Dear Reader,
Greetings!
I write to you after days. I hope the time has been kind, and that you have been finding little niches in the shifting topsoil - the chaotic multitudes, the colourful errata of the contemporary mediated digital landscape - to plant your curiosity. There is a lot to say about the contemporary (a la Lauren Berlant’s compelling enquiry of historicity and temporality - “When did the Present begin?”), but this post does not venture to make any pointed commentary in that direction. It is enough to say, with some certainty, and a sense of overwhelm, that poetry is never far from the galaata, the hungaama (“jab ki tujh bin nahīñ koī maujūd/ phir ye hañgāma ai ḳhudā kyā hai” - Ghalib). This cacophony of wavelets surges through the expanse of creative endeavours, only to fall noiselessly against the shore of minds teeming with questions - not giving answers, but briefly serving as an interface for wandering minstrels to park their incomprehension.
Witnessing turns into writing (and writing into witnessing), traversing the long journey from scandal to crisis to care. The more I see, and sense, and feel, the less I know, and the acute awareness of not knowing is the surest prompt to poetics (is it not?) Poetry irrupts, from time to time, in the guise of a temporary autonomous zone, throwing caution to the winds, wrapping the news cycle around its quivering shoulders, not trembling with fear, but vibrating with the immediacy of a language that has the force to defy temporality. Carrying torrents of opinion and knowledge along with it, poetry builds a narrative, and the stanza betrays a room that you can temporarily find refuge in, and meaning. The time beseeches me to oscillate between two shores - from place to character, and from character to place, and then back, and then back again. But more on this later.
I break my silence today, to bring to you the call for poetry that I had promised in May 2023. I had imagined it then as the first edition of “an online little magazine”. I am looking at it now more as a curated volume, an anthology complete in itself, not necessarily the first in a series (but not foreclosing that path, either).
I share below the call for poems. Do engage with it, and share it along, if you feel some resonance with the thematic, and the world it contours.
Meanwhile…
A call for poems
“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
― John Berger
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough”- Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
"...As I play,
the city slowly reconstructs itself,
stone by numbered stone."- Arun Kolatkar, “Pi-Dog” (From Kala Ghoda Poems)
How does a poet negotiate the city? What does your city mean to you?
Leaf and sunset have given way to screen and concrete spire. Sometimes the city offers a way out. Sometimes it is a mirror, offering a way into ourselves. To the poet, the city is both muse and monster, lover and mentor. Artists locate themselves within the city, making apparent their relationship with people, places and shifting scripts of memory. In their unique experiences we find ourselves, and also, a language with which to speak about the world.
This language is fickle, incandescent, and always moving. It is hidden in the smell of ittar whose enterprise conjures up utopian escapes, or the taste of a bunt cook's coconut chutney sold off a makeshift kitchen on a cycle (not unlike Annapoorna’s “avalanche of idlis” in Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems); It settles sleepily in the fumes of 5.30 am chai to dunk bun maska in, a breakfast reserved only for daily wagers, outside Churchgate station. It surfaces in the marigold's orange under Dadar bridge, or as the touch of cold steel on the railing of the harbour line 7:12 am VT (CST) slow. It dreams in the silence of three black crows on an electric wire, and the city below bucking heaving moaning groaning honking brawling bawling screeching snarling breathing. It takes its afternoon nap in the folds of yellow curtains in middle class homes (a la Anjum Hasan) or tetrapods that keep the frothing sea at bay beside Marine Drive (tipping hat to Rushdie, and the Bombay poets). Like the musician’s attempt to find the most perfect pitch of every note in a raag – that unrolls as alaap (I borrow from Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar’s oft repeated definition of alaap, here), I imagine a poet searching for the poem with their tuning fork, remaking the city with their song.
The material city is characterised by a unique form of sociality, and differential and intertwined modes of living together. But the city is also constructed in the imagination. The emotional heft of poetic world-making comes alive in the body - it moves, and it feels (to reframe Brian Massumi), and it senses. Writing is the act that covers the distance from movement to feeling, and from sense to sensorium. A parallel trajectory emerges from material to emotion, and from place to people (invoking Gita Kapur’s landmark 1981 exhibition).
Various lines of conception diverge from this fertile creative place. How does poetry become an act of placemaking? Who is the witness? How does the object of witnessing change the witness? How does the poet experience the city, and how much of the city lives in the poet’s experience? Most importantly… When the poet writes into the city, is the city a changed entity? How does the poet make the city through their writing?
Submissions are open for a collection of “Bombay City Poems”. This anthology seeks poems that range across form, experience, and placemaking tendencies- from the lyric to the place poem, from the imagist manzar to the list poem, from the catalogue poem to the urban ghazal or the development dirge, from free verse to prosepoetry. Surprise us!
The field is vast, but is envisioned through one cross section that is critical to an archaeology of urban experience. I do not by this, mean to estrange the individual, to remove the person from the context. Quite the contrary. The line between consciousness, and that which is lived, is blurred, to open up new avenues of thought about “the social” and “the urban”, about “ways of living together” and “being-with-others”.
There is only one thematic box to tick – for this collection. Let the backdrop be of Bombay/Mumbai, not any other city. The vision for this collection is to put together a series of “Contemporary Bombay City Poetry”.
Parameters of curation will include the conceptual shadow of the “urban”, creativity in form, and how the writing makes the reader feel.
Submission Guidelines
Send in between 1-5 “Bombay City Poems” to the editor, Aranya - poetly@pm.me.
Please send your poetry in an attached word document with the subject line “Poetry submission for Meanwhile”.
You are not required to send a bio note.
The poems should be unpublished (Social media sharing is fine).
If the poems are selected, the copyright of the poems will remain with poets, but Poetly reserves first publishing rights, and subsequent citation.
At the moment we cannot pay contributors, but we are seeking funds.
The last date for submission is March 17th 2024.
We look forward to reading your work.
Feel free to write in (to poetly@pm.me) with any questions, queries, or comments. We will write back as soon as we find the space, and the time.
If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.
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