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Ziaul Karim, the literary editor of Dhaka’s leading English-language newspaper The Daily Star, talks to the celebrated young poet Sudeep Sen. His bilingual English-Bangla volume -- A Blank Letter -- Ekti Khali Chithi -- was published in Bangladesh to much critical acclaim earlier this year. His last book, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) was awarded the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA). Four new chapbooks were published this year in the United States -- Retracing American Contours, Almanac, Lines of Desires, and, In Another Tongue. Sen was on a literary tour in The Balkans where his work was translated into Macedonian and Slovenian languages. He was invited to read at the world’s oldest poetry festival, The Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia, as well as at the prestigious Vilenica Writers Festival in Slovenia.
“Art in its purest form never reveals all”, writes Sudeep Sen, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Indian and international poetry circles, as evident in the unfathomable depth and beauty of a ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ in a poem by that name. This inspired line by the poet also serves as a fascinating commentary on his poems. Sen essentially loves to express himself in a clear, crisp, logical fashion, while building his ideas line by line, and stanza by stanza. The belief that ambiguity is at the core of poetic beauty is not true for Sudeep Sen. His poetic beauty works at a very different level.
However he may conceive a poem, the final result is always a well-knit fabric. If you try unravelling the threads of the fabric itself, it will gently reveal subtle layers which otherwise go unnoticed to an everyday eye. It is worth comparing his poems to a treasure-chestone that appears simple, concrete, and well-constructed but upon opening it, it starts to “slow-release” its many secrets, splendours, and gifts. The voice in his poems is soft, gentle, though persuasiveone which murmurs and hums its mantra into our ear, a mantra that is, to quote the end of the same poem, “poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.”
ZK: You have a penchant for digging deep into lifes experiences, or at least the Sudeep Sen as he appears to me as a poet, loves to discover the intricate mysteries of living. You are basically a poet whose voice is understated. Even though you are politically conscious and aware, you are not overtly political. Are you a cerebral poet?
SS: I try very hard not to sound too political or overly cerebral. In fact when I write poetry and revise them, this is an aspect that becomes very important to me as I dont want to sound either overly politicized leaning one way or the other, or consciously cerebral. I think that the whole point of a poem is lost if you cannot appeal to a wide cross-section of readers.
Different readers with different backgrounds bring with them a unique personal sensibility by which they understand and appreciate a piece of art and all of them have a perfectly valid point of view. I imagine my audience as anybody who is literate and culturally-inclined in the most widest sense of the words/he could be a banker, teacher, sports person, model, ice-cream seller, or working in the garment industry. I definitely do not write specifically for the English departments of universities, or students of English literature.
I write because I enjoy writing, because I enjoy language, because I enjoy how words sound when they are strung together in an interesting manner. If one consciously tries to insert sexy politically-correct terminology or jargon, references which largely an English literature student (or an academic/critic) understands, then I think I would be terribly limiting myself. I would feel claustrophobic if I just dwell in the inward world of academic discourse. My interests are serious, and at same time much widersports, popular culture, alternative music and drama, underground literature, and so on.
There is a lot of politics, comment, perhaps even a pinch of intellectualization in my poem show can one avoid what is around you in a daily sense. However, what I try to do is not make them obvious. And that can be quite hard because having written the poem/s, subverting the obvious is a serious challenge. Being understated and quiet is much more interesting to me than the other way around.
Often one reads poetry which sound like statements, as if the only aim of poetry is to give expression to a set of ideas or agendas. That in its own myopic terms does not interest me enough, as that can be done by a commercial political speechwriter or ad-agency copywriter. To me, if you have an interesting thought, then how can you write about it without being obvious or blatantthere lies the challenge for me. So, its a question of writing in a very textured way, with multiple levels, with various layers, all overlapping and distinct at the same time, as well as being lucid.
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ZK: Are you obliquely referring to Coleridges maxim “poetry is best words in best order”, or is that subconscious when you write? From an architectural point of view, it seems Louis MacNeice has heavily influenced you.SS: The architecture of a poem is very important to me, partly because of my own inherent interest in architecture itself. Had I not read English literature, I would have been an architect now. In fact, it was very very close choosing between the profession of being an architect and teaching literature and film.
To me, a poem should not only be linguistically challenging, but how it appears visually is a fairly important factor to me. There are two kinds of structuresone of course is the use of rhyme and various rhyme-schemes, and the other is visual rhymes. And then, depending on how important structure is to that particular poem, it can have a considerably significant impact.
For instance, in the poem ‘New York Times’, I invented a rhyme-scheme abxba cdxdc efxfe ... and so on ... the middle line, i.e. the third x line, in fact is the mirror-line which reflects the first & second lines with the fourth & fifth lines of each stanza. The other reason I used the five-line stanza-format in the poem is because the city of New York itself has five boroughs Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, etc. The other thing about this poem isif you turn the poem 90 degrees on its central axis, then a different kind of mirror-line mimics the shape of the island of Manhattan itself and its reflection on the surrounding waters. Another poem, a long sequence, Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio as a verse-play, and premiered in London as a stage-play by Border Crossings) is based on a series of eight etchings of a British artist, Peter Standen.
The entire poem is set in rhymed couplets reflecting the presence of two principal characters -- man /woman, lover/other, life/death and the other essential dualities. But they do not appear as obvious rhymes (like the translucent choral refrains in the poem) -- they are wrap-around rhymes as opposed to end-stopped rhymes. The four stanzas in each section reflect the four seasons, the four side of a frame, the four corner of a visual space. I also use alternating line-indentation for each couplet and stanza with the idea that the entire poem works on a cyclical principle. So, if you join all the stanzas together using the left-justified margin as a reference plane, they in fact fit in a perfect dove-tail joint.
But in the end however, typography and structure of a poem is just as vital as the inner-spirit and content of any poem. Back to top
ZK: Right from the beginning of your career, your poems are brilliant examples of great control as regards rhythm and syntax, which is a testimony to your own interest in poetry as a craft. Later you went through creative writing programmes at American universities. Did your interest in the architectural aspect of poetry inspire you to go for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing?
SS: Thank you, those are very kind words.... The creative writing classes I took in the United States were much later. I first started writing during my boyhood in Delhi. In India in those days, creative writing was only deemed as a hobby, albeit a laudable one. Nobody took it seriously, certainly not in a career or an academic sense. So by the time I went to America and took my first creative writing class, I already had a typical South Asian bias against the teaching of creative writing itself. I thought that how can anybody teach you how to write poetryyou either had it in you or notor so I was led to believe until then.
But what I did learn when I was enrolled in these workshops were aspects of craft, prosody, stylistics, and technique. It is very important to know and learn these things, and I cant over-emphasize their importance. We also read sheaves and sheaves of contemporary poetry which is very exciting for me. A lot of bad name to modern poetry has come about because people think that they can just write a sentence, break it up, and then rearrange it in a column-format. It may be poetry for some people, but for most it is not. These amateur poetasters do not necessarily have the skill, technique, or the inclination to actually write in formal stanzaic patterns. When I say formal, I dont necessarily mean that it has to be always rhymedthere is blank verse, free verse, concrete poetry, other kinds of structures involved. I think creative writing classes are useful both if you are particularly interested in the aspects of prosody, as well as it teaches you to think seriously and critically about contemporary writing itself.
ZK: In the post-colonial literary scene, poets and novelists writing in English from the non-English speaking world, do suffer in most cases, from a sense of displacementthis is a strong phenomenon in the writings from the South Asian diaspora. You are remarkably free from such feelings of being uprooted. One discovers that in the pages of your various books, you move smoothly between one home to another.
SS: I think the reason why you dont see any sense of displacement in my writing is because Im actually a very rooted person. My rootedness comes from my family and the way I was brought up. Im first and foremost a Bengali writer, who just happens to write in another Indian language that is English. So, my cultural and intellectual spaces are very much defined by the fact that I come from a thoroughly Bengali milieu.
I am also fortunate to have grown up in a tri-lingual situation -- I spoke Bengali at home, Hindi on the streets, and English at school not by design but by circumstance. So, this wonderfully tripartite situation was such that I could slip in and out of several mother-tongues and languages at the same time it certainly made it linguistically richer, and we as South Asians are very lucky because of that.
I also come from a typically liberal educated middle-class Bengali family who have always been an immense source of strength for me. So, that kind jargon-ridden “post-colonial” displacement you are talking about is very alien as a concept to me, and even more difficult for a person with my background to rationally understand. The other aspect of this is that I grew up in the capital city of Delhi which is a very cosmopolitan place it has a curious mix of the First and Third World atmosphere depending on where or what you are engaged in at any given moment. So wherever I traveled subsequently, be it a cosmopolitan place or a rural one, I was in some manner or the other, somewhat familiar with that new place from beforeat least I was never in a state of cultural shock, however remote.
We, in India, have been exposed to the western culture, along with our very own, from our early childhoodso neither of them are unfamiliar to us. So, when one is actually inhabiting these so-called Western (and Eastern spaces), they are places one feels equally at home. In fact I quite enjoy being in both worlds. I love the taste of singara, sandesh, kabab and phuchka... at the same time I love blue cheese, meat roasts, wine and single malt. I dont personally see any conflict in these two worlds, rather I feel lucky and infinitely richer in experience, since my taste-buds as well as my intellectual and emotional terrain, can accommodate all of that happily and simultaneously.
ZK: Is it then, your trans-national self, that writes “I / am going home once again from another / home, escaping the weave of reality into another / one, one that gently reminds and stalls / to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul”? SS: The poem ‘Flying Home’ partly reflects the trans-national quality I have been talking about. Many writers and artists nowadays are in this sort of situation. When Im going from one home to another in a plane, which in itself is such a peculiar kind of controlled space, it is a sort of perennially-transitional home, a home that is elasticit all depends on how you visualize space and how you demarcate geography. To me, that in itself is an interesting concept, one that allows for an expansive canvas. So, I suspect there is something inherent in me that makes it very difficult for me to feel displaced. Back to top
ZK: Poetry and dance are constant sources for your poetic inspiration. Through your poetry you constantly refer to other forms of art and its architectural beauty, e.g. in the poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’. SS: Absolutely. It accurately reflects my penchant for various sorts of art-forms, in this particular case, the South Indian classical dance. But Im equally interested in music, film, theatre, live and performance art, and more. If a particular dance or a particular painting, or even a particular piece of dramatic writing moves me, I may write about it directly or obliquely. And this poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ is a clear case in point. An aspect of the poem that may interest you is the architectural and topographical mapping of its poetic structure. I invented another rhyme-scheme for this poem that reflects the actual dance-step pattern on stage that is in consonance with the bols and tals, in this case -- ta dhin ta thai thai ta -- abacca dedffd ... -- the actual rhyme-scheme of the poem itself. That of course is only one thing. The more important thing is that I was completely moved and entranced by the performance, skill and beauty of the dancer herself, Leela Samsom so I had to write the poem. It was almost written for me by her, I didnt have a choice... the whole process was quite magical really.
As is perhaps evident, I do enjoy writing about other art-forms which have inspired or moved me in some way or the other. In fact, my new collection of poems I am currently working is called Blue Nude. The title poem is a sequence that have been inspired by Henri Matisses cobalt-blue cut-out figures by the same name. Then there are other poems in the that book that were inspired by photographs, drama, film and other media. So one can say that the central unifying theme of this book-in-progress, comes from my pleasure and response to the genre of creative arts itself.
ZK: By the time Postmarked India was published by HarperCollins, you had already polished and crafted you own poetic voice. You were awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in the UK and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA bears testimony to that fact. But somehow I detect that Louis MacNeice’s influence still seemed to linger on.SS: I am not entirely sure whether I agree with that last comment, in fact I dontvarious critics have said various things I believe you in this case you are referring to the poet and literary critic, Angus Calder, who compared me with Louis MacNeice in The Scotsman. It was an interesting comparison, but Calder perhaps was referring to the “variousness” in my writing, its range and latitude. I never thought that I was ever inspired by him or wrote like him. Similarly, other people have written that they have found influences/similarities of T.S.Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Hugh MacDiarmid and W.H.Auden in my poems. This could all be temporarily very flattering, but at the end it is completely up to the reader or the critic as to how and what they feel about a particular piece of my writing. I dont think I have at all been influenced by any one of them, even though I admire their writing enormously.
No one poet has directly influenced me, and this is evident in the kinds of poetry I like which tends to be rather varied and eclectic I adore the poetry of Jibanananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, the French symbolists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Verlaine; Rilke, Neruda, Paz, Walcott, Heaney... it is too varied to list them all. Also the ticker-tape is so dissimilar and expansive that I cant think of any one or two who, could have possibly influenced me.
Again, if have to find one source or fountainhead of influence it would actually be Bengali culture that has affected me ultimately, directly and indirectly. For instance, my interest and sense of rhythm and rhyme comes from my very early childhood through my mother and grandmother. They used to recite stories or sing lullabies to me, and I regularly heard them chant their prayers with a typical Bengali rounded lilt. All these were very inherent rhythms which quietly slipped into my psychological system by a curious process of osmosis. So, these perhaps are my influencesvery localized and genetic, completely spontaneous. However, the received and learned knowledge as well as the exposure they subsequently lentwhat I was talking about earlieris a very different sort of thing altogether. Back to top
ZK: Your voice as a poet is very subdued. And your poems are soliloquies?
SS: I would just replace the word “subdued” by the word “understated” which is perhaps more apt. I find that there is a lot of power in understated writing. If you write in a dramatic fashion then you are just advertising the superficial, and often there seems to be nothing very much beyond that. To me, writing ought to be a quiet kind of a thing where the reader can read and then take in its effect in a slow-release fashion, much like time-lapse photography. It this sort of style I am personally attracted to. It is so much more effective, because once you influence a person gently over time, then the effect is a lot more permanent and effective, rather than someone who is impressive one minute and altogether forgettable the next minutelike certain fashions or trends, or even like a loud noise which soon disappears. A slow well-paced murmur, or an elongated baritone of a hum, actually stays in the sensibility of a human being a lot longer and is perhaps more meaningful.
