Photophrastic - nimisha kavitha based on a click by Gauri Dixit

Lovers sat on those benches/ and husbands and wives who quarreled/ on separate ones/ some practiced social distancing/ by leaving the one in between empty/ tired people embraced them/and ones taking a break/then there were those who just wanted/to while away the time/ watching the petals falling/in warm weather or cold times/how many stories they could tell/perhaps this shows lockdown/benches, man-made, oft unused, petals and leaves, natural too, fallen/all subject to the chipping or yellowing wheel of time/ here caught in a moment of abeyance

My second collection of poetry or third one gets reviewed in Indian Literature

 

Repost: Parul Khakar's Shav Vahini Ganga translated by Dr Koshy AV (with a few changes)

Parul Khakkar's Shav Vahini Ganga (Corpse bearing/vehicle Ganga.)

Translated by Dr Koshy AV

Don't be sad but 'rejoice', say the corpses in one voice

O King, in your Ram Rajya!

We see the corpses floating in Ganga

Lord, the trees have all become ash

There is not even a speck of a place in the crematorium

There is no undertaker there or people to carry the corpses to the pyre

No one to sit near and cry

To those of us who lost everything, only the dance of death continues around us, O King

In your Ram Rajya, our corpses float around in the Ganga

Spitting smoke and spitting smoke, even the chimney is panting

The virus has caught us and is shaking us

Our bangles are breaking, and our insides are hurting, burning like fire

While the city is burning, the pandit is playing the veena

O King, in your Ram Rajya corpses floating through Ganga too I see

What pomp and power there was in your get up and style earlier

Now the city sees your real face

Say no excuse now but come out in the open and say loudly, loudly

That you are wearing nothing and have no ability and are lazy

And will not rest now at least but act, show us that!

Smoke rings rise and rise to touch the sky, the city is angry and seething

Don't you know that in your kingdom through Ganga the corpses are floating, at all?

Gala

 (Charles Hewitt, Gala Dali, 1955, source: Getty Images)

It is a dry time

The muses have taken a hiatus

The wasp in my room buzzes: All irritation

The child mourns

The slate grey sea does not stir in the absence of breeze

Then a bard sings outside

A single sweet note followed by a single sweet

Note

Somewhere other birds take it up again

It is Gala time

The dry bones/stones have allure on either sides of her back

Her gaze into the far distance seeks

I am out of sight, on the other side

The bird cries a single note

Another bird/bard flying on makes its own songs

I will go down and find company and solace with my child

Down the stairs in a surreal, dim-lit evening

Escape from the gathering gloom in my darkening room

Having now seen God and poetry in a woman's photographed & unvarnished hair, buttocks, and back.

2 Poems

 Slow, the vultures circle in the sky

Slowly the hyaenas walk on earth, and make an outcry

The snakes with small, squat, poisonous heads raise them

To strike, but are "mocked by a tissue that will not serve"

They shall all die and their bodies shrivel up

in forest and desert and city, village, town;

"hang in a pitiful crescent". In hell, fry.

2.

Flights of black birds in formation

overhead, going home

or to sleep

turn the evening into winged dreams

There are bruises on the sky

cuts and wounds -

part of the fact that birds can fly -

in the clouds

Red gashes

blue or black

turning the evening into

purple twilight and night

The birds continue their flight

looking effortless

Do they wish to be wingless

and grounded

with or like us here, down below

the way humans wish they could float, unwounded

in the air of the heavens; 'weightless', cutting a path

through, free, in endless flight?

