,"who dares to bind her turbulent waters?" No one can break her spirit!

Kishore's language is flawless; she manages to wed Sanskrit lexicon and imagery with English meter, thus producing lyrical, limpidly flowing verse.

As a lover of Sanskrit poetry and Indian classical music, I am enthralled by Usha Kishore's use of these sources to create beautiful poetry in English. As a feminist, I relish Kishore's delving into Hindu tradition of a living goddess culture to show the path of feminist ideas.

Kishore's poems are a pleasure to read--they are sensual and intellectual at the same time, a rare combination.

Smita Agarwal's "Marginalized: Indian Poetry Written in English"

Here is an excerpt of my review published in the last issue of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature:


"What is the texture of the English that is used by Indian poets? Vijay Dharwadkar’s examination of Arun Kolatkar is clearly a star essay picking up on the poet’s unique use of English. The examples from Jejuri, Sarpa Satra, Kala Goda, and discussion, show the spare beauty of the Kolatkar’s lines. Dharwadkar picks up on key points of Kolatkar’s life to argue the poet’s poetic nexus between English and Marathi, Hindu epic tradition and modern life. We see a similar treatment of Jayanta Mahapatra’s poems by Sachidananda Mohanty that helps us read them with a fresh perspective. As Tabish Khair reminds us, “we have a long tradition of literature in largely textual and standardized elite languages: Sanskrit and Persian. To ignore this tradition is to deprive Indian poetry in English of its heritage—and its voice” (253). Agarwal’s book firmly locates Indian poets writing in English in their rightful places by recognizing the depth of political, social, and linguistic investment they have made, thereby adding heft to the thin skein of critical works on these poets."

Matwaala:South Asian diaspora poetry festival

Matwaala

Matwaala, a South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival will be held at Casa De Luz, Austin, Texas on August 2, 2015, Sunday, 9am-8 pm. Co-hosted by the Poetry Caravan and Austin Poets International, the festival is the first project of the collective. The Dialogue Institute’s reception, dinner and reading for the poets is slated for August 1, Saturday 6 p.m. Other events will flag off the poets presence in Austin on the morning of August 1st as well.

Matwaala’s first venture is a poetry festival that will be held on Sunday, August 2, 2015, at Casa De Luz from 9am-8 p.m. The guest of honor is the eminent 78 year old Parsi poet Keki Daruwalla of New Delhi and noted poets from the US and possibly Canada will be attending. Keki Daruwalla is considered to be one of India’s leading poets and lives in Delhi. He has over ten volumes of poetry and half that number in short stories. His Collected Poems were published in 2006 by Penguin India. He won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987 for his book "Landscapes". His novel "For Pepper and Christ"--a historical novel—was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Asia and UK) in 2010. His latest books (2014) are Fire Altar: Poems on the Persians and the Greeks" and a short story volume entitled "Islands". Another Novel on the Parsees is slotted for publication this year. Daruwalla was a Queen Elizabeth Fellow at Oxford for a year. He is also a former Indian Police Service officer, who retired as Additional Director in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).He was also special Assistant to the Prime Minister in 1979. He retired as Chairman JIC. Recently he was a Member of the National Commission for Minorities.

Noted US poets attending are Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laurate of Suffolk county, NY; Saleem Peeradina, Michigan and others including local youth and adult poets to be confirmed soon. Festival director Usha Akella’s mission in organizing the collective and festival is to bring visibility to the expanding and prolific Diaspora South Asian Poets in the country. The idea of a sole poetry festival emerged after a recent editorial project she co-edited with Pramila Venkateswaran for www.museindia.com.  The issue focused on a project involving Diaspora artists and poets that generated the idea for sustained collaboration and initiatives. She states: “Matwaala, South Asian Diaspora Poets Collective, is a community of poets whose origins go back to South Asia. Our aim to promote South Asian poetry and collaborate with other arts in North America. The mission of our initiative is to encourage solidarity, promote members’ work, and increase awareness of South Asian poetry in the mainstream American Literary landscape.” A group of poets, Saleem Peeradina, Pramila Venkateswaran, Amritjit Singh and Usha Akella form the core team of Matwaala.

Poetry readings, a youth reading, panels and papers will be featured. The evening ends with a reception and a cultural segment. A detailed program will be available closer to the festival.

On commenting on the collective identity, poet and scholar Dr. Amritjit Singh, defines Matwaala as:  The name Matwaala evokes bonding and bonhomie, fun and funk, creative adventure and freedom, artistic assertiveness and non-conformity. A Hindi/Urdu word, it was the name of a radical literary magazine edited by the poet Nirala from Kolkata a century ago. Matwaala is used for someone who is drunk, but the word is used more often in a transferred sense, for someone who is a free spirit. As poets we are, of course, drunk on language and words.

For more information, and to have your kid participate email poetrycaravanaustin@gmail.com or call 914.686.4487

Rickey Laurentiis' "Study in Black"

In the current issue of Poetry, I read Rickey Laurentiis poems, among which "Study in Black" is particularly striking.

The epigraph," Tu Fu, 'Thoughts While Traveling at Night,'" prepares us for the nature imagery. But Laurentiis' use of unusual line lengths, line breaks, appositives, double dashes, alternating long and short lines and indentation take us into the meditative space of not just Tu Fu but this particular speaker who sees his words as limiting. Not just that. But the speaker calls himself a "spook bird" a violent image of poet and bird roped and alone, rotting.

Ironically, the whole poem has a lightness to it like the "wind in the grass" we are introduced to in the opening line--the lightness is maintianed in phrases like "there here," and the amazing number of internal rhymes--"down"-"ground," "wonder"-"plainer," "injuries"-"me," "know"-"solo"-"roped;" off-rhymes as in "boat"-"mast"-"night," "moon"-"skin," and assonance as in "fame"-"age," "injuries."

 

Although the poet tries not to be dark in the beginning, the poem inevitably arrives there. The sky is a solemn witness. Is this what we feel like when we cannot produce art?