ZK: Does emotion compel you to write? Or do you wait for the right mood to inspire you?
SS: I think it is a combination of both. Being a writer is like being a strange kind of a beast. Writers tend to have invisible antennas on top of their head which pick up radar-signals odd-things while you are looking at ordinary scenes, snatches of other conversations, a glimpse of something somewhereso the ordinary everyday scenario acts as a rich well-spring of ideas for me. Even as I speak to you, I might be simultaneously processing an entirely different idea or thought that might have just struck meit is a complex parallel process. These, of course, may be just fragments, or overheard figments, voices, or images. If it is something strong and compelling, I generally try and make an effort to write it down. I dont necessarily carry a note book, so it could be on the back of a bill, or on the palm of my hand. If I am in a restaurant I would write it down on a piece of napkin, or find an excuse to get some toilet paper to scribble on it.
So when I sit down to write, I have all theses ideas and phrases in front of me. Sitting down and writing requires discipline because writing doesn’t just come from the middle of nowhere that is just the inspiration perhaps. But having had the inspiration you need time to put it all together and build the piece brick by brick. I sit down with poetry two or three hours everyday and it is not necessarily that I write a new poem every time very often I dont, but I could be revising poems that I have written before, or maybe review a book of poetry, or simply just reading and enjoying a book of poetry. Its my own quiet way of staying with poetry. It is quite important to write things down when they first strike, because often I find that if I dont do that and try to remember it later, it might altogether leave me, go away or vanish. Sometimes of course, it might happen at the most oddest and inconvenient timewhen Im already in bed at four o’clock at night / morning especially if it is winter you really do not want to get out from under the duvet and go to the desk and write it down. Sometimes I feel lazy and postpone writing it down until the next day, and very often it has completely gone by then. It is always worth that extra effort to swiftly pen it down and keep it for later.
ZK: Does contemporary literary theory in any way come between you and your writing of poetry? Do theories influence your outlook?
SS: I find intelligently argued theory interesting and worth a rigorous read, but a lot of what is churned out does not inspire me at all. In some odd way, I even dislike theory especially when it is presented to a literate public making simple things overly complicated for no apparent reason. If theory has an intellectual positive base, original and rigorous, then Im keen on it, only then. But it certainly never influences my creative writing at all. In fact, it stays very very far from it.
Im constantly surprised when I read a review, critique, or an essay on my work, as to how much theory is being used these days, especially in the so-called post-colonial circuit. I am not impressed by writers who put polysyllabic jargon just for effect. Frankly this sort of writing is of no interest to me.
ZK: But certainly you have theories of your own. Just because you don’t adhere to contemporary literary theories, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a theory of your own? Certainly your responses to different stimuli are not passive. SS: You cant be passive when responding to different stimuli, especially if you posses the invisible antennas I had mentioned before if you are passive you cant be writing at all. All the writing I have done over the past fifteen years are responses to various stimuli. The published results are in front you, clearly then one is not passive.
But when it comes to literary and critical theory, of course I’m aware of what is going on around me. But I don’t let that tarnish or complicate my writing, because as I have said before they are completely separate categories and disciplines. Art should really exist independently on its own merit. Intelligent analysis and critique is surely exciting, but the two genres and purposes are entirely different. At the end, what excites me is a piece of original writing that is well-written, thought-provoking, intelligently argued. But ultimately it needs to move me, it needs to create quiet indelible waves that constantly haunts me, changes me in some slight modest way. Otherwise it is simply a cerebral exercise like playing and solving a Rubics Cube which only has limited pleasures.
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ZK: You have a strong liking for fluids -- its intricate flow and glide. There are plenty of references to milk, wine, blood, juices of passion, in your poems such as ‘Single Malt’, the long poems ‘Line Breaks’ and ‘Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames’, for example. It seems you want to achieve some kind of linguistic fluidity in your poems. Your comments, please.SS: The concept of fluid itself is I think quite interesting. In a sense it is a cross-over phase, or point the of intersection, between the liquid and solid states. So, we are talking about an in-between state, a state that has its own definite rhythm, flow, deliberateness, and so on. It also is a state which typifies the unobvious. The clarity of liquid is very clear and the concreteness of solid is equally concrete.
But the fluid state is almost like a penumbra, a title of which is also a poem I have written. It is a space which allows you to do a lot because it is infinitely multi-layered -- it is much more textured, as much depends on the viscosity and density of the fluid itself. It is certainly a worthwhile, languorous, languid space to control and be creative with it.
ZK: Your taste as a poet is very broad, open, and wide-visioned. You are a poet who cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed.
SS: Is that a good thing or a bad thing, i.e. the fact that you can't put me in a pigeon-hole?
ZK: As a reader, I have enjoyed the varied landscapes that you portray, the stream of emotions and themes that you give expression to. The good thing about all this is that Sudeep Sen is not a prisoner of a specific style, or a set of images, or even an agenda.
SS: Well, I suspect you have answered your question yourself. Which is precisely why I was trying to ask you the question back. I'm glad that one can't pigeon-hole me, because my interest, my themes, my forms, my rhythms are very very varied indeed.
I still think inspite having written a fair bit for the past 15 years or so, I am still in the continuous process of growing and learning new things. Every time I work on a new book, I realise that there is so much more to learn, and so much more to explore.
When it comes to writing itself, it is always a progression -- you start from point A, to point B, and onwards. One of the most interesting grammatical punctuation for me is actually the ellipse, the three dots [...] which simply says --as such, nothing ends. It makes one's way of looking at things as well as one's own writing organic. I feel it is a good thing because otherwise if you work in a very myopic kind of a way then you are only narrowing your scope further and further. Whereas simply being open to growth, you have the entire canvas and palette open, to choose from. And that is very useful and at the same time unconstraining.
ZK: Your early interest in the external architecture of poetry, i.e. the overt formal construction of poetry over the years has grown and graduated into an internal, much quieter, perhaps spiritual, and sparer organization of poetry.
SS: You have put that quite well in fact. In my early poems, the architecture of the poem itself was visually much more apparent. Whereas as time has gone on, I have been able to be much more subtle in my writing. It is essentially because of a greater experience, both in life and writing itself. You learn how to use craft and words, and hopefully you get better and better to a point that you can in fact hide very complex formal-constructs in a poem to an uninitiated eye, one that is only apparent if you dig deep into the skin and tissue of the poem.
Of course, there is also a shift in sensibility, in the sense that I was much younger then. Life's circumstances change, with that your sensibility changes and grows. I think these aspects are also reflected in my later poems.
ZK: Your poems are visually rich, but they do not just end there. You have been influenced at the same time by ancient Prakrit poetry, Japanese haiku, Chinese poetry, Imagist and Metaphysical poetry. But you don't just try to stir your reader with only images. Your frames and conceits cast a deceptively soothing spell, one that goes beyond the physical as well as metaphysical reality.
SS: Certainly that tends to be very true. There is an immense visual quality in my poetry, partly influenced by the fact that I worked for many years as a film-maker. Besides, I do have more than a part-time interest in photography. As I mentioned before, architecture was an important area of interest of mine, a field I might have actually pursued as a career, but circumstances took a different turn. But I still am interested in visual and graphic art, and in the whole nature of light, photography, and fibre-optics. So all that somewhere along the line must permeate and stain my poems.
However, that's only one aspect of the poetry -- only the stretched-canvas, only the surface of the parchment where the colours you see are brightly dabbed upon. Once you go beyond that level, there is an intensely quiet, an inwardly deeper depth of field in my writing -- an aspect of my poetry which perhaps what you are alluding to. I don't know whether it is spiritual or not, but certainly it is an introspective kind of writing. So in that sense, you are right.
ZK: One of your recently published chapbooks, Almanac, contains poems corresponding to the twelve months of the year. What inspired you to write poems on the different months?
SS: It was completely accidental actually. At the time, I was trying very hard to write poems for my new-born son Aria, and I increasingly found that writing poetry for children very very difficult. One of the things that I was experiencing in my writing was -- when I was consciously trying to write for a child, I realised that I was speaking down at them rather than to them as a colleague. So, I thought the other alternative could be poems about each month of the year as a calender so that my son could learn the different months of the year in a creative way. Part of it was that.
Part of it was also that I realised that I had enough poems which had some reference to some month or the other. So, when I pulled all those poems together, some published and others unpublished, I realised there were poems which represented about eight of the months. Since I already had eight poems, I thought why not try and write four new poems relating to the remaining four months to complete the sequence. From reading the poems you would realise that not all the poems are directly related to month concerned as such. They are obliquely related to the months. For instance, there is poem called 'April's Air' which is set in Japan and about rice-harvesting that takes place in April. So, the poem conveniently fit into the April month-slot.
Similarly, ‘One Moonlight December Night’ obviously comes in the December section. But the poem, for instance, which refers to the month of May is a newish poem which I wrote for my son whose birthday falls on the 21st of that month. Even though the poem is titled ‘Aria’, the reference to people who are in the know is to the month of May. So, I had quite an enjoyable time putting this volume together.
ZK: The most difficult task for any reader of your poetry is that there is no one specific geographical location or boundary to associate you with. The landscape, seascape, and airspace that fill your poems are borderless and trans-national. There is practically no one central location that can be identified as your own personal territory in the broad sense of the term.
SS: That’s the way I have been brought up. I was brought up as a Bengali within a Bengali family-milieu, but in a non-Bengali landscape of cosmopolitan Delhi. I spoke English in school, Hindi on the streets, and Bengali at home. So, it was an essentially and inherently multi-lingual and multi-cultural space that I started from. Also the range of landscapes and topographies that influenced me were both Eastern and Western at the same time. Through literature, art, and film, I had access to the Western culture, but at the same time I was immersed in my own in India, and the East so to speak broadly. So, obviously it is very difficult to pin me down in one place. And I’m glad that is a difficult thing as it also relates to the earlier answer I gave you. As you travel both vertically and horizontally, perspectives change. It is not just the diverse landscapes in terms of different countries and topographies, but it's also diverse in terms of different levels we are talking about -- whether it is purely visual, purely cinematic, purely structural, purely architectural -- moving from one level to the other, moving from one plane to the other, some time it is two dimensional, some time it is three dimensional, some time it is much more.
The only thing that links me to some sort of centre is the ‘centre of gravity’ itself. Otherwise, the only tangible thing that links me to a centre is my own family and the Bengali culture, something that is either obliquely or directly omnipresent in my work.
ZK: The volume, Retracing American Contours, takes us back again to an American landscape, a terrain that you explored in your highly successful third book, New York Times. Why the return to the United States?
SS: The poems in Retracing American Contours are poems that were originally written in the period from 1987 to 1990, much of it around the same time as the poems in New York Times itself. Originally, I had planned for all these poems to have come out together as one volume. But since the book became very large, my British publisher thought it would be a good idea to cull out the New York based and New York related poems, to form one independent book. I went along with that idea and was very pleased about the eventual results.
So the poems in this new volume Retracing American Contours are the ones that I want to preserve from that original group that were not published in book form. Publishing them now, almost after a decade they were first born, is also a private way of visiting those places again. There are so many important events and significant memories attached to those places, that it is almost like a journey down memory-lane, but with a fresh considered perspective.
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ZK: Your recently published volume, Lines of Desire, is stunning, quite a stylistic revelation. As a poet you strike similes and evoke metaphors that are original, cool, untainted, soothing, and the same time, urgent. In addition, they also remind one of conceits in metaphysical poetry.
SS: That is an interesting observation. Lines of Desire is basically series of very tightly written short erotic poems. In fact, I re-reading and savouring the poetry of John Donne quite a lot while writing some of the poems in this volume.
It is very difficult to write about love and passion in an original and fresh way because it is one subject that has been completely exhausted. So I wondered, how does one write about it without actually sounding old. My way of getting into it was to turn them inside out, rather than going from outside into the inside which is usually the case as it is a much safer and controllable route. I wanted to capture the raw passion and essence of the particular range of emotions, and at the same time be subtle and unobvious. Also I wanted to give these poems a meditative and chilling quality, an edge that is at the same time sharp and well as mesmerising. Back to top
ZK: Tell us about In Another Tongue -- an impressive volume of translations you have recently published, something quite new for you.
SS: In Another Tongue is my first volume of translations that gathers poetry from well known and lesser known poets from Hebrew, Macedonian, Persian, Hindi and Bengali languages. Since its publication, I have translated more -- from Dutch, Slovene, and others.
William Radice pointed out that this volume is quite a departure from what I have been engaged in the past. I have enjoyed this relatively new process a lot. Translation is at the same time very different and similar to writing original poetry. But the dynamics and energies are completely unusual and difficult to quantify when translating.
I especially enjoy translating from Bangla and Hindi -- languages I know well. It is so nice to be in a totally Bengali milieu, immersed in its people, poetry, and music. It is as though a part of me really wanted to blossom, but did not have the right context for it. Growing up in Delhi is and was truly trilingual -- Bengali, Hindi, and English are the languages I use (but understand quite a few Northern Indian languages -- Punjabi, Rajasthani, Urdu, even Gujarati and Maharastrian from Western India). When I am in the West, it is predominantly English that I am using. So when I am in Bangladesh, I absolutely enjoy being swathed in Bangla in more ways than one. One realises that English is so redundant in these parts, and thank god for that.
ZK: Your new work which is due to appear next year is a major book-length poem, Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent. It is an highly unusual and inventive work, a tour de force. How did it begin? Tell us something about its form, and the journey itself.