The two quotes are from two poems by Samuel Beckett called the Vulture and Yoke of Liberty respectively

Interview

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0jyiPVDEXM

Reader Island

 There will always be an island

the island of readers

unbiased

who come to my writing as nymphs and dryads

to the cool of a forest

and the shade of a waterfall

to enjoy the words'

sound

cascading like water

picking and eating them

like berries

that stain their lips red

with their juice

and because of these and the naiads

who quench their thirst at my poems' fountains

because of their refreshment

I breathe

I live

7Nidhi Popli, Lakshmi Venkatachalam and 5 others

Something dark

 I know you read me

and then wish you hadn't

because there is something in there

you just can't place your finger on

something that is nothing like and belied by my appearance

shaggy like a bear and silver-backed like a gorilla

something dark that swallows light

and make you want to be wild, get wet or get angry

Proud to be an anti-national poem

 Looking at the young, feminine faces of 'the enemies of the State'

Narwal, Devangana Kalita, Parul Khakar and Disha Ravi

Their names like a poem

(All Good Hindu Names, or are they not, my friends?)

I feel 'their' State is the devil's flaming brew/tea

and they the flies to wanton boys

who think they are Gods

who 'strip' off their wings

and leave them all in it to float, sink or drown.

Paranoid and bitter? Poem

A Tribute to Nightbirde*

I remember back then

how you used to come

hang on to my every word and every poem

You and you and you

and you and you and you

I was the stars to your moon

My poems the sun to your sunflowers

I was the one you could practice heliotropism on

Then when you thought that you had arrived

Your visits became few and finally none

You said you are not a poet, or your silence did, to me

I am bigger than you now, it said, I know it all

I watched you try to remove the ground beneath my feet

Unable to feel hurt, or anything

The Krishna whom you felt that you could give a bhashan to

The Drona whose thumb and forefinger you wanted to remove

The one who was just an inn on your way to your destiny

Or cut down to size, to step into my shoes

I was busy watching the ants in the anthills

The anthills in the savannahs and not the cities

You did not know of people like Nightbirde

In comparison with whom you would never become anything

As you did not have the same amount of humility

People whom I watched, the tears streaming down my face

The real thing, whether successful or not

Fighting insuperable odds and able to go on

To sing, to dance, to write poems to fight, to live

To hope, to have faith, to love, with the courage to go on alone

I did not know them and they did not know me

But we were kin and wing to wing flew in the unknown, lost

"It's ok, it's ok, it's ok," was our song

"To be among the lost," and soar, vast, "sometimes".

To burn a hundred poems and still be strong

To never look back, and have nothing to look forward to

to break the yellow lights and know it is only you you lied to

"It's ok, it's ok, it's ok", you see

"To be among the lost", and not even soar**, "sometimes."

*Everything in this poem may be wrong. (ref. to Richard Bach's Illusions)

** have a golden buzzer moment

https://www.facebook.com/simoncowell/videos/542849500456737

Prompt poem

 

given by Amita Paul

10stSponsoSrencdh  · 

This is photograph of Karwar Railway Station which Karnataka Tourism claims is the greenest in India.
It looks breathtakingly beautiful in this photo.

I wonder how many poets in TSL would feel inspired to write a poem or two on it?

that green that mist those tracks that train those platforms and the smell of rain is that not where i kissed you once that rain that green those mountains that mist that smell that pain

The night as seducer/seductress - a poem.

 The night as seducer/seductress

the night has its longings

the day does not know,

takes off its furs/dress

no longer trammeled by the light

not afraid to reach out and touch

for warmth

the skin of the one/s it wants to darken

the night has its own restlessness

its feelings/failings

and longs to be found at some hearth

watching the flames licking at the logs

curled up on the carpet

legs stretched out

in its nakedness

having crept in through the window

and the sliver of light

underneath the door

to slide, sidle into bed

and watch over

the breath in sleep,

the soft rise and fall of some fair breast/chest

black now, with the light switched off,

as its own face

in the mirror near, a mere* now

in its sight.

