'And the clipped exuberance of green'
Colours of the imagination with David M. deLeon and Kolatkar
“Bombay made me a beggar
Kalyan gave me a lump of jaggery to suck.
In a small village that had a waterfall
but no name
my blanket found a buyer
and I feasted on just plain ordinary waterI arrived in Nasik with
peepul leaves between my teeth.(From The Turnaround, ‘Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita’, 1977, Arun Kolatkar)
Hunger enters the bloodstream through the mind’s quiet door. The city enters the body through the fingers. In the poet’s journey poem, place is transit. The city is stamped by a list that is defined by this hunger. The hungry marks places with his apetite. Hunger turns the poet into a dog, a ‘beggar’. Is there any other way to know a city, than through its offerings?
In the poet’s imagination, the city is a touchpoint. Words wrung from the salt of experience grow to accomodate cities. The poet becomes animal through language (with apologies to Deleuze). This is a kind of experience that catches place in its moving scythe. A poet learns to find consistency in the momentum of the narrative, not in being still, and calling a place home. Imagination cuts through the landscape with the searching gaze of the curious. The material world collides with an imagination that has imbibed the position of the witness, when confronted with the living archive of the world. By writing into this world, not about, I curate sensation. This is the truth of testimony. The poet becomes animal through writing.
While reading city poems today, and a marathi poet’s idealistic and conservative delusions about beauty, I paused to find myself caught in another’s skin. I recognised the desire to be in the poet’s shoes, read as he read, be an onlooker, as he was. The experience of space spliced right at the center by time allows me to re-enter the changed city as a changed poet.
I realised that the only way to enter the mind of a poet is to become a giant ear.
We must listen for the echoes is it not?
One phrase from this poem hooked me to its flight. And the clipped exuberance of green. deLeon is wondrous in the clutch of words: ‘there’ just ain't enough words to tell even one/ story’. How to translate, for instance, the eleven different greens I can discern outside my window? How to describe with careful artsmanship the bend of the wind seived by rain, the spring unfurled in yellow flowerlets, the lone crow on the leafless tree - itself the skeleton of an afternoon with its hands up in the air? And the clipped exuberance of green.
deLeon gives me, perhaps, my current favourite definition of poetry, disguised as a definition of a colour (that until then, it seemed like I never really saw properly - ‘grey’): ‘a color that contains its own promised/ color’. This is when I know that a poem has worked: when the eyes of the reader alighting on the words, as kisses on the palimpsest of imagination, discover in the poem’s shell, its own interiority - its thingness. For a moment, words doused in feeling envelope the listener, and they find themselves in the clutch of the crescendo. The lush sensorium of individual experience splits from the seams of the page, like an otherworldly light, to become ‘we’. And the city is passed on, from poet to reader. Maybe this is what poets aspire to: to curate a picture, to make a picture washed so completely in the spray of imagination - a colour that contains its own promised colour.
I hope you are finding the time to write.
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