SS: The book-length poem -- Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent -- began on a wet August morning, as I sat in an half-sunken basement space of a partially restored fifteenth century mansion ‘Gartincaber’ in Doune (near Stirling, Scotland). Almost drunk under the spell of this space, both interior and exterior, dactyls were dictated to me by photons in the surrounding electric-charged air. It was here where my journey began. My journey continued leaving a winding trail of foot-steps, pug-marks I tried to hide, but could not. It is still an uncompleted journey, a journey that cannot be completed ... perhaps, it is part of one's own fallibility. This journey has infinitely long lines and many miles left to traverse, but I know my blood's inadequate crimson may prevent such an ambition. So I take all this as a gift, a dream. I feel constantly grateful that I have been allowed such a dream.
Along the way, I have been coloured by many sources, interests, passions, and obsessions -- some obvious and others oblique. Among them, there are overheard phrases, paintings, photographs, fragmented images, films, music, memory, poems, women, fluids, and the intoxicated air.
My alter-ego wanted to be an architect and a cartographer -- I have a more than part-time interest in science -- All these must have, in some way, influenced this poem.
I re-read many of my favourite poetry books at the time -- classics like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal; volumes by contemporary masters like Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and others. Walcott’s Omeros, Brodsky’s To Urania, Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, Donald Hall's The One Day, Jaan Kaplinski’s The Same Sea In Us All, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, Dom Moraes’s Serendip, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Middle Passage, A K Ramanujan’s Collected Poems, especially kept me company. I have used fragments from many of these poets' work throughout to punctuate the narrative, so that readers can get some sense of their world as parallel asides, just as it did for me on my journey. I was also immersed in Gray’s Anatomy, Encarta’s BodyWorks, Louis Kahn’s Sounds and Silence, Matthew Arnold and T S Eliot’s essays, John Frederick Nim’s Western Wind, .... At the time, I relied on my grandfather's trusted old compass that helped navigate my way, imaginatively plotting a course through my National Geographic map collection that lay in disarray .... My memory provided calm, as I struggled, translating Jibanananda Das’s ‘Bawnolawta Shane’ to recreate its music and passion. All of them have been guiding companions .... And so, the journey went on .... The sparse elongated structure of the poem partly reflects the strength and surety of the human vertebra and spine; much like Neruda's Odes that reflect the long-thin shape of Chile. The sections and sub-sections join together like synapses between bone and bone. The titles are translucent markers or breath pauses, not separators.
The short two-line couplets echo the two-step foot-prints, a pathway mapped on the atlas. The 12 sections correspond to the 12 bones in a human rib-cage, the 12 months in a year, the 12 hours in a day .... There are 26 bones in a human vertebrae, and the 26 parts in the poem slowly assemble themselves from a montage of tenuously strung lyrics. (The projected 206 page-length of this book would match the exact number of bones in a human body.)
This poem leaves a footprint from a perennial walk that meanders through public and private spaces -- making sense of the vicissitudes of our loves, losses, wants, desires, inadequacies -- as it maps the matrix of living and dying.
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Invention, Fusion & Balance in Sudeep Sen's Poetry
Ziaul Karim, the literary editor of Dhaka’s leading English-language newspaper The Daily Star, talks to the celebrated young poet Sudeep Sen. His bilingual English-Bangla volume -- A Blank Letter -- Ekti Khali Chithi -- was published in Bangladesh to much critical acclaim earlier this year. His last book, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) was awarded the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA). Four new chapbooks were published this year in the United States -- Retracing American Contours, Almanac, Lines of Desires, and, In Another Tongue. Sen was on a literary tour in The Balkans where his work was translated into Macedonian and Slovenian languages. He was invited to read at the world’s oldest poetry festival, The Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia, as well as at the prestigious Vilenica Writers Festival in Slovenia.
“Art in its purest form never reveals all”, writes Sudeep Sen, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Indian and international poetry circles, as evident in the unfathomable depth and beauty of a ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ in a poem by that name. This inspired line by the poet also serves as a fascinating commentary on his poems. Sen essentially loves to express himself in a clear, crisp, logical fashion, while building his ideas line by line, and stanza by stanza. The belief that ambiguity is at the core of poetic beauty is not true for Sudeep Sen. His poetic beauty works at a very different level.
However he may conceive a poem, the final result is always a well-knit fabric. If you try unravelling the threads of the fabric itself, it will gently reveal subtle layers which otherwise go unnoticed to an everyday eye. It is worth comparing his poems to a treasure-chestone that appears simple, concrete, and well-constructed but upon opening it, it starts to “slow-release” its many secrets, splendours, and gifts. The voice in his poems is soft, gentle, though persuasiveone which murmurs and hums its mantra into our ear, a mantra that is, to quote the end of the same poem, “poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.”
ZK: You have a penchant for digging deep into lifes experiences, or at least the Sudeep Sen as he appears to me as a poet, loves to discover the intricate mysteries of living. You are basically a poet whose voice is understated. Even though you are politically conscious and aware, you are not overtly political. Are you a cerebral poet?
SS: I try very hard not to sound too political or overly cerebral. In fact when I write poetry and revise them, this is an aspect that becomes very important to me as I dont want to sound either overly politicized leaning one way or the other, or consciously cerebral. I think that the whole point of a poem is lost if you cannot appeal to a wide cross-section of readers.
Different readers with different backgrounds bring with them a unique personal sensibility by which they understand and appreciate a piece of art and all of them have a perfectly valid point of view. I imagine my audience as anybody who is literate and culturally-inclined in the most widest sense of the words/he could be a banker, teacher, sports person, model, ice-cream seller, or working in the garment industry. I definitely do not write specifically for the English departments of universities, or students of English literature.
I write because I enjoy writing, because I enjoy language, because I enjoy how words sound when they are strung together in an interesting manner. If one consciously tries to insert sexy politically-correct terminology or jargon, references which largely an English literature student (or an academic/critic) understands, then I think I would be terribly limiting myself. I would feel claustrophobic if I just dwell in the inward world of academic discourse. My interests are serious, and at same time much widersports, popular culture, alternative music and drama, underground literature, and so on.
There is a lot of politics, comment, perhaps even a pinch of intellectualization in my poem show can one avoid what is around you in a daily sense. However, what I try to do is not make them obvious. And that can be quite hard because having written the poem/s, subverting the obvious is a serious challenge. Being understated and quiet is much more interesting to me than the other way around.
Often one reads poetry which sound like statements, as if the only aim of poetry is to give expression to a set of ideas or agendas. That in its own myopic terms does not interest me enough, as that can be done by a commercial political speechwriter or ad-agency copywriter. To me, if you have an interesting thought, then how can you write about it without being obvious or blatantthere lies the challenge for me. So, its a question of writing in a very textured way, with multiple levels, with various layers, all overlapping and distinct at the same time, as well as being lucid.
ZK: Are you obliquely referring to Coleridges maxim “poetry is best words in best order”, or is that subconscious when you write? From an architectural point of view, it seems Louis MacNeice has heavily influenced you.SS: The architecture of a poem is very important to me, partly because of my own inherent interest in architecture itself. Had I not read English literature, I would have been an architect now. In fact, it was very very close choosing between the profession of being an architect and teaching literature and film.
To me, a poem should not only be linguistically challenging, but how it appears visually is a fairly important factor to me. There are two kinds of structuresone of course is the use of rhyme and various rhyme-schemes, and the other is visual rhymes. And then, depending on how important structure is to that particular poem, it can have a considerably significant impact.
For instance, in the poem ‘New York Times’, I invented a rhyme-scheme abxba cdxdc efxfe ... and so on ... the middle line, i.e. the third x line, in fact is the mirror-line which reflects the first & second lines with the fourth & fifth lines of each stanza. The other reason I used the five-line stanza-format in the poem is because the city of New York itself has five boroughs Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, etc. The other thing about this poem isif you turn the poem 90 degrees on its central axis, then a different kind of mirror-line mimics the shape of the island of Manhattan itself and its reflection on the surrounding waters. Another poem, a long sequence, Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio as a verse-play, and premiered in London as a stage-play by Border Crossings) is based on a series of eight etchings of a British artist, Peter Standen.
The entire poem is set in rhymed couplets reflecting the presence of two principal characters -- man /woman, lover/other, life/death and the other essential dualities. But they do not appear as obvious rhymes (like the translucent choral refrains in the poem) -- they are wrap-around rhymes as opposed to end-stopped rhymes. The four stanzas in each section reflect the four seasons, the four side of a frame, the four corner of a visual space. I also use alternating line-indentation for each couplet and stanza with the idea that the entire poem works on a cyclical principle. So, if you join all the stanzas together using the left-justified margin as a reference plane, they in fact fit in a perfect dove-tail joint.
But in the end however, typography and structure of a poem is just as vital as the inner-spirit and content of any poem. Back to top
ZK: Right from the beginning of your career, your poems are brilliant examples of great control as regards rhythm and syntax, which is a testimony to your own interest in poetry as a craft. Later you went through creative writing programmes at American universities. Did your interest in the architectural aspect of poetry inspire you to go for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing?
SS: Thank you, those are very kind words.... The creative writing classes I took in the United States were much later. I first started writing during my boyhood in Delhi. In India in those days, creative writing was only deemed as a hobby, albeit a laudable one. Nobody took it seriously, certainly not in a career or an academic sense. So by the time I went to America and took my first creative writing class, I already had a typical South Asian bias against the teaching of creative writing itself. I thought that how can anybody teach you how to write poetryyou either had it in you or notor so I was led to believe until then.
But what I did learn when I was enrolled in these workshops were aspects of craft, prosody, stylistics, and technique. It is very important to know and learn these things, and I cant over-emphasize their importance. We also read sheaves and sheaves of contemporary poetry which is very exciting for me. A lot of bad name to modern poetry has come about because people think that they can just write a sentence, break it up, and then rearrange it in a column-format. It may be poetry for some people, but for most it is not. These amateur poetasters do not necessarily have the skill, technique, or the inclination to actually write in formal stanzaic patterns. When I say formal, I dont necessarily mean that it has to be always rhymedthere is blank verse, free verse, concrete poetry, other kinds of structures involved. I think creative writing classes are useful both if you are particularly interested in the aspects of prosody, as well as it teaches you to think seriously and critically about contemporary writing itself.
ZK: In the post-colonial literary scene, poets and novelists writing in English from the non-English speaking world, do suffer in most cases, from a sense of displacementthis is a strong phenomenon in the writings from the South Asian diaspora. You are remarkably free from such feelings of being uprooted. One discovers that in the pages of your various books, you move smoothly between one home to another.
SS: I think the reason why you dont see any sense of displacement in my writing is because Im actually a very rooted person. My rootedness comes from my family and the way I was brought up. Im first and foremost a Bengali writer, who just happens to write in another Indian language that is English. So, my cultural and intellectual spaces are very much defined by the fact that I come from a thoroughly Bengali milieu.
I am also fortunate to have grown up in a tri-lingual situation -- I spoke Bengali at home, Hindi on the streets, and English at school not by design but by circumstance. So, this wonderfully tripartite situation was such that I could slip in and out of several mother-tongues and languages at the same time it certainly made it linguistically richer, and we as South Asians are very lucky because of that.
I also come from a typically liberal educated middle-class Bengali family who have always been an immense source of strength for me. So, that kind jargon-ridden “post-colonial” displacement you are talking about is very alien as a concept to me, and even more difficult for a person with my background to rationally understand. The other aspect of this is that I grew up in the capital city of Delhi which is a very cosmopolitan place it has a curious mix of the First and Third World atmosphere depending on where or what you are engaged in at any given moment. So wherever I traveled subsequently, be it a cosmopolitan place or a rural one, I was in some manner or the other, somewhat familiar with that new place from beforeat least I was never in a state of cultural shock, however remote.
We, in India, have been exposed to the western culture, along with our very own, from our early childhoodso neither of them are unfamiliar to us. So, when one is actually inhabiting these so-called Western (and Eastern spaces), they are places one feels equally at home. In fact I quite enjoy being in both worlds. I love the taste of singara, sandesh, kabab and phuchka... at the same time I love blue cheese, meat roasts, wine and single malt. I dont personally see any conflict in these two worlds, rather I feel lucky and infinitely richer in experience, since my taste-buds as well as my intellectual and emotional terrain, can accommodate all of that happily and simultaneously.
ZK: Is it then, your trans-national self, that writes “I / am going home once again from another / home, escaping the weave of reality into another / one, one that gently reminds and stalls / to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul”? SS: The poem ‘Flying Home’ partly reflects the trans-national quality I have been talking about. Many writers and artists nowadays are in this sort of situation. When Im going from one home to another in a plane, which in itself is such a peculiar kind of controlled space, it is a sort of perennially-transitional home, a home that is elasticit all depends on how you visualize space and how you demarcate geography. To me, that in itself is an interesting concept, one that allows for an expansive canvas. So, I suspect there is something inherent in me that makes it very difficult for me to feel displaced. Back to top
ZK: Poetry and dance are constant sources for your poetic inspiration. Through your poetry you constantly refer to other forms of art and its architectural beauty, e.g. in the poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’. SS: Absolutely. It accurately reflects my penchant for various sorts of art-forms, in this particular case, the South Indian classical dance. But Im equally interested in music, film, theatre, live and performance art, and more. If a particular dance or a particular painting, or even a particular piece of dramatic writing moves me, I may write about it directly or obliquely. And this poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ is a clear case in point. An aspect of the poem that may interest you is the architectural and topographical mapping of its poetic structure. I invented another rhyme-scheme for this poem that reflects the actual dance-step pattern on stage that is in consonance with the bols and tals, in this case -- ta dhin ta thai thai ta -- abacca dedffd ... -- the actual rhyme-scheme of the poem itself. That of course is only one thing. The more important thing is that I was completely moved and entranced by the performance, skill and beauty of the dancer herself, Leela Samsom so I had to write the poem. It was almost written for me by her, I didnt have a choice... the whole process was quite magical really.