*well

Anti-moon poem

 I would not want a lover like the moon

Far away and probably cold not only in June

Just an eye or peering in through the window

Yellow or silver, pitted black or new

I would not want a lover like the moon

She is only a dream that makes you want to swoon

Never comes down from that distance, up there

To the earth to take off her clothes as an apsara

and dance with me to my poor tune

No, I really would not want, either, to be the moon

And be compared by poets to atrocious similes,

lies, metaphors and lunatic images

The moon is like a paper cup

She is cheese and a crescent of t/horns

Dripping blood, a vagina, a sand dune

A desert, there's a girl in it, no, that's a cosmonaut, you fool!

Must be painful to read all that and not feel like a poltroon

Roses are there and stars and the sun

Golden ladders to the night and sky

Blue of the morn

Be careful what you wish for

Be wary of the moon

I would not want to have her for a lover,

That old, capricious, woman moon.

Rejoinder poem

 Trying my hand at poetry after a long time by my standards

A Poem inspired by one I read of Smitha Mohandas that I have turned around or inside out - thanks for the inspiration, Smitha, by making me read a good poem written by you carefully after a long time

The small, brown puddle

On the wet, muddy side-road

An ocean for two paper boats

After the rain,

Drifting away from each other

So near can yet be so far

His arms lay robotic by his side

To not touch her fingers wet from raindrops

While her thighs trembled for their touch.

So near can yet be miles

A hand's span in a puddle

For paper boats

Oceans wide. The water getting in

Drowning, making the paper a thick, soggy green

Sinking.

Interview with Aprilia Zank in WEB J OPA (as Poet of the Month)

 

Thanks to Nilovro Nil Shuvro - the editor, for this opportunity. (https://ourpoetryarchive.blogspot.com/2021/06/ampat-varghese-koshy-talking-with.html)

APRILIA ZANK: According to the American poet Robert Frost, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Can, in your opinion, all thoughts be 'translated' into words?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I was a very logos-centered or word-oriented person till my son came along who has autism. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God kind of artist, very literature-based. Reading and writing was the big thing. But after looking at how he related to the world which is more in terms of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell rather than the three r’s and imagining his inscape and seeing his kind of operative mode and creativity and artistry text has become for me only a part of a larger picture to be honest and, though still my favorite part of it, due to my background in the Word, no longer any more important than other features like sound. To put it in a nutshell thoughts are to me, predated by experiences that are probably more holistically sensory, and expressing them through multimedia and hypermedia has become increasingly important for me and the present world. The growth of the internet too has ensured this as we now think more in terms of sound bytes, videos, memes, gifs, emojis, etc;, with the language being only a part of the whole. So, to sum up, Frost, no, things have changed.

APRILIA ZANK: The English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Can you explain how poetry unveils the hidden beauty of the world?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: This goes back to Coleridge wanting to make the strange familiar and Wordsworth wanting to make the familiar strange, in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and vice versa, with both wanting to do both to signal the shift to Romanticism, but Shelley is also talking of something more, about not only beauty but truth, according to me, that for most men these things are hidden and poets help us to see them clearly, for the first time or as if for the first time. When we describe the beauty of a woman we love we reveal her beauty that is inner and hidden to the reader for example when we are poets in our poems. Same with the truth, that brings about a development in the awareness of people to increase their social conscience about causes by putting before them truths they may not have been aware of before in an aesthetically fitting way. Shelley’s own poems on Manchester and revolutionary ones and anarchy, and his Ode to the Skylark and his Ozymandias are examples that reveal to us both hidden beauties and truths and make the familiar strange and the strange unfamiliar. (I should have mentioned Cenci too, maybe)

APRILIA ZANK: The American poet of English origin W. H. Auden was convinced that, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” Do you think that poetic language should always be refined and cultivated, or may it also be rough and raw if necessary?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: A poet is in love with language and for him every word and nuance of it matters. Every poet knows instinctively and intuitively that no word is bad in itself but it is thinking that makes it so, to misquote Shakespeare. A poet can use refined, civilized and cultured language where it fits and rough and raw or ready language where that fits. In Sanskrit aesthetics, there is a word that can be translated as appropriateness which is auchithya, or as we say in Malayalam “uchitham” and this matters a lot to me, this concept. Sometimes we get somewhere in art by breaking rules too and it is the same in language as we are on a creative quest but if lucky or sensitive our handling of language will be accepted and appropriate either in the present or in the future and this is where we strike the balance.

