In his preface to the collection published in 2018 by Poetrywala, ‘Tips for Living in an Expanding Universe’, the poet, translator and critic E. V. Ramakrishnan invokes Arun Kolatkar while talking about dilemmas of language, creation, image and reality:
“Arun Kolatkar once wrote, “You need a double-barrelled gun to shoot a bilingual poet/One bullet in the head will never be enough to kill me.” Like Kolatkar, I often wonder whether I am one writer writing in two languages, or two writers writing in two languages. An image transcends language. The same is true with a tone or an extended metaphor. In that sense, poetry inhabits the frontiers of language, leaning beyond its limits. In the process of writing I always wait for a moment when I can cross the boundary and evaluate an experience from an alternative point of view.”
This collection has been lying in my bookshelf for some time now. I remember reading a poem by EVR in the anthology by Arundhathi Subramanian and Jerry Pinto, Confronting Love. There was one line in that poem that stayed with me. I loved the metaphor the poet applied in that poem - ‘love as research’ - but that particular image got under my skin, and lay there asking questions whose answers I sought in my own practice:
“I fumble and misquote, as I learn more and more, about your less and less”.
There is the presence of an absence in these lines. There is a distance in identity and locus of experience that rests quite effortlessly between those words. It is an awareness of uncertainty, and the uninhibited exploration of it. This is an attitude that is similar to the one who stands on the margin of things, of a ‘provincial’ person in the city, of a native speaker speaking in a borrowed tongue, say English, one who makes spaces for the world, to find themselves elsewhere. In fact, EVR’s first volume of poetry was called ‘Being Elsewhere in Myself’. ‘There is an ‘else-whereness’ to imagination which allows you to go beyond the scripts of the real’, he says, while referring to his approach again.
I am intrigued by EVR’s peripherality - the searching river that is his construction of identity in relation to an evolving world, and his almost ironic suggestions of presence in this unfurling absence of modernity, development, technology, political catastrophe and constant movement. The collection is shot through with this approach, always careful, always humble, and always questioning. But most of all, I have this image of a person who labours passionately at his writing desk, uncorking the nights and creating fervently on quiet mornings, labouring to relieve words of their historical and cultural yokes, and revision them with sensuous and sonic wonder. What the poet is doing, is carving out little pieces of himself, basting them with the energy of his own collision with language and philosphy, and carefully locking them in translucent frames of poetic frenzy, for the reader to see; but always, from a distance.
The title of this poem by EVR is ‘Untitled’, and I’m positive that it is a carefully crafted piece whose name has been chosen with some deliberation (not mere incapacity to find the right nomenclature). This, in itself, tickles me no end.
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