As is perhaps evident, I do enjoy writing about other art-forms which have inspired or moved me in some way or the other. In fact, my new collection of poems I am currently working is called Blue Nude. The title poem is a sequence that have been inspired by Henri Matisses cobalt-blue cut-out figures by the same name. Then there are other poems in the that book that were inspired by photographs, drama, film and other media. So one can say that the central unifying theme of this book-in-progress, comes from my pleasure and response to the genre of creative arts itself.
ZK: By the time Postmarked India was published by HarperCollins, you had already polished and crafted you own poetic voice. You were awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in the UK and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA bears testimony to that fact. But somehow I detect that Louis MacNeice’s influence still seemed to linger on.SS: I am not entirely sure whether I agree with that last comment, in fact I dontvarious critics have said various things I believe you in this case you are referring to the poet and literary critic, Angus Calder, who compared me with Louis MacNeice in The Scotsman. It was an interesting comparison, but Calder perhaps was referring to the “variousness” in my writing, its range and latitude. I never thought that I was ever inspired by him or wrote like him. Similarly, other people have written that they have found influences/similarities of T.S.Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Hugh MacDiarmid and W.H.Auden in my poems. This could all be temporarily very flattering, but at the end it is completely up to the reader or the critic as to how and what they feel about a particular piece of my writing. I dont think I have at all been influenced by any one of them, even though I admire their writing enormously.
No one poet has directly influenced me, and this is evident in the kinds of poetry I like which tends to be rather varied and eclectic I adore the poetry of Jibanananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, the French symbolists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Verlaine; Rilke, Neruda, Paz, Walcott, Heaney... it is too varied to list them all. Also the ticker-tape is so dissimilar and expansive that I cant think of any one or two who, could have possibly influenced me.
Again, if have to find one source or fountainhead of influence it would actually be Bengali culture that has affected me ultimately, directly and indirectly. For instance, my interest and sense of rhythm and rhyme comes from my very early childhood through my mother and grandmother. They used to recite stories or sing lullabies to me, and I regularly heard them chant their prayers with a typical Bengali rounded lilt. All these were very inherent rhythms which quietly slipped into my psychological system by a curious process of osmosis. So, these perhaps are my influencesvery localized and genetic, completely spontaneous. However, the received and learned knowledge as well as the exposure they subsequently lentwhat I was talking about earlieris a very different sort of thing altogether. Back to top
ZK: Your voice as a poet is very subdued. And your poems are soliloquies?
SS: I would just replace the word “subdued” by the word “understated” which is perhaps more apt. I find that there is a lot of power in understated writing. If you write in a dramatic fashion then you are just advertising the superficial, and often there seems to be nothing very much beyond that. To me, writing ought to be a quiet kind of a thing where the reader can read and then take in its effect in a slow-release fashion, much like time-lapse photography. It this sort of style I am personally attracted to. It is so much more effective, because once you influence a person gently over time, then the effect is a lot more permanent and effective, rather than someone who is impressive one minute and altogether forgettable the next minutelike certain fashions or trends, or even like a loud noise which soon disappears. A slow well-paced murmur, or an elongated baritone of a hum, actually stays in the sensibility of a human being a lot longer and is perhaps more meaningful.
ZK: Does emotion compel you to write? Or do you wait for the right mood to inspire you?
SS: I think it is a combination of both. Being a writer is like being a strange kind of a beast. Writers tend to have invisible antennas on top of their head which pick up radar-signals odd-things while you are looking at ordinary scenes, snatches of other conversations, a glimpse of something somewhereso the ordinary everyday scenario acts as a rich well-spring of ideas for me. Even as I speak to you, I might be simultaneously processing an entirely different idea or thought that might have just struck meit is a complex parallel process. These, of course, may be just fragments, or overheard figments, voices, or images. If it is something strong and compelling, I generally try and make an effort to write it down. I dont necessarily carry a note book, so it could be on the back of a bill, or on the palm of my hand. If I am in a restaurant I would write it down on a piece of napkin, or find an excuse to get some toilet paper to scribble on it.
So when I sit down to write, I have all theses ideas and phrases in front of me. Sitting down and writing requires discipline because writing doesn’t just come from the middle of nowhere that is just the inspiration perhaps. But having had the inspiration you need time to put it all together and build the piece brick by brick. I sit down with poetry two or three hours everyday and it is not necessarily that I write a new poem every time very often I dont, but I could be revising poems that I have written before, or maybe review a book of poetry, or simply just reading and enjoying a book of poetry. Its my own quiet way of staying with poetry. It is quite important to write things down when they first strike, because often I find that if I dont do that and try to remember it later, it might altogether leave me, go away or vanish. Sometimes of course, it might happen at the most oddest and inconvenient timewhen Im already in bed at four o’clock at night / morning especially if it is winter you really do not want to get out from under the duvet and go to the desk and write it down. Sometimes I feel lazy and postpone writing it down until the next day, and very often it has completely gone by then. It is always worth that extra effort to swiftly pen it down and keep it for later.
ZK: Does contemporary literary theory in any way come between you and your writing of poetry? Do theories influence your outlook?
SS: I find intelligently argued theory interesting and worth a rigorous read, but a lot of what is churned out does not inspire me at all. In some odd way, I even dislike theory especially when it is presented to a literate public making simple things overly complicated for no apparent reason. If theory has an intellectual positive base, original and rigorous, then Im keen on it, only then. But it certainly never influences my creative writing at all. In fact, it stays very very far from it.
Im constantly surprised when I read a review, critique, or an essay on my work, as to how much theory is being used these days, especially in the so-called post-colonial circuit. I am not impressed by writers who put polysyllabic jargon just for effect. Frankly this sort of writing is of no interest to me.
ZK: But certainly you have theories of your own. Just because you don’t adhere to contemporary literary theories, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a theory of your own? Certainly your responses to different stimuli are not passive. SS: You cant be passive when responding to different stimuli, especially if you posses the invisible antennas I had mentioned before if you are passive you cant be writing at all. All the writing I have done over the past fifteen years are responses to various stimuli. The published results are in front you, clearly then one is not passive.
But when it comes to literary and critical theory, of course I’m aware of what is going on around me. But I don’t let that tarnish or complicate my writing, because as I have said before they are completely separate categories and disciplines. Art should really exist independently on its own merit. Intelligent analysis and critique is surely exciting, but the two genres and purposes are entirely different. At the end, what excites me is a piece of original writing that is well-written, thought-provoking, intelligently argued. But ultimately it needs to move me, it needs to create quiet indelible waves that constantly haunts me, changes me in some slight modest way. Otherwise it is simply a cerebral exercise like playing and solving a Rubics Cube which only has limited pleasures.
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ZK: You have a strong liking for fluids -- its intricate flow and glide. There are plenty of references to milk, wine, blood, juices of passion, in your poems such as ‘Single Malt’, the long poems ‘Line Breaks’ and ‘Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames’, for example. It seems you want to achieve some kind of linguistic fluidity in your poems. Your comments, please.SS: The concept of fluid itself is I think quite interesting. In a sense it is a cross-over phase, or point the of intersection, between the liquid and solid states. So, we are talking about an in-between state, a state that has its own definite rhythm, flow, deliberateness, and so on. It also is a state which typifies the unobvious. The clarity of liquid is very clear and the concreteness of solid is equally concrete.
But the fluid state is almost like a penumbra, a title of which is also a poem I have written. It is a space which allows you to do a lot because it is infinitely multi-layered -- it is much more textured, as much depends on the viscosity and density of the fluid itself. It is certainly a worthwhile, languorous, languid space to control and be creative with it.
ZK: Your taste as a poet is very broad, open, and wide-visioned. You are a poet who cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed.
SS: Is that a good thing or a bad thing, i.e. the fact that you can't put me in a pigeon-hole?
ZK: As a reader, I have enjoyed the varied landscapes that you portray, the stream of emotions and themes that you give expression to. The good thing about all this is that Sudeep Sen is not a prisoner of a specific style, or a set of images, or even an agenda.
SS: Well, I suspect you have answered your question yourself. Which is precisely why I was trying to ask you the question back. I'm glad that one can't pigeon-hole me, because my interest, my themes, my forms, my rhythms are very very varied indeed.
I still think inspite having written a fair bit for the past 15 years or so, I am still in the continuous process of growing and learning new things. Every time I work on a new book, I realise that there is so much more to learn, and so much more to explore.
When it comes to writing itself, it is always a progression -- you start from point A, to point B, and onwards. One of the most interesting grammatical punctuation for me is actually the ellipse, the three dots [...] which simply says --as such, nothing ends. It makes one's way of looking at things as well as one's own writing organic. I feel it is a good thing because otherwise if you work in a very myopic kind of a way then you are only narrowing your scope further and further. Whereas simply being open to growth, you have the entire canvas and palette open, to choose from. And that is very useful and at the same time unconstraining.
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ZK: Your early interest in the external architecture of poetry, i.e. the overt formal construction of poetry over the years has grown and graduated into an internal, much quieter, perhaps spiritual, and sparer organization of poetry.
SS: You have put that quite well in fact. In my early poems, the architecture of the poem itself was visually much more apparent. Whereas as time has gone on, I have been able to be much more subtle in my writing. It is essentially because of a greater experience, both in life and writing itself. You learn how to use craft and words, and hopefully you get better and better to a point that you can in fact hide very complex formal-constructs in a poem to an uninitiated eye, one that is only apparent if you dig deep into the skin and tissue of the poem.
Of course, there is also a shift in sensibility, in the sense that I was much younger then. Life's circumstances change, with that your sensibility changes and grows. I think these aspects are also reflected in my later poems.
ZK: Your poems are visually rich, but they do not just end there. You have been influenced at the same time by ancient Prakrit poetry, Japanese haiku, Chinese poetry, Imagist and Metaphysical poetry. But you don't just try to stir your reader with only images. Your frames and conceits cast a deceptively soothing spell, one that goes beyond the physical as well as metaphysical reality.
SS: Certainly that tends to be very true. There is an immense visual quality in my poetry, partly influenced by the fact that I worked for many years as a film-maker. Besides, I do have more than a part-time interest in photography. As I mentioned before, architecture was an important area of interest of mine, a field I might have actually pursued as a career, but circumstances took a different turn. But I still am interested in visual and graphic art, and in the whole nature of light, photography, and fibre-optics. So all that somewhere along the line must permeate and stain my poems.
However, that's only one aspect of the poetry -- only the stretched-canvas, only the surface of the parchment where the colours you see are brightly dabbed upon. Once you go beyond that level, there is an intensely quiet, an inwardly deeper depth of field in my writing -- an aspect of my poetry which perhaps what you are alluding to. I don't know whether it is spiritual or not, but certainly it is an introspective kind of writing. So in that sense, you are right.
ZK: One of your recently published chapbooks, Almanac, contains poems corresponding to the twelve months of the year. What inspired you to write poems on the different months?
SS: It was completely accidental actually. At the time, I was trying very hard to write poems for my new-born son Aria, and I increasingly found that writing poetry for children very very difficult. One of the things that I was experiencing in my writing was -- when I was consciously trying to write for a child, I realised that I was speaking down at them rather than to them as a colleague. So, I thought the other alternative could be poems about each month of the year as a calender so that my son could learn the different months of the year in a creative way. Part of it was that.
Part of it was also that I realised that I had enough poems which had some reference to some month or the other. So, when I pulled all those poems together, some published and others unpublished, I realised there were poems which represented about eight of the months. Since I already had eight poems, I thought why not try and write four new poems relating to the remaining four months to complete the sequence. From reading the poems you would realise that not all the poems are directly related to month concerned as such. They are obliquely related to the months. For instance, there is poem called 'April's Air' which is set in Japan and about rice-harvesting that takes place in April. So, the poem conveniently fit into the April month-slot.
Similarly, ‘One Moonlight December Night’ obviously comes in the December section. But the poem, for instance, which refers to the month of May is a newish poem which I wrote for my son whose birthday falls on the 21st of that month. Even though the poem is titled ‘Aria’, the reference to people who are in the know is to the month of May. So, I had quite an enjoyable time putting this volume together.
ZK: The most difficult task for any reader of your poetry is that there is no one specific geographical location or boundary to associate you with. The landscape, seascape, and airspace that fill your poems are borderless and trans-national. There is practically no one central location that can be identified as your own personal territory in the broad sense of the term.
SS: That’s the way I have been brought up. I was brought up as a Bengali within a Bengali family-milieu, but in a non-Bengali landscape of cosmopolitan Delhi. I spoke English in school, Hindi on the streets, and Bengali at home. So, it was an essentially and inherently multi-lingual and multi-cultural space that I started from. Also the range of landscapes and topographies that influenced me were both Eastern and Western at the same time. Through literature, art, and film, I had access to the Western culture, but at the same time I was immersed in my own in India, and the East so to speak broadly. So, obviously it is very difficult to pin me down in one place. And I’m glad that is a difficult thing as it also relates to the earlier answer I gave you. As you travel both vertically and horizontally, perspectives change. It is not just the diverse landscapes in terms of different countries and topographies, but it's also diverse in terms of different levels we are talking about -- whether it is purely visual, purely cinematic, purely structural, purely architectural -- moving from one level to the other, moving from one plane to the other, some time it is two dimensional, some time it is three dimensional, some time it is much more.