APRILIA ZANK: Please consider the following statement of the English scholar and poet A. E. Housman: “Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.” Do you write or prefer explicit poetry with an obvious meaning or message, or rather more cryptic, challenging poetry?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I am one of the widest poets I have known with a breadth that is all-encompassing so I write both explicit poetry and cryptic, challenging poetry. It comes down to what comes out as a first draft often for me but there is one matter in which I completely agree with A E Housman and that is that we have to leave half the work to the reader in terms of form, meaning, content and everything else or the poem fails as we need to draw in the reader as a co-creator. I would thus expand on what he says to include other parameters and not just meaning.

APRILIA ZANK: “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”, is a famous quote by the German romanticist and philosopher Novalis. To what extent can poetry have a therapeutic effect?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: Poetry is a two-edged sword. It definitely has therapeutic effects on those who write it and especially on women and children and it has therapeutic effects on those who read it too but it can also be used to cause wounds on those who sometimes deserve it and this part of it interests me too. Poetry is an untamed beast and can sometimes heal but also cause wounds even on those it should not as once written and released a half of its reception is in its perception. Here poets have to take care to be more on the side of the Force and not the Dark Side, to put it in Stars Wars terms. (laughs) Poetry should be a light-saber, in other words, and in the hands of Jedis who have not sold out in today’s world, to expand on this pop culture reference.

APRILIA ZANK: According to Salvatore Quasimodo, an Italian poet and literary critic, “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” Is, in your opinion, the poet primarily a personal voice, or rather the echo of his fellow beings?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: Both, I speak myself in poetry and not just for myself, it is the flesh become word to invert scripture and unless it finds an echo in my readers who say you speak me or for me it fails. Poetry has to be an extension of oneself where the other melts into one too or it cannot be poetry that will outlast time or find much spread in geographical terms to other languages.

APRILIA ZANK: The American literary critic M. H. Abrams asserted that, “If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.” Do you also think readers need to be educated as to how to go through a poem? If 'yes', in which way?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: For a deeper understanding of a poem’s aesthetics readers have to be educated about figures of speech, titling, musical devices, and imagery as well as forms, genres, structures, and analysis or comparison or contrast etc., as poems are not just about themes or layers of meanings but “body” as MH Abrams puts it so beautifully and to make love to that body one needs to get hold of it properly first.

APRILIA ZANK: Let us now consider the words of the American songwriter and poet Jim Morisson: “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” Can you please tell us how poetry can be/become educational?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: It is strange that you should club the word educational with Jim Morrison as his point, I think, was to set people free from the limits of education as it was practiced in his time, through the art of music, lyrics, poetry, and performance. Morrison knew what Gardner speaks of, that there are many intelligences and not just literary or linguistic ones or mathematical ones, leftovers of Greek philosophical subjects in schooling that were reduced to these three as primary, and his aim is to make poetry also reflect that times have changed and should take in technology and the past not limited just to Graeco Roman or Judaeo Christian frameworks but including others ones too like American Indian ones. He does this in his own lyrics to try to expand the frame.

APRILIA ZANK: The British-American poet T. S. Eliot claimed that, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Do you sometimes/often experience 'love at first sight' for poems that you have not understood immediately/completely?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: Oh, yes! Poems have a lot of depth and to get the meanings one has to read them several times, but to love them one has to read them only once. They communicate to the neural synapses before anything else being a very sensory medium. I remember this reaction on reading Rilke and Rimbaud for instance and more recently RS Thomas, WS Merwin, and some others. As I get older some names escape me but the poems don’t.

