Article
Editorial: 15 February 2010
February 11, 2010
The problem with this genre of criticism is not just that it is patronising but that it is based on misconceptions that the personal is the autobiographical, and that the personal voice is distinct from, and subordinate to, the public voice. (What exactly is the public voice? It seems to mean, more often than not, a poet grandiosely assuming the self-appointed role of Voice of the People). Few would dispute that the “personal is political” but it seems to remain a pat mantra – to be nodded at sagely, but never to be taken seriously. And so the same old jingoistic distinctions between the personal / private / domestic (read ‘slight’) and the universal (read ‘profound’) continue to be perpetuated in much critical writing.
So if there’s a theme in this issue of PIW, devoted to the work of Indian poets, domain, it is this: the Big Theme and the Little Theme and the essential hollowness of that divide.
Telugu poet K. Siva Reddy, who describes himself as a Marxist poet, is unapologetic about the fact that his poetry has grown more personal, more philosophical, quieter and less oratorical over the years. But as he says of his recent work in a fascinating interview with his translators, M. Sridhar and Alladi Uma, “The collective experience gets submerged in the personal experience in these poems. The demarcation of the personal and the public gets erased.” Significantly, his recent poetry is no less radical for this reason. His translators point out that his distinctive contribution has been to liberate revolutionary Telugu poetry from the platitudes, stale conventions and broad strokes of propagandist verse.
Yumlembam Ibomcha is a Manipuri poet whose work can speak of lovers and lions, Saddam Hussein and Meitei goddesses all in the same breath. There is no divide between home and world here, and the poet’s absurdist vision encompasses a host of diverse dramatis personae. Although “the wail of a crowd” is never far off in his poetry, his work also registers the voice of an irate wife, the cadences of political discussion with friends over cups of tea, the laughter of men and women on the street, punctuated intermittently by the sound of gunfire. Poetry does not have to try to be relevant, he says in an interview with poet-translator Robin Ngangom; it simply cannot help reflecting the “radical circumstances” in which we find ourselves. “ . . . if one writes with the conviction that poetry must play a role [in public life], the effort will not only fail to become poetry, but will also end up as unappetizing propaganda. A poem is a piece of art in the first place and is then found to be inextricably related to life.”
From the expansiveness of K. Siva Reddy to the verbal frugality of Eunice de Souza is a considerable leap. A poet who writes in English, de Souza’s poetry is one of startling intimacy. The landscape is unabashedly local, the references often deeply personal; college staffrooms, corridors, restaurants and Bandra Christian parties are the sites of many of these poems, and difficult parents, insensitive colleagues and unpredictable lovers abound. And yet, it would be simplistic to see these as mere morsels of autobiography. Although the tone is direct, and the ‘I’ idiosyncratic and whimsical, there is far too much composition in these taut fragmentary poems for them to ever be seen as mere transcriptions of self. And can there ever be poetry about a private self in which the universal isn’t implicated? That is the question with which de Souza’s poems leave us.
The work of these three poets seems to point collectively to the fact that there are no Big Themes and Little Themes in poetry. If anything, there are – and have always been – only good poems and bad poems. And we know how provisional and uncertain even that divide can be! But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as de Souza’s poem ‘Reprieve’ reminds us:
nothing in your little black heart
can frighten me,
I’ve looked too long
into my own.
Thank you for the gift
of your uncertainties.
This issue of PIW features work by three Indian poets, introduced by PIW India editor Arundhathi Subramaniam.
One would like to believe the facile divisions between “small themes” and “big themes”, between “personal poems” and “universal poems”, between interior landscapes and the “Real World” were buried long ago. But it’s amazing how resilient they are. Women poets are routinely congratulated for breaking out of their private angst-ridden realities and taking on ‘bigger’ and ‘meatier’ issues. Literary reviews regularly talk about a poet moving from the personal pronoun ‘I’ to the collective ‘we’ as a sign of ‘growth’.The problem with this genre of criticism is not just that it is patronising but that it is based on misconceptions that the personal is the autobiographical, and that the personal voice is distinct from, and subordinate to, the public voice. (What exactly is the public voice? It seems to mean, more often than not, a poet grandiosely assuming the self-appointed role of Voice of the People). Few would dispute that the “personal is political” but it seems to remain a pat mantra – to be nodded at sagely, but never to be taken seriously. And so the same old jingoistic distinctions between the personal / private / domestic (read ‘slight’) and the universal (read ‘profound’) continue to be perpetuated in much critical writing.
So if there’s a theme in this issue of PIW, devoted to the work of Indian poets, domain, it is this: the Big Theme and the Little Theme and the essential hollowness of that divide.
Telugu poet K. Siva Reddy, who describes himself as a Marxist poet, is unapologetic about the fact that his poetry has grown more personal, more philosophical, quieter and less oratorical over the years. But as he says of his recent work in a fascinating interview with his translators, M. Sridhar and Alladi Uma, “The collective experience gets submerged in the personal experience in these poems. The demarcation of the personal and the public gets erased.” Significantly, his recent poetry is no less radical for this reason. His translators point out that his distinctive contribution has been to liberate revolutionary Telugu poetry from the platitudes, stale conventions and broad strokes of propagandist verse.
Yumlembam Ibomcha is a Manipuri poet whose work can speak of lovers and lions, Saddam Hussein and Meitei goddesses all in the same breath. There is no divide between home and world here, and the poet’s absurdist vision encompasses a host of diverse dramatis personae. Although “the wail of a crowd” is never far off in his poetry, his work also registers the voice of an irate wife, the cadences of political discussion with friends over cups of tea, the laughter of men and women on the street, punctuated intermittently by the sound of gunfire. Poetry does not have to try to be relevant, he says in an interview with poet-translator Robin Ngangom; it simply cannot help reflecting the “radical circumstances” in which we find ourselves. “ . . . if one writes with the conviction that poetry must play a role [in public life], the effort will not only fail to become poetry, but will also end up as unappetizing propaganda. A poem is a piece of art in the first place and is then found to be inextricably related to life.”
From the expansiveness of K. Siva Reddy to the verbal frugality of Eunice de Souza is a considerable leap. A poet who writes in English, de Souza’s poetry is one of startling intimacy. The landscape is unabashedly local, the references often deeply personal; college staffrooms, corridors, restaurants and Bandra Christian parties are the sites of many of these poems, and difficult parents, insensitive colleagues and unpredictable lovers abound. And yet, it would be simplistic to see these as mere morsels of autobiography. Although the tone is direct, and the ‘I’ idiosyncratic and whimsical, there is far too much composition in these taut fragmentary poems for them to ever be seen as mere transcriptions of self. And can there ever be poetry about a private self in which the universal isn’t implicated? That is the question with which de Souza’s poems leave us.
The work of these three poets seems to point collectively to the fact that there are no Big Themes and Little Themes in poetry. If anything, there are – and have always been – only good poems and bad poems. And we know how provisional and uncertain even that divide can be! But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as de Souza’s poem ‘Reprieve’ reminds us:
nothing in your little black heart
can frighten me,
I’ve looked too long
into my own.
Thank you for the gift
of your uncertainties.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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