The only thing that links me to some sort of centre is the ‘centre of gravity’ itself. Otherwise, the only tangible thing that links me to a centre is my own family and the Bengali culture, something that is either obliquely or directly omnipresent in my work.
ZK: The volume, Retracing American Contours, takes us back again to an American landscape, a terrain that you explored in your highly successful third book, New York Times. Why the return to the United States?
SS: The poems in Retracing American Contours are poems that were originally written in the period from 1987 to 1990, much of it around the same time as the poems in New York Times itself. Originally, I had planned for all these poems to have come out together as one volume. But since the book became very large, my British publisher thought it would be a good idea to cull out the New York based and New York related poems, to form one independent book. I went along with that idea and was very pleased about the eventual results.
So the poems in this new volume Retracing American Contours are the ones that I want to preserve from that original group that were not published in book form. Publishing them now, almost after a decade they were first born, is also a private way of visiting those places again. There are so many important events and significant memories attached to those places, that it is almost like a journey down memory-lane, but with a fresh considered perspective.
ZK: Your recently published volume, Lines of Desire, is stunning, quite a stylistic revelation. As a poet you strike similes and evoke metaphors that are original, cool, untainted, soothing, and the same time, urgent. In addition, they also remind one of conceits in metaphysical poetry.
SS: That is an interesting observation. Lines of Desire is basically series of very tightly written short erotic poems. In fact, I re-reading and savouring the poetry of John Donne quite a lot while writing some of the poems in this volume.
It is very difficult to write about love and passion in an original and fresh way because it is one subject that has been completely exhausted. So I wondered, how does one write about it without actually sounding old. My way of getting into it was to turn them inside out, rather than going from outside into the inside which is usually the case as it is a much safer and controllable route. I wanted to capture the raw passion and essence of the particular range of emotions, and at the same time be subtle and unobvious. Also I wanted to give these poems a meditative and chilling quality, an edge that is at the same time sharp and well as mesmerising. Back to top
ZK: Tell us about In Another Tongue -- an impressive volume of translations you have recently published, something quite new for you.
SS: In Another Tongue is my first volume of translations that gathers poetry from well known and lesser known poets from Hebrew, Macedonian, Persian, Hindi and Bengali languages. Since its publication, I have translated more -- from Dutch, Slovene, and others.
William Radice pointed out that this volume is quite a departure from what I have been engaged in the past. I have enjoyed this relatively new process a lot. Translation is at the same time very different and similar to writing original poetry. But the dynamics and energies are completely unusual and difficult to quantify when translating.
I especially enjoy translating from Bangla and Hindi -- languages I know well. It is so nice to be in a totally Bengali milieu, immersed in its people, poetry, and music. It is as though a part of me really wanted to blossom, but did not have the right context for it. Growing up in Delhi is and was truly trilingual -- Bengali, Hindi, and English are the languages I use (but understand quite a few Northern Indian languages -- Punjabi, Rajasthani, Urdu, even Gujarati and Maharastrian from Western India). When I am in the West, it is predominantly English that I am using. So when I am in Bangladesh, I absolutely enjoy being swathed in Bangla in more ways than one. One realises that English is so redundant in these parts, and thank god for that.
ZK: Your new work which is due to appear next year is a major book-length poem, Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent. It is an highly unusual and inventive work, a tour de force. How did it begin? Tell us something about its form, and the journey itself.
SS: The book-length poem -- Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent -- began on a wet August morning, as I sat in an half-sunken basement space of a partially restored fifteenth century mansion ‘Gartincaber’ in Doune (near Stirling, Scotland). Almost drunk under the spell of this space, both interior and exterior, dactyls were dictated to me by photons in the surrounding electric-charged air. It was here where my journey began. My journey continued leaving a winding trail of foot-steps, pug-marks I tried to hide, but could not. It is still an uncompleted journey, a journey that cannot be completed ... perhaps, it is part of one's own fallibility. This journey has infinitely long lines and many miles left to traverse, but I know my blood's inadequate crimson may prevent such an ambition. So I take all this as a gift, a dream. I feel constantly grateful that I have been allowed such a dream.
Along the way, I have been coloured by many sources, interests, passions, and obsessions -- some obvious and others oblique. Among them, there are overheard phrases, paintings, photographs, fragmented images, films, music, memory, poems, women, fluids, and the intoxicated air.
My alter-ego wanted to be an architect and a cartographer -- I have a more than part-time interest in science -- All these must have, in some way, influenced this poem.
I re-read many of my favourite poetry books at the time -- classics like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal; volumes by contemporary masters like Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and others. Walcott’s Omeros, Brodsky’s To Urania, Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, Donald Hall's The One Day, Jaan Kaplinski’s The Same Sea In Us All, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, Dom Moraes’s Serendip, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Middle Passage, A K Ramanujan’s Collected Poems, especially kept me company. I have used fragments from many of these poets' work throughout to punctuate the narrative, so that readers can get some sense of their world as parallel asides, just as it did for me on my journey. I was also immersed in Gray’s Anatomy, Encarta’s BodyWorks, Louis Kahn’s Sounds and Silence, Matthew Arnold and T S Eliot’s essays, John Frederick Nim’s Western Wind, .... At the time, I relied on my grandfather's trusted old compass that helped navigate my way, imaginatively plotting a course through my National Geographic map collection that lay in disarray .... My memory provided calm, as I struggled, translating Jibanananda Das’s ‘Bawnolawta Shane’ to recreate its music and passion. All of them have been guiding companions .... And so, the journey went on .... The sparse elongated structure of the poem partly reflects the strength and surety of the human vertebra and spine; much like Neruda's Odes that reflect the long-thin shape of Chile. The sections and sub-sections join together like synapses between bone and bone. The titles are translucent markers or breath pauses, not separators.
The short two-line couplets echo the two-step foot-prints, a pathway mapped on the atlas. The 12 sections correspond to the 12 bones in a human rib-cage, the 12 months in a year, the 12 hours in a day .... There are 26 bones in a human vertebrae, and the 26 parts in the poem slowly assemble themselves from a montage of tenuously strung lyrics. (The projected 206 page-length of this book would match the exact number of bones in a human body.)
This poem leaves a footprint from a perennial walk that meanders through public and private spaces -- making sense of the vicissitudes of our loves, losses, wants, desires, inadequacies -- as it maps the matrix of living and dying.
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MARRYING
THE SHORT STORY AND ART OF POETRY:
Sudeep Sen's Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames
by
Kwame Dawes
Sudeep
Sen is a poet of subtle nuance and formal dexterity -- his line is always
carefully crafted reflecting a mental acuity and concentration that is
enviable. His commitment to the discipline of form reflects his belief in
the efficacy of formal practice that has provided consistency and poetic
order to many ancient and time tested oral poetic traditions in India and
Africa; in the cadence of the Hindu scriptures, the Koran, the Torah, and
the King James Bible; and in the set-pieces of poets who have been writing
for centuries. Above all, Sen reminds us that poetry is an often lively
and dynamic dialogue between the understatement and restraint of form and
the passion and energy of the image -- of metaphor. It has become
virtually a truism to say that Sudeep Sen's work is evocative, moving,
deeply intelligent and most delicately poised. This is a poet of manners
who is committed to the thesis that poetry is only useful when, at some
level, it is about something important ‑‑ when the poet has
taken risks, when there is life‑blood evident in the production.
In what is
already a remarkably substantial body of work, Sen has given us a
tremendous amount to think about and to experience. His work is almost
always impressive for the sheer craft at work and for all the habits that
one wishes all poets would have demonstrated in his poems. Yet it is in
the moments of crystallization, of a certain paring down to an almost
minimalist and essentialist simplicity that we come to appreciate the poet
for his honesty, daring, and sheer poetic confidence and humility. It is
when Sen dares to remove the facade of words, of elaborate conceits that
have a bombastic attraction to the reader, when, that is, he throws away
the crutches and relies on the most basic form and the cleanest and
uncluttered arrangement of words that we come to understand how good a
poet he is. He achieves this quietly and movingly in the extremely
touching movement of verse Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames, published first
in 1994 by Peepal Tree Books in England and White Swan Books in New York,
which appears this year as part of his new book Postmarked India: New
& Selected Poems through HarperCollins.
The project is
almost pretentious at first. Poet sees some visual art ‑‑
seemingly unimpressive etchings by talented, well‑seasoned but
uncelebrated artist; poet is moved and decides to use pictures as
inspiration for poem; poet writes poem; publishers, titillated by the
prospect of printing pictures in a poetry book publish book: Art and
Poetry meet ‑‑ the publicity seems easy enough. But the very
patness of the project is undermined by a number of interesting factors.
The artist Peter Standen is a British artist born in 1936, and the poet is
Sudeep Sen, an Indian poet born in 1964. The marriage promises to be a
pseudo‑modernist example of multiculturalism ‑‑ cross
cultural fertilization. But closer scrutiny of the work that is generated
reveals that Sen is moved by the etchings of Standen because of their
ability to invoke complex emotions that explore, with grace and
sensitivity, the business of death, mortality, permanence and temporality,
and above all, the business of art and history. Sen's youth, his prolific
energy, his almost frenetic desire to generate a legacy of poems quickly
and brilliantly is suddenly placed in profound relief by Standen's quiet
dialogue about time, about history, about the temporality of human
existence.
The cultural
dialogue makes more and more sense as we note that what moves Sen in these
pieces is what moves Sen in his engagement with Hindu spirituality, in the
ideologies of Zen, in the singularly non‑Western conception that
there is no real dichotomy between the sacred and the secular. In this sense, Sen's work is deeply Indian, profoundly
spiritual and succeeds in something that I believe is important: it
succeeds in appropriating the appropriated work of an artist, and through
his poetic sensibility, in granting it an ironic power that can only make
sense in the context of a non‑Western ethos. Standen's etchings
represent a narrative sequence that is immensely satisfying in its
articulation of the circularity of life. The pieces manage an ironic
expression that is unusually unaffected and unstrained.
Briefly, the
eight etchings, presented in small (perhaps too small) reproduction in the
very generously spaced (the book is a tastefully designed publication:
sepia on ivory paper and copious open
space
that emphasizes the austere starkness of the verse itself) collection
narrate a love story of sorts. The
first of these cartoon‑like and rather rugged looking pieces shows
the foundation of a house being built under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
The building looks uncannily like a tomb. In the second, a couple move a
couch/bed into the house; and in the next, the couple embrace on the couch
with the image of the mountain still visible through a window. The
mountain will always be there in each of the plates, unshakable and
constant while everything else goes through the natural cycles of life and
death. In the fourth, the lovers are naked while the mountain begins to
smoke, darkness engulfs this plate ‑‑ the edenic motif of
sexuality and doom is unmistakable here. In the fifth, the consuming
darkness overwhelms all but the muted shape of the lovers and a
moon‑like light where the mountain is. The sixth frame is the most
startling: the frame is divided into shades of light and dark representing
under the earth and the surface of the earth. Under the earth, buried
beneath the ruins of the home, are the skeletal remains of the lovers
locked in an embrace in their death. We realize that the volcanic eruption
has killed the couple in mid‑coitus.
In the sixth
frame, a pair of animatedly etched excavators ‑‑
archaeologists, it would appear ‑‑ discover the remains of the
couple among the ruins, and in the eighth and final frame, the couple are
somehow artificially reconstructed and placed in a glass case in a solidly
built room reminiscent of their original home.
Through the window one can see the mountain as always, while a
tourist or viewer of some sort stares at the museum relic ‑‑
lovers in cold embrace; now permanent, now artifacts. Art, the ironic
statement declares, has been transformed by death into the permanence of
art.
I have taken
the trouble to outline the content of the etchings because their very
narrative and thematic thrust should make it clear why Sudeep Sen is drawn
to the pieces. The business of art and artifact ‑‑ its
dallying with issues of life, relevance, permanence and ultimately, its
virtually inadequacy as a substitute for life ‑‑ is a constant
theme in Sen's work. As a poet, the feature that rescues Sen from the
questionable place of an artist so engrossed in form and the ritual of
publishing erudite verse for other poets only, is his painful distrust of
the efficacy of art. It is a nagging preoccupation which each poetic
construction appears to contradict. Sen writes as if he is thinking of his
legacy ‑‑ he writes as if he is fascinated by what is left
behind and what it all means ultimately. Where Keats' "Grecian
Urn" appears to arrive at some kind of conclusive peace of mind, Sen
is never at rest, never sure about it all.
This unrest is understandable since Sen is essentially an artist
who is profoundly aware of where he comes from, aware of poverty and the
callousness of human interaction, aware of the millions of souls who may
never read a poem ‑‑ aware of his sometimes insignificance as
a writer in the face of the chaos of the world. Refreshingly, this
tension, this mortal uncertainty produces some of the most humane verse
that I have read in a long time.
Sen avoids the
trap of simply re‑telling the narrative offered by the etchings. His
agenda is to distill, to find the heart of the narrative, to take it and
to ferret out all the nuances and ironies contained therein. His project,
also, is to create a veritable drama, albeit a staid and profoundly
restrained one that offers an at once reassuring and disturbing vision of
the world. For Sen, the poem is an artifact ‑‑ a kind of relic
of human experience, and yet it remains an undeniable vehicle for
expressing human emotions and thoughts. The poem, then, is at once static
and living. This dualism is central to Sen's imagination and rests at the
core of this movement of poems. Mount Vesuvius, the volcanic mountain,
possesses similar dualities of dormancy and activity, but above all, the
mountain does not move ‑‑ it remains constant, defying human
experience, defying the elements, defying its own instinct for
self‑destruction. It is in the face of this constancy, that the
mutability of the human condition is articulated in the opening couplets
of the poem:
Death has an
invisible presence
in the Vesuvian valley, even the corpses
bear an
insidious resemblance, that belie
shifting shadows in the subterranean alley.