APRILIA ZANK: Paul Valéry, a French poet, essayist, and philosopher, said: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Do you also think that the final 'embodiment' of a poem happens in the mind of the reader?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I agree fully with Paul Valéry as in my own experience being a poet whenever I return to a poem after weeks or months or sometimes years I see I could have written it better and make changes to it. There seems to be no final satisfactory version, even if sometimes the change is just a word. However, as the reader does not know of this and the care poets take over their works, (at least ones like me influenced by fastidious poets like Valéry) and so feel some of my poems are perfect and need no change. I rarely feel that way about any of my poems. Maybe one can about a couplet or a four liner or five liners, at most.

APRILIA ZANK: The famous British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie believes that, “A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” Should, in your opinion, poetry have a strong social and/or militant component?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I need to point back to my earlier answer of calling poetry a light saber here. In today’s world, no poet can be apolitical or not take stances or fight for things he believes in, or call out bogus stuff and keep to wanting to be secure and safe. This is my unabashed position. I fully agree with him. I am, for instance, against fascism, against minorities being persecuted, for autism, against caste discrimination, for preserving what is good about Christ’s influence in the world, etc. And all these things if opposed I have to point out that I cannot just stand and watch but have to take sides.

APRILIA ZANK: The poetic credo of the highly influential American poet Maya Angelou was the following: “The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.” Do you also think that your poetry addresses a large and varied audience?

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I have written thousands of poems and my poetry definitely addresses a large and varied audience, including all who know English, all who are Indians or Asians, all who are human beings and all who are against the idea that they are human beings too as there are post-human and anti-human strands too in my poetry so I really don’t know anyone my poetry leaves out. It may address people in different ways but all may find themselves and their consciences questioned in it as well as find me appreciative of their arts, cultures, and other such valuable things. I feel this is how we can approximate universality in our times and in all my poetry books like FIGS, or Allusions to Simplicity or Birds of Different Feathers or Wine-Kissed Poems which is a collaboration with Jagari Mukherjee or Vodka by the Volga which is another collaboration with Santosh Bakaya I have tried to go beyond parochialism to being universal and mostly succeeded, or so I feel.

AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: Dr. Koshy A.V. is presently working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. He has many books, degrees, diplomas, certificates, prizes, and awards to his credit and also, besides teaching, is an editor, anthology maker, poet, critic, and writer of fiction. He runs an autism NPO with his wife, Anna Gabriel. Two of his co-authored books published in 2020 were Amazon best-sellers in India and the USA, namely, Wine-kissed Poems with Jagari Mukherjee and Vodka by the Volga with Santosh Bakaya.

Dr. APRILIA ZANK is an educationist, freelance lecturer for Creative Writing and Translation Theory, as well as a multilingual poet, translator, editor from Munich, Germany and an Author of the Poetry book BAREFOOT TO ARCADIA. Born in Romania, she studied English and French Literature and Linguistics at the University of Bucharest, and then moved to Munich, Germany where she received her PhD degree in Literature and Psycholinguistics for her thesis, THE WORD IN THE WORD Literary Text Reception and Linguistic Relativity, from the Ludwig Maximilian University, where she started her teaching career. The research for her PhD thesis was done in collaboration with six universities from Europe, and as a visiting lecturer at Alberta University of Edmonton, Canada. Dr Aprilia writes verses in English and German, French and Romanian and was awarded a distinction at the “Vera Piller” Poetry Contest in Zurich. Her poetry collection, TERMINUS ARCADIA, was 2nd Place Winner at the Twowolvz Press Poetry Chapbook Contest 2013. In 2018, she was awarded the title “Dr. Aprilia Zank – Germany Beat Poet Laureate”, by the National Beat Poetry Foundation (USA). She has been an acclaimed guest at cultural events in Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Turkey, Singapore and Romania, where she read her poems, delivered lectures on various topics. Her poems and articles are published in many ezines and Anthologies of different countries.