Coming across an old diary filled with favorites jotted down set me reminiscing about my on-again, off-again affair with this genre of written expression. My first brush with it in school included rhyming singsong stuff like A. A. Milne’s Puppy and I and those wacky poems by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, the pleasurable effect only broken by a frisson of unease caused by Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners.
Then came the shock – poetry need not rhyme and could describe nasty stuff that is usually shoved under the carpet. I learned this at IST Dar-es-Salaam when we did Stephen Crane’s In The Desert . To say that his verse is disquieting would be an understatement – more like visceral, bloody and in-your-face, forcing you to look beyond skin-deep man.
Then sometime in the early ’80s my dad brought home a volume of modern American poetry from the USIS library. I was intrigued enough to copy many of them out into an old diary that I still have! Some of my favorites among them:
– Charles Bukowski’s Short Order
– Donald Justice’s An Elegy is Preparing Itself.
– William Carlos Williams‘ The Red Wheelbarrow
– Al Young’s Ponce de Leon
– James Emanuel’s The Negro
– Dabney Stuart’s Exchange
– Gwendolyn Brooks‘ We Real Cool
When I came back to India, it was only natural I sought out poets from the subcontinent. Jibananda Das (Banalata Sen), Amrita Pritam (Pariah) and Imtiaz Dharker stand out among them.
I then came across this piece in The Hindu by V. Sudarshan in the mid ’80s and was impressed enough to cut it out and keep. I cannot locate it on the Internet – the Hindu’s archives don’t stretch back far enough I guess – so I’m reproducing it below for your reading pleasure.
ANOTHER KIND OF WINDOW
newspapers are colorconscious
display everything in black and
white
and forests might have moved in
the night
if not for
the daily bifocal squint
at the fine print
I get a clearer picture of
yesterdays
through the now familiar
perspective
of an amnesiac’s lapse of
memory
get to know the latest deaths
(those that couldn’t see beyond
the caste
mark on the village well included)
local
or otherwise
of the blind who allegedly
recovered sight
somewhere in the dark
continent the news of which
reached
the inside pages three
or four days later
or nearer home the neighbours
with their daughters lately ripe
wear the Sunday morning
matrimonial look
as they with a discriminating eye
separate the nettles
from the grooms
how the rivers thin to trickles!
frontpaged three columns wide
unidentified bodies grainy
and radiophotoed festoon
the nearby tree after a bomb
blast that had been
merely a warning
today the editorials are sartorial
carefully skirt expunged remarks
and whole scenes and maintain
the Dignity of the House (there
are
not many opportunities to hurl
brickbats and spittle freezes in
midair when the set up
is democratic) somewhere low
on page three squashed between
an advertisement for newfangled
undergarments at thirty percent
and an aborted token
protest a death by hanging
after the sour cud of
a careless pregnancy
continued on page eight column
eight is the life sentence the
judge
gave the now wifeless poor man
with
one nagging mistress and five
children
(four daughters and a male
bastard)
and the still bloody memory and
of course after the bonebundle
the newsdog hauled
out from the cupboards
of an otherwise
flawless politician
I am full
and
make it a point
to hurl open the window
drag in the fresh air
lick myself
clean again
like a cat
after
the daily dole
of newspaper gruel
– V. Sudarshan
© Sosha Srinivasan
Recent Comments