Death has an
invisible presence,
so does life, in its incipience and its ends,
linked, like
two inverted arches, bent
to meet in a circle at their ends.
(11)
The
encroaching presence of death is disturbing, but Sen discovers in this
moment of fear and awe, a simple truth, that death must be defined by its
antithesis, life. The image of death and life, held in amorous embrace,
forming the circle of the human condition is the heart of hope in the
poem. In this prologue, we understand immediately, that the poet is
reconciled to both conditions and finds them equally unreliable. Eliot,
surely, is invoked, but this is somewhat removed from the Eliot
celebrating the efficacy of history, the validity of memory, so to speak:
"In my beginning is my end".
Here, the articulation moves from a truism about history and the
present to an ironic and decidedly closed encounter with the finality of
death and the artificiality of efforts to try and retrieve this art
through the business of archeology. Humanity, flesh and blood, are reduced
to inanimate objects and elements. The
art of the painting has made static the human narrative, and seasons, now
captured, have lost their vitality ‑‑ they become, simply,
frames. The "Prologue", therefore, ends with a certain despair.
Its weight is critical for such despair must be undermined at the end of
the sequence ‑‑ this is Sudeep Sen's almost holy project:
Strips of zinc, metal coated in wax,
bathed in acid,
are scratched.
Year's twelve seasons reduced to eight ‑‑
the image
slowly unfolds its fate
in the half‑light, under transparent
protection of
paper, moist and permanent,
etching the once‑flowing blood stream,
now frozen as
rich loam, ribbed lava reams.
(12)
Like
the poet, the artist is working with base tools which invariably fail to
revitalize life that has passed. There is coldness to the etchings in as
much as there is a palpable coldness to Sen's poem.
Here, Sen is working diligently at the use of parallels. The edge
in the rhyme scheme ‑‑ a tad more inevitable than Sen's
usually subtle schemes in other sequences, suggests a certain cynicism, a
caustic irony.
What follows is
one of the most precise and compact epics to be written in so few lines.
The narrative's simplicity belies a philosophical scope, ribbed with
allusions, echoes, refrains and cleverly transformed images. In this
moment of masterful writing, Sen captures the clarity of the etchings'
narrative, while eking out its multiple nuances. Instead of offering
closure, a certain reductionism, he does what the best poetry does, he
explodes the metaphor lending it resonance and multi‑layered
meaning. And yet, if we engage with the poem at its most superficial, we
leave with a sense of satisfaction nonetheless.
The couple who
we meet are simply sketched ‑‑ a newly wed couple, excited by
the hope of a life together, unconcerned about death; wanting to build a
home with each other. Their relationship to nature is naive ‑‑
like the properly mandated citizens of Eden, they are drawn to the taming
of the landscape through framing ‑‑ through the business of
art:
The sight
chosen, the view determined ‑‑
Mount Vesuvius ‑‑ this centrepiece
to be framed by an arched window pane
of the bedroom's intimacy, and space.
(13)
The
arch of the window pane is a foreshadowing, an echo of the
"Prologue"; that marriage of life and death, and so is the curve
of the bed they place in the room. Sen takes these small details and
transforms them into significant metaphors. The couple furnish the home,
watch it begin to breathe and come alive, and the couple then say a prayer
that suddenly plunges the narrative into a pessimistic and fatalistic
gloom; one in which the sensuality of sexual union and marriage is placed
in tight embrace, almost inevitable embrace, with the business of death. A
certain hope and naivety is lost. The Apocalypse looms:
'Lava God!' they prayed, `Bless us,
our love, and
our curse.' The union of
flesh, blood, smoke, and bones.
(17)
These
"elements" are basic to the human cycle as enacted in this
tragi‑comedy. Here, Sen's language is carefully selected for the effect of
a broader epic ‑‑ a narrative about elemental issues. One is
tempted to say "universal", but this is inappropriate for the
universality does not emerge out of a quest to be more marketable or to
distill artificial indices like ethnic preoccupations and geographic
indicators into an anemic blandness which has no sense of context,
tradition or history. Sen, instead, has chosen to pretend a dogged
devotion to the "text" of the etchings, to its context and
place, and in so doing, he retrieves his own emotional context and forms a
narrative landscape that is as much about the persona as artist, lover,
and philosopher as it is about the eight etchings that have inspired this
poet.
The emotional
landscape, the point of contact for the reader does not lie in the
accuracy of physical landscape, but the efficacy of the emotional
narrative. The story of this couple becomes the story of many couplings;
humans trying to understand themselves in the face of death and love.
Herein lies the humanity of the poem, and we are pleased that Sen offers
us this rather domestic and seemingly confessional detail for it forces us
to read ourselves into the poem in a manner that we would not without
this. Then he achieves a shift in the poetics, from the detail of this
deeply human coupling to intimations about the flame of destruction and
death. Here, Sen is a sensual as he ever is, and Sen is notoriously
circumspect about sexuality. But in this he cannot resist the conceit
‑‑ the metaphor of sexual burning, the orgasmic ejaculations
of a volcano and the ash and void at the end of the explosion.
The metaphor is never crass or cliched. The secret is in the
understatement:
That evening unfolded naturally
and quietly, as
deceptively
as the view's receding perspective
drew them to
the mountain peak ‑‑
to its air, the snow, its dust and fire.
Fire engulfed
their bodies, their
fingers, burning nail‑tips, furrowing
lines of
passion on each other's skins.
From
this peak, there is a petrifying catastrophe:
their bodies remained locked in fear
and in death,
around each other.
A marriage made in heaven, and in hell
buried
unknowingly ‑‑ skeletal
remains transfixed in the passion of
the very first
night, unaware of
the world's changed face
and the undone
terrain, ...
(21)
Here
is simply brilliant poetry. The dualisms are spoken without fanfare
‑‑ they make poignant sense.
The grotesque of this image of love and death, sex and the skeletal
is never bizarre, it is simply absurd ‑‑ an existentialist
trope as simple as Solomon's "all is vanity, a chasing after the
wind."
The couple is
buried in the ash and lava of the volcano. The description of the
excavation that takes place years later, echoes the technical precision of
the sequence of building the home in an earlier section. Here, Sen invokes
the conceit of the poet as excavator, builder. What he produces is a
thesis of recovery, salvaging through the process of clearing away, an apt
metaphor for a poem that is about clearing away all that may clutter
meaning: "... clearing // the debris of the past / itself, to unearth
the past." (26). But
truth is only found, eventually, through a certain spiritual and
miraculous series of events. The earth tremor that shakes the earth is
reminiscent of the Gospel account of supernatural geographic occurrences
alarming the death and resurrection of Christ. At his death the earth
opened up and the dead walked. The ghoulish image is only suggested in
Sen's poem, only enough, that is, to invoke the theme of redemption. The
latter day anointing of rain, healing rain, begins the incarnation of the
brittle and ancient bones of those who have passed. It is in this moment
of possibility that the chorus returns to offer a perspective of dualism
and contradiction ‑‑ to remind us that the poem as always
about hope and despair:
heavy rain ‑‑ a rain of redemption, healing
the lepered
limbs, slowly washing
the bones to the last brittle and grain.
Death has an
invisible presence
in the Vesuvian valley, even corpses
bear peculiar
insidious resemblance.
The
couple are mummified and offered as relics in a museum. This is their new
incarnation. The moment is disappointing, virtually cynical. This cynicism
becomes a virtual lament about the futility and void of art, its complete
inadequacy in the face of death. The very etchings that he has been
inspired by suddenly deflate the persona in the final movement. The
tragedy is acute because of its blatant simplicity and clarity:
The dead: All neatly packed
in small square
groups, and
in even multiples of eight,
nailed, framed,
and glass‑encased.
Even the new grave‑diggers pay,
#
the elderly
mountain pays
too ‑‑ in twos, fours, and eights
Pompeii
remains, uncontained.
(32)
But
it is out of this despair that Sen achieves a poetic coup, an inversion
that is brilliantly subtle and yet, for all its stylistic and formal
subtlety, is deeply transforming. Despair is changed to hope by the
irrevocability of the complete circle. He repeats, with minor but
significant changes, the two movements of the "Prologue", and
this time, he inverts their order. The alterations are worth noting for
two reasons: the first is for evidence of how careful Sen is about the
business of making form a slave to the idea, and the second has to do with
Sen's revived belief in the efficacy of art. The poem, then, a
"re‑scratching" of the static etching, offers life. Where
in the first rendering that art is simply "scratched", now it is
"re‑scratched." Where there is a certain stasis and
closure in the tense used to describe the art taking shape in the first
movement: "the image slowly unfolds its fate," in the final
movement, the present continuous, suggesting evolution, a work in
progress, replaces the static present tense. Finally, the fourth couplet
is completely antithetical. The progression is from this: "etching
the once‑flowing blood stream, / now frozen as rich loam, ribbed
lava reams," to this:"etching the flowing blood stream, life /
frozen, yet unfrozen, rich lava, alive." It is as if the narrative,
the telling of the tale, the fleshing of the static images with poetic
life‑blood, has transformed the entire movement for Sen
‑‑ the transformation is from the static to the living. Thus,
when the "Epilogue", a movement identical to the first movement
of the "Prologue" except for an inversion of the indentation in
each line (creating an interlocking joining of beginning and end that is
both visual and thematic), is read, the nagging pessimism of the
"Prologue" is assuaged. The circle promises that at the very
least, the path will entail some life, and that life will have some
meaning for as short a time as it exists.
One is left
with a deep of admiration for Sudeep Sen's craft and his willingness to be
so bold in his minimalist inclination. One is also grateful that he is
given to the directness of narrative in this movement such that the story
becomes everything. This story‑telling assumes a timelessness, and
helps explain the epic breadth of what is, in the best way possible, a
simple poem. I have read a great deal of poetry from Sudeep Sen, and I
will continue to read many more of his poems in the future, I am sure. I
look forward to those encounters with this poet who has matured at a rapid
and assured pace. In Mount
Vesuvius, Sen does not show‑off his unquestionable metaphorical
depth and verbal dexterity, nor does he seduce us with his intelligent
wit. Instead he relies on the most basic instincts of poetry and in so
doing proves to us, with the gravity that we expect only from elders, that
the elemental instinct of poetry is the discovery of the complex in the
midst of the simple. This is exceptionally good poetry.
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Kwame
Dawes teaches at the Department of English, University of South Carolina,
Columbia, USA. He is the author of five volumes of poetry: Progeny of Air
(Forward Prize Winner), Resisting the Anomie, Prophets, Requiem, and
Jacko Jackobus.
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This critical article simultaneously appeared in
Paterson Literary Review (USA),
World Literature Written in English (Singapore), and
Kavya Bharati (India) in 1998/99.
VISUAL REALITY AND A CRAFTSMAN'S ODYSSEY:
The Poetry of Sudeep Sen
by
Mario Relich
Sudeep Sen is amongst the finest younger English language poets
in the international literary scene. A distinct voice:
carefully modulated and skilled, well measured and crafted.
gregor robertson on BBC Radio
Sen's poetry is rich and complex ... images deserve close study.
nissim ezekiel
Sen's poems are about an imprint a place makes on his life,
and he does this in a language which is his own. Sen is able
to dramatise his keen observations with power and immediacy.
jayanta mahapatra
A gifted poet .... I think everyone who works in Indian literature
in English should thank him for all he has done.
dom moraes in Sunday Mid Day
1
Sudeep Sen's Postmarked India, published by HarperCollins in 1997, includes sixteen new poems, and a generous selection from eight previous poetry collections. It contains two of his very best poems, `Bharatanatyam Dancer' and `Jagannath Temple, Puri'. In the former, the lines and rhythms evoke the intricate, graceful steps of the dancer, radiating into meditative ecstasy: "... the female dancer / now illuminates everything visible: clear, / poetic, passionate, and ice-pure". Anarchic couplets in the poem, which uses a combination of rhyme and half-rhyme, perfectly capture the undulating ambivalence of religious devotion. Both poems also look back to Sen's achievements so far, and are reminiscent of an early, more rhetorical work `A Pilgrimage to Mathura'.
A poem like `The Photograph', on the other hand, represent a new beginning, a charting of new territory. It hints at psychic depths usually explored by certain novelists. Here is the concluding stanza:
I realise the unaged pain of secrecy
and the power of revelation and re-discovery
that spilled guts and locked emotions enact.
I have, only remains, of recorded magnetic tapes,
exposed bromides, memory, and friendship,
but enough to reconstruct mythic bodies:
imagined, unimagined, buried, but alive.
A powerful story emerges from the poem, one not necessarily allegorical, or having anything to do with the poet's own imagination. Yet the concluding stanza can also be read as suggesting that the poet himself has intimations of greater exploratory endeavour. He is prepared to confront demons if necessary, in a blazing quest to write poems which stretch language to its unutterable limits. This entails risks, hence the "unaged pain of secrecy", but if such risks result in the reconstruction of creative myths, then they will be triumphantly worthwhile.
Kwame Dawes in his introduction to Postmarked India pinpoints where the source of Sen's creativity lies: Reviewers in India and those outside of India who have followed Sen's work generally agree that he is one of a few poets pioneering a new idiom in Indian literature. The central characteristic of this trend is a tendency to have an expansive, more global and decidedly less parochial palette from which to create.
Dawes goes on to add: "It is a development that places Sen alongside other trans-national writers from non-Western countries like Ben Okri from Nigeria, Fred D'Aguiar from Guyana, Kazuo Ishiguro from Japan, Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka, and Vikram Seth from India, to name only a few." As a poet, Sen's "new idiom" has actually surpassed the writers mentioned by Dawes, all of whom have done rather better as novelists than poets. But let us begin at the beginning.
