'...because poetry, like blood, must come from the heart...'

Assem Kaul

It doesn’t take much to seed chaos nowadays. Social media conversations have evolved into chimeric nightmares. An idealist might imagine that trollwars, news debates, and cultural discourse would, at their zenith, be crafted by the hands of poetic imagination or, perhaps, in the literary flourishes of the artist-philosopher. Rather, more prosaic codes that include self-fashioning, predatory behaviour, and marketspeak, dominate a complex, multi-fanged modern civil society. The “always on” echo chamber is the breeding ground for a peculiar fusion of the public and the private, turning the self into a matter of aesthetic choice, and the mere statement of solipsistic presence starts to gain the creative fervour of vocation or “calling”.

These are some of the concerns C. P. Surendran outlines in his opinion piece, ‘Politics of new poetry and the Salesman poet’. The familiar call for ‘quality over quantity’ echoes through his exhortation, more rant than measured critique. It is written with the assurance of an Aamir Khan who doesn’t attend award functions (for no other reason other than the opportunity to make the priveliged claim of not attending award functions). Surendran’s “insider critique” of the literary circuit has already polarised poets and literary commentators.

“In India, just now, there is an explosion of poetry, most of it attributable to the readymade town square of social media. The cell phone is your trumpet. Hundreds of new poets throng the counters, murderous self-promotion gleaming in their eyes. Some of them come with awards in their pockets, form a group and honour the others in the group. In a highly literary market like Kerala, for example, the awards go in circles and everyone gets at least one. According to one reliable drawing room estimate, there are over two lakh poets in the state.”

Surendran can barely hide his righteous fury, but he is not wrong about one thing - the explosion of poetry. Quality is a dubious parameter, and contrary to what the author might have us believe, it is also defined in the eyes of the throng, the discernment of the crowd. An image briefly mists up my mind’s eye - the figure of the “New Poet” (a conflagration that is as ephemeral, and as vacuous, as the term “Urban Naxal”) as Maximus the Gladiator, painted in blood and fury, screaming at the angry mob from the centre of the stadium “Are you Not Entertained?”

The greatest corruption that a post-informational society assists into birth is a uniform world, where our most personal opinions and the most intimate desires must express themselves as acceptable to groups [Italics mine]. So what do we do? We pretend that inside and outside we are the same.

Again, this is not untrue. Confessional poetry is not a new phenomenon, and the personal essay, perhaps the most popular form of writing in this “uniform world” owes a lot to it. The modern answer to Plath’s much quoted - “Is there no way out of the mind?” - is the Facebook box that asks you “What’s on your mind”.

I have grown as a writer in this ecosystem. I would like to believe, that apart from the poetry which is its nucleus, even this newsletter has become a space that brings together people and ideas that engage meaningfully with new knowledge in the form of literary and cultural criticism. My allegiance is always to the intuition that spies in the terraced drowsy fields of stylised, enjambed, metaphorized verse, the goldenrod of revelation. Poetry is the last wavelet that breaks, sometimes when there’s nobody looking. The little globes of froth diffract, for a single cataclysmic moment, the entire universe. The text houses entire discursive registers of living, being and flourishing - alone together. It is that moment, above all, that I seek to isolate. Rather than discernment, I would like to believe that a practiced intuition sharpens with time and engagement. But this must be accompanied with the radical conviction that the world can be experienced completely through poetry. It is a kind of persistence, I think.

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Ironically, Surendran’s article came as I was thinking of writing to you with an update about the Bombay City Poetry Anthology, and the response. Of course, it does not deter the project in any way. I have been busy, and could not post the update on the last date for submissions. I have nevertheless accepted submissions that have come a day or even a week after the last date. A few people wrote in asking if they could submit, and I have written back saying I will accept submissions. I have decided to extend the submission date for another month - you can now send in your poems until the end of this month - April 30th.

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I share with you, today, a poem I fell in love with even before we met properly. I had come across the second line of the first couplet randomly, somewhere online. The modified zoegma in the first part, really had me breathless. I immediately found the entire poem on mascara review, and also a book of vignettes (Etudes), by the poet Aseem Kaul. This is a poem that should be heard, not read. Perhaps I will share an audio recording in the next edition.

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Resharing a link to the call for City poems below
Meanwhile: A call for 'Contemporary Mumbai/Bombay City Poems'

I hope you are finding the space to write, to dream, and to resist.

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