2
The aforementioned `A Pilgrimage to Mathura', which opens The Lunar Visitations, reveals, even if indirectly, much about the genesis of the poet. He also begins with the same poem in Parallel, his compact disc/audio cassette of poems, in which he informs us that "Mathura is a town in North India in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is traditionally the landscape of Krishna". Krishna, arguably one of the most important deities in the Hindu pantheon, plays a key role in the most famous Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita. It is Krishna who, at the end of Bhagavad Gita, proclaims "the most secret doctrine of all":
Because I greatly desire thee, therefore shall I tell thee thy salvation. Think on me, worship me, sacrifice to me, pay me homage, so shalt thou come to me. I promise thee truly, for I love thee well. Give up all the things of dharma, turn to me only as thy refuge. I will deliver thee from all evil. Have no care.1
Krishna, in short, reveals divine love reaching out to individual men and women. In Sen's poem, however, there is a clash between the pilgrim, described in the first stanza as "a stranger" and Krishna's priestly guardians. This is how the clash is described:
Amid chants, cymbals, song and frenzy,
he saw devotion bartered, faith disrobed.
He didn't offer anything, just
a few words as prayer -- a thanksgiving.
The priests, swathed in silk and silver,
sapped every pulse of emotion from the humans.
Or perhaps the clash is more of an unbridgeable gap between worshippers and priests, as the refrain which occurs twice in the poem, "One paid the price, the other didn't have to. / One carried the virus, the other got injected", strongly implies.
As the sub-title of The Lunar Visitations tells us, `A Pilgrimage to Mathura' is part of `a cycle of poems'. Its position as the first poem of the cycle is therefore even more significant than it would otherwise have been. As a result, it may well be that the clash described is a metaphor for the poet's own position. The poet gives thanks for the created world, but he needs to be wary of Krishna's priests, because they are only human, and therefore liable to corruption, even barring the true way to Krishna. Such an interpretation seems to be confirmed by the penultimate stanza, which mentions "Pilate's Hands", implying that all institutional religion (since the image here is from the Christian gospels) is potentially corrupt. The poet must therefore rely only on himself. Here is the final stanza:
A bird, one of the migratory species,
came here for a new season.
But the stranger and the bird
soon left the city to find the Truth,
while millions came here to find the same.
These concluding lines suggest that the poet is indeed a pilgrim, and the seeker after truth, yet his pilgrimage tends to run counter to the institutional worship of the "millions".
The poem, in fact, shows him to be very different from many contemporary British poets who claim to be merely voicing the aspirations and concerns of ordinary people. The great fear among many British poets is to be considered elitist in any way. Though not intended as such, `A Pilgrimage to Mathura' reveals how misplaced such a fear can be.
3
Sudeep Sen has published nine collections of poetry so far. Each collection, however, represents not just a progressive development, but a switching of gears, as it were. I would maintain that The Lunar Visitations (1990), his first major collection, explores a metaphorical, and very nearly archetypal landscape. Kali in Ottava Rima (1992) abandons such a landscape for the most part, and explores Hindu ritual and mythology instead. New York Times (1993) by contrast metropolitan in feeling, focuses on time as the fourth dimension in which we are all trapped. Parallel (1993) presents a generous hour-long selection from the first three volumes in a powerful and moving reading by the poet himself, where new meanings emerge in the manner he reads them, and the subtle changes he makes in words, imagery, and rhythm. South African Woodcut (1994) seeks to find epiphanies in a time-obsessed world. Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (1994) deals with time itself, in an ossified state, and opens up the whole debate between poetry and art, burial and rejuvenation, collaboration and isolation. Dali's Twisted Hands (1995) is most complex of all in its handling of imagery. It explores time, memory, and above all, light. Finally, Postmarked India (1997) contains a generous section of new poems plus selections from all his previously published books (including very early poems from Leaning Against the Lamp-Post (1983), not easily available earlier).
Rather than treat Sudeep Sen as an "Indo-Anglian" poet, or to categorize him in relation to other poets or movements, my aim is to give an indication of what makes each collection distinctive, and to single out poems I particularly find effective.
4
What makes The Lunar Visitations exhilarating to read is that it reveals the young poet in the process of discovering the power of metaphor. This is confirmed by the American poet and critic Phillis Levin. She has discerned a powerfully intricate structure of The Lunar Visitations as a cycle, that links the overall narrative, framework, and the specific images of the poems. Here is an excerpt from her detailed description:
His constellations evoke both the Christian and Hindu trinity -- the triad of birth, life, and death; the universal process of creation, preservation, and destruction -- creating a drama whose players include man, woman, and child; sun, earth, and moon; a prophet, a beggar, and a priest. But many other thoughts and images populate his lines: a moth, a broken yolk, and an eclipse; "antiquated symmetry", "tidal premonitions", and "lunar implications". The recurrent figure of the moon, appearing and disappearing throughout this volume, is emblematic of the post-modern landscape, its light illuminating the urban realities of East and West. The Lunar Visitations can be read an epic whose three characters constantly change form, but whose essence remains the same.2
The images described by Levin certainly recur in The Lunar Visitations, and it very likely that the poet intended such a structure, but his individual poems I find particularly striking and memorable.
`Remembering Hiroshima Tonight' is one of the most daring of these. Here is the poem, a short one, in full:
It is full moon in August:
the origami garlands surrounding the park
glitter as the stars, plutonium-twinkle,
remember the fall-out of that sky.
Tonight everyone walks around the solemn arcades
where lovers were once supposed to be.
In the distance, the crown of Mount Fuji sits, clear
on the icy clouds, frozen in time with wisdom.
Suddenly the clouds detonate, and all the petals,
translucent, wet, coalesce: a blossoming mushroom,
peeling softly in a huge slow motion.
But that's only a dream.
Tonight, real flowers are blooming
in the ancient Japanese moonlight.
Mount Fuji, of course, means very much to the Japanese. It is prominent in art, literature, history and religion. It is also an image, indeed an icon, which is bound to represent Japan to most readers. Part of the remarkable power of this poem can be described (to adapt from Wordsworth's famous observations on poetry) as the horror of the atom bomb recollected, really imagined, in tranquillity. Muted in its lyricism, the poem points to the hard-won triumph of age-old accumulated wisdom (as exemplified by Japanese civilization) in harmony with the processes of nature.3
One section of The Lunar Visitations is entitled `Nightscape in a Moonlit City', and the poems here stylistically borrows much from T S Eliot's early "nocturnal" poems. Like Eliot's, these poems are exercises in oblique moonlit and deliquescent imagery which foregrounds a harsh, urban landscape. The moon here acts as a kind of mistress of metamorphosis. In `The First Sight: An Invocation', the following lines, "I saw the moon sliced and / obscured by clouds / through the wrought-iron grill", suggest one of the most resonant images from surrealist cinema. Who can forget the man who stares at the moon, and then proceeds to casually slash a woman's eyeball? But Sen is gentler than Luis Bunuel in Un Chien Andalou. His poems in this vein generally evince an almost religious reverence, rather than surrealist rage.
`Leaning Against the Lamp-Post', for instance, is pervasive with miasmic hallucination, yet strictly controlled by structural indications of "lighting-up time". It emerges that the `voice' behind the poem is that of a suffering beggar: "a haggard skeleton / his synovial fluid dry / cracked and crackled with time".
A poem like `In the Gallery', however, shows the poet to be equally adept at rejecting the kinds of evasion to be found in Eliot's early poems, which tend to muffle `voice' in a fog of crepuscular consciousness. `In the Gallery' also portrays a beggar, but from a completely different angle. The poetic voice is a much more direct one. It seems to be that of the Freudian ego, and the beggar a kind of alter-ego, perhaps a Jungian anima. The poems suggests a poet very much in control of his images, instead of allowing them to drift, as in the Eliotesque `Leaning Against the Lamp-Post'.
The `voice' in the poem, very much a narrative one, is that of a picture-gallery visitor. It ends with the poet (the `voice' certainly seems to be very directly his) leaving the gallery, and concluding as follows:
I came out of the gallery
on to the scorching street, started
walking along graffiti-smeared
walls, stopping now and then
to read them and smell the peeling paint;
someone tapped me on my shoulder:
it was the same beggar.
The poem is one of the most achieved in The Lunar Visitations. It reads like a powerful statement, and one in which conscience predominates, about whether art can really transcend life. More specifically, it also appears to reject the treatment of the beggar in `Leaning Against the Lamp-Post', where he is more submerged in the aesthetic, "moonlit" pattern. The poem really probes the poet's own self-doubts, yet taken as a whole, it triumphantly overcomes them.
5
Ritual and mythology are at the heart of Sen's next collection, Kali in Ottava Rima, but his manner of treating ritual is far from traditional. Yet, as the title itself indicates, his poetic equivalent of the religious reality behind ritual lies in traditional poetic form. The title poem exploits `ottava rima' very much as Byron did in Don Juan. Byron, moreover, would have enjoyed the sensual, the apparently satiric elements in the poem. The subject, Kali, is the most fearsome goddess in the Hindu pantheon, yet also associated with creativity. As one commentator on Hinduism puts it, "Iconographically she is represented as dancing on the body of the prostrate Lord, festooned with skulls, her tongue lolling and dripping with blood."4 Here is how the poem, in its entirety, pictures her:
Kali's curvaceous long lecherous tongue woos
Shiva as it hangs loose, while she
tramples Him, stamping her beloved's breast, who
lies passive under her feet, breathing still, as he
watches her wild, swinging with her own devil Ashoor
draped around her neck. As she frees
herself slowly, crusade-ridden, victorious,
bedecked, dripping thick in blood and luxurious,
she wallows in a crimson fashion,
electric, juggling in hysteria her many-beaded
half-alive heads that adorn her aquamarine bosom.
Resting arms, she wipes her triple-eyed brow, tinted
blue, her body prepares to make love, passion
gliding as she dances on Shiva, the Mahakal emptied
of infinite Time, while she guards her Time's own womb.
Kali's rufous tongue woos Him, as it hangs loose.
The poem is also pictorial that it reminds one of the sharp outlines, and dynamic graphics, of a `Kalighat' print. Such prints, originating from Calcutta, were cheap and aimed at devotees of Kali during the nineteenth century, and the early part of the twentieth. The poem itself is not precisely an `ottava rima', but a `double ottava rima', thus playing skilfully with that form. It thereby poses a challenge to the reader, particularly the Western reader, both in terms of form, and in terms of its religious content. Some readers might be disturbed by it, but most are likely to find it boldly Byronic, amusing and exuberant. `Villanelle for Shiva', another poem in this vein, is equally enjoyable and challenging.
In another poem, `Durga Puja', sinuous, serpentine alternating rhyming couplets allude to, and quite likely make use of, Sanskrit poetic forms, the sloka in particular. Here are the opening three couplets:
Through the swirling fumes of the scented incense, the arati echoes
as the priest hums, and the Chandipaat chants in a scriptural rhyme.
From the bamboo pedestal she stares through her painted pupils, frescoed
and tinselled, the three-eyed pratima of the Goddess Durga --
resplendent, statuesque, armed with ten hands on her roaring chariot,
her glazed clay demeanour, poised, even after the mythic bloody war.
Sensuous and leisurely paced, in some ways remarkably reminiscent of Swinburne, the poem makes Hindu ritual come vividly to life, yet by purely aural means, employing a definite incantatory tone. It is a miracle of technique, and the reverential attitude behind it has seldom seemed so exciting.
A rather more personal poem, `Dadu', has the poet recollecting his grandfather's penultimate heart attack, as he "convulsed fiercely fighting for life". The consolations of ritual are completely absent in this stark, but very moving poem. His close involvement with his grandfather's fatal seizure is particularly intense in the third stanza:
The dreaded moments, struggling, gasping to
live. I was just as drenched as he was. I saw:
His eyes closed, he lay there silently with his
heaving chest rise and fall
as all the sweat beads rolled down his sides.
The poem ends with a pained reproach from the poet's grandmother:
"All our grandchildren except you saw him,
you weren't here, to save him, this time."
The reader may or may not sympathize with the grandmother's reaction, and it is really her grief that is speaking, but the poem itself is a life-affirming act of redemption. It is, in fact, dedicated to Didu, the poet's grandmother.
6
`Dadu' affords a rare glimpse of Sudeep Sen as a deeply personal poet, but his stance is usually more detached. Sen, in fact, is also a documentary filmmaker, but apart from the detachment which is usually associated with documentary filmmaking, it is evident that his imagery is akin to filmic ones. As one reviewer has pointed out about the dominant voice in his third book, New York Times, " `I' is to some extent a camera, in other contexts an objective mediator."5 The poems in The Lunar Visitations were characterized by fluid imagery reminiscent of filmic montage, but the imagery in New York Times is much more accelerated in its montage. I would go even further. Although the silent-film comedian Harold Lloyd never materializes in New York Times, the presiding spirit in this book is certainly Lloyd hanging on from a gigantic clock-hand, as so many of the poems ring true to the rhythms of time in the great metropolis. The title poem itself is very much about how the city-dweller can become a prisoner of time. The sense of meaningless scurry is particularly captured in the following lines:
.... In this city, I
count the passage of time only by weekends
linked by five-day flashes I don't
even remember.
Hectic, and accelerated in tempo, the entire poem dazzles with its jazzy rhythms. The overall `abxba cdxdc efxfe ...' rhyme-scheme that Sen has invented for this poem (that consists of five-line stanzas corresponding to the city's five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, etc., with the central `x' rhyme mirroring both the other lines) is unique. It could easily be a homage to Piet Mondrian's `Broadway Boogie-Woogie'. Other poems like `Rain on Hot Concrete' and `Night in Times Square' are reminiscent of variations on images from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
Time is viewed from a different perspective in `Treading the Season's First Snow', a prose-poem. The following paragraph/stanza stands out in the manner it blends historical information about Greenwich Village together with the poet's own personal history:
I decided to go toward Fifth Avenue. This is where the more affluent Villagers reside. The Salmagundi Club built in 1853 near 12th Street is the last of the imposing private mansions that once lined the avenue. I passed one of my alma maters, The New School for Social Research, which looked rather shut at this point of the night. I did a diploma in 16mm film production there a few summers ago when I made a short feature titled, Woman of a Thousand Fires. The school offers a wide latitude of courses, everything from fixing a faucet leak to ethnomusicology.
`Woman of a Thousand Fires', in fact, is also one of the poems in The Lunar Visitations. (Both film and poem are based on the same source, the ethnographer Chick Strand.)6 Isolated, the autobiographical facts mentioned in the quoted extract seem random, but in the context of the prose-poem it shimmers with delight at the minutiae of life, and how the past, whether recent, or more remote, enhances and enriches the present. Even the poet's taste for Famous Ray's pizza becomes an epiphany: "I'll vouch for every slice, my favourite being the hard crusted ones with meatballs and spinach, topped with extra cheese".
One section of New York Times, entitled `Seven Sonnets' plays against and in juxtaposition with this traditional poetic form in a manner similar to the poet's formal experiments in Kali in Ottava Rima. As one reviewer puts it, "he darts and floats between `free' and `formal' verse".7 Two of the `Seven Sonnets', `Penumbra' and `Leafed Cynosure', however, are as near true ones as makes no difference. Neither deal with urban subjects, but in both the rhythms of time and nature are prominent.
In `Penumbra', the very act of writing poetry, its inspirations and evanescence, its transience and permanence, are explored with evocative power and subtlety. Here is the sonnet, in full:
The sun quite unexpectedly came back out
from behind the deep-folded rain clouds
after many days of ruffled uncertain
light. It emerged robed in tethered linen,
just the way I held the sky in my hand
like a piece of crumpled paper. Bands
of deep blue didn't seem to interfere with
the whites, and the cotton patches, which
were so transient, moved at the slightest
hint of breeze. I released the paper from my fist,
tried to iron out the creases and to rearrange,
but couldn't. The folds had created a new terrain
just as the clouds in the sky never
repeat the same pattern over, ever.
In `The Leafed Cynosure', the delicate intervention of human agency is highlighted: "... a woman tenuously cared / for each leaf, each twist of a twig, watching how it fared". The sonnets, both traditional and experimental, provide a pleasing contrast to the other poems in New York Times.
7
South African Woodcut (1994), a slim collection, resulted from a visit to South Africa. Paradoxically, however, instead of directly immersing himself in the turbulent politics (his visit was six-months before Nelson Mandela's election victory) of that country, Sen has come up with poems like freeze-frames, in which epiphanic moments of time are captured. The first poem, `97 6th Avenue, Mayfair', meticulously describes a meeting with Stephen Gray, South African poet and academic. Here are the opening lines:
Under the strong shaft of the Johannesburg sun,
you sit in the old chair of your study, stroking
your cat, tiding the unsaid loneliness with your fingers
that know the beauty of rhythm, enacted variously
under arc-lights and real light. ...
These opening lines, to echo Conrad, make us see, and give us a strong inkling of Stephen Gray as a person. The poem as a whole is also about memory, and how it transcends the limits of space and time, as in the following lines:
.... Across hemispheres,
both North and East, I carry your thoughts,
replay The Poet Speaks, hearing the gentle cadence
of your voice, your voice that reverberates
even now, just as strongly as it did from behind
the posters at The Market Theatre, listing your cast.
The above lines celebrate memory as a reinforcer of friendship, but a reading of the entire poem reveals that both poets, since they have met at such a crucially historical moment for South Africa, must have been full of foreboding even while enjoying each other's craft and company.
None of Sen's poems are tendentious, but tense with quiet intensity. The political is not overtly obvious, but emerges obliquely, as in the following couplet from `Daguerreotypes': "Afrikaans is as far apart from English, / as Xhosa is to Sotho, and that to Xulu". This poem ends philosophically with a startling image: "Can one arrest the restlessness of the sea?"
The title poem of South African Woodcut needs to be quoted in full:
Live township theatre smeared in blood and soil has
carved more in this delicate piece of wood than
what's played out in innumerable scripts, repeated
for years. The hollows of these eyes stare, animated
and frigid. Through its chiselled pupils appears
a sight, a vision that condenses years and years
of unequal struggle. Thick lips, now too mute to
protest once again, giving in this time, to
trade. But this mask, masks much more: the glaze
of the rural varnish and the herb-paint's
primal colours preserves the ritual, anointing the
face, charting history's altered course. On the
new stage, this face has more power in its passivity,
more emotion in its muted, saintly serenity.
This sonnet sums up the seismic changes which was in the process of accelerating while the poet was in South Africa. Ritual and history merge in the penultimate couplet, but it is the haunted look suggested in the second couplet which indicates that Sen's sympathies are never far from the suffering subject of an otherwise seemingly impersonal juggernaut of history.
Not surprisingly, therefore, a distinguished historian and literary critic, Angus Calder, has perhaps paid the greatest tribute so far to Sen's artistry: "At 29, he's probably as good as Louis MacNeice was at the same age, and he often reminds me of MacNeice, of `the drunkenness of things being various'."8
Personally, I find Sudeep Sen a more controlled kind of poet, so much so that, to revise the great "philosopher of History", Hegel, in his poems most blazingly "the visual is real, and the real, visual". Homer knew more about history than Hegel, even if only relying on the instinct of a great poet, because for him the visual was real, encompassing much more than the merely rational. Sen shares something of this epic insight.
8
Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames is highly visual in a more literal, but equally luminous way. This long poem in eight sections, plus prologue and epilogue, works as a companion piece to `Pompeian Idyll', a series of eight etchings by the well-known Edinburgh artist, Peter Standen. Here is the third "frame" from the poem:
That evening unfolded naturally
and quietly, as deceptively
as the view's receding perspective
drew them to the mountain peak --
to its air, the snow, its dust, and fire.
Fire engulfed their bodies, their
fingers, burning nail-tips, furrowing
lines of passion on each other's skins.
The accompanying etching has a man kneeling beside a woman reclining on a couch. There is, however, a striking time-lapse between the lines and the etching, itself, of course, composed of graphic rather than verbal lines. As a result, the poet's lines are no mere illustrations to the etching. The etching makes clear that the man and the woman are about to make love, but the lines describe them in the throes of passion soon to be engulfed by the erupting lava which destroyed Pompeii.
The poem's interactive structure and form can be found in the buried clues in the text itself. Here is Part 8:
The dead: All neatly packed
in small square groups, and
in even multiples of eight,
nailed, framed, and glass-encased.
Even the new grave-diggers pay,
the elderly mountain pays
too -- in twos, fours, and eights.
Pompeii remains, uncontained.
Numerologically "two" corresponds to the couples and the rhyming couplets, "four" to each of the frame's four sides and corners as well as to the seasons, "eight" to the number of etchings in the series, and so on. One has to read the entire sequence, as well as examine the etching themselves to appreciate just how dynamic, dialectical, and visionary the collaboration between the poet and artist has turned out.
9
Richness of visual imagery is even more prominent in the collection entitled Dali's Twisted Hands. The title poem, at one level, is about hurt and betrayal, but ultimately very much about how a poem comes to be written. The following stanza, for instance, works as a metaphor for the dynamics of the poet's imagination. As an image, it could not be more startlingly clear, and yet instinct with mystery. Here it is:
Now from amidst the ravaged landscape
of my past which resembles the melted hands
in the twisted unexplained terrain of Dali,
one clock unsprung setting time for a new time.
The point here is not that the poet opts for some vague surrealism of style, but for exactitude about the evanescent. Sen identifies with Dali, I would maintain, because his famous surrealist paintings, such as `Persistence of Memory', may be dreamscapes, but every detail in them (e.g., the melting watch hanging from a bare branch) is painted in an exact, even "trompe l'oeil" manner. The poems in Dali's Twisted Hands literally explode with a visual translucency analogous to spring flowers suddenly blooming.
Nor are all the poems necessarily dense with implicit meaning. `Musee D'Orsay, Paris', for instance, is airy and breathes spaciously, visualizing the French capital as a city of labyrinthine elegance. A labyrinth is certainly at the heart of the following lines:
.... One of the
higher floors opens onto a terrace by-pass
where the winds from Seine bring gently, the
wet, settled on encased pyramids of glass
of higher art, from the grand palace across the
city's Louvre. ...
The poem contrasts most vividly with `New York Times', and reminds one how different Paris is from Manhattan, yet also how modern.
At the heart of this collection contains a piece titled `Line Breaks', a long poem sequence in 14 parts that originates from a writers' rural retreat in England. Austere verbal ingenuity is displayed in the two alternating voices that are structured in spare minimalist lines. Ostensibly, they play with metaphors linking milk and proofreading, but eventually the narrative evokes and suggests the juxtaposition of beauty and horror, real and surreal.
The poems in Dali's Twisted Hands differ radically, on the whole, from Sen's previous collections, though the turning-points are already evident in South African Woodcut and Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames, in that the poet's vision shifts from the archetypal to the historical. The "hidden glint of a 5th Century Gupta coin" in `Sun's Golden Sands', for instance, is most exciting as a find in a archaeological dig, the very opposite of remote and dusty. But the deepening of the poet's vision is most characteristically evident in `Govind Dev Temple, Vrindavan', certainly one of the finest poems in the collection. Here it is:
Pink-buttocked monkeys leap from one lichen-layered eave
to another, as the parrots' plumage splashes the deep red
of the wall green in patches: resident bees drone
from the hives stuck to the ceiling, and the screeching
bats echo, flying in and around, tracing arced orbits.
Govind Dev stands steadfastly, propped with monumental
blocks of red and ochre sandstone, where solidity and finery
of architectural execution are married in an art,
both Islamic and Hindu, high on the hill in the centre of
Vrindavan, rising above everything around.
In 1590 when Emperor Akbar's general Man Singh
supervised its creation, his cavalry bowed as they marched
past this splendour on the hill enroute from Delhi to Agra.
Now, the surrounding tenements invade, inching their way into
every square of the courtyard space, and the pilgrims' walk.
Here, under the old sanctum, Krishna's idol was found,
celebrated, worshipped, rasa-lilas sung by Chaitanya,
his followers, and people. Through four hundred years
generations of devotees, bats, parrots, and monkeys
have lived here, prayed here, and changed hands,
but one fact has remained constant:
Every year, on nights when the moon appears full
for the first time, its incipient rays streak through
the main archway, lighting Krishna's forehead faint blue,
and the empty temple halls echo: Radhey, Radhey.
Like `A Pilgrimage to Mathura', the poem highlights the individual search for truth and, like `Durga Puja', it pays tribute to ritualistic communal values, but it reads like an incandescent synthesis of the two seemingly divergent aims.
Another poem, `The Garland of Stars', fuses poetry and friendship in its concluding couplets:
And at the end, my only gift to you both will be
that of a humble craftsman's tools and epopee --
I want to weave for you, in crystal stills,
my very own garland of stars, that never wilts.
"Epopee" is a more obscure (or very rare according to oed) word for "epic", and what it might forebode is that Sen's achievement would be considered as a kind of epic in the course of time. In that case, his pilgrimage will be like that of Odysseus; not so much Homer's, as Tennyson's Ulysses, with this injunction: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
* * *
Mario Relich
teaches English Literature and Film at the Open University in Edinburgh and is on the Book Awards Panel of the Scottish Arts Council. He regularly reviews poetry for national newspapers and literary magazines, and contributes scholarly pieces to journals. He is one of the primary contributors to
The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry
(ed. Ian Hamilton), and The Oxford Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English
(ed. Jenny Stringer).
Notes
1. R.C.Zaehner, Hinduism, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1966), p. 98.
2. See book-jacket of The Lunar Visitations (New York, 1990), and Sunday Mail (Bombay, Dec., 1991).
3. A comment by Gordon A Craig in his review-article (`An Inability to Mourn') on
The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and
Japan, by Ian Buruma, provides an interesting context for `Remembering Hiroshima Tonight': "In the place where the bomb fell there is today a Peace Park, which, Buruma says, is a `veritable Lourdes of shrines, monuments, stones, bells, fountains, and temples, commemorating the dead and offering prayers for peace'." See
The New York Review of Books, vol. XLI, no. 13 (July 14, 1994), page 44.
4. Zaehner, p. 145.
5. Susan Clement, review of New York Times, Wasafiri, no. 18 (1993), p. 70.
6. This is how Sen introduced the poem in his cd/audio cassette, Parallel: "This poem is based on a ... particular ethnographer, a Latin American ethnographer's (Chick Strand) work, ... where he found that in a specific tribe in Latin America, when a woman is found to be barren, she is supposed to kill herself". The cd/audio cassette was released by The Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh.
7. Angus Calder, `A Drunkard of the Senses' (A review of Kali in Ottava Rima and New York Times), The
Scotsman, December 6, 1993.
8. Sudeep Sen repaid the compliment in `Over May Day' in Dali's Twisted Hands. It actually quotes the same MacNeice line in the epigraph. The poem itself is not only a tribute to Angus Calder, but also to Edinburgh as a city where culture and conversation flourish. This is further evidenced in Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames, where we see reflective inspiration and interaction between the Scottish artist, Peter Standen, and the Indian poet, Sudeep Sen, who is himself so familiar with Scotland. The other relevant Scottish poems would include: `Single Malt' and `Trossachs' (and the current book-length poem-in-progress, Distracted Geography: An Archipalego of Intent).
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