Writing, Theory and the Making of Verse. - Learning and Creativity

Writing, Theory and the Making of Verse. - Learning and Creativity

Samuel Beckett’s English Poetry: Transcending the Roots of Resistance in Language - Learning and Creativity

Samuel Beckett’s English Poetry: Transcending the Roots of Resistance in Language - Learning and Creativity

Curating Micro-narratives: The New Creativity - Learning and Creativity

Curating Micro-narratives: The New Creativity - Learning and Creativity

Reading, the Reader and Readers.

There are several direction one can go in as a reader.

There is that of reading the text carefully and taking into consideration what it signifies or refers to or means and also taking into consideration the author's intentions and motives, as well as what critics have said on a text and its historical context. This is the traditional method and it is one where the reader acts like a truth seeker, trying to please himself as a reader of his analysis that he has got it 'right,' regarding the conclusions he has drawn.

There is that of looking at a text in terms of placing it in different contexts. This is how literary theory comes in. Here we can read a text  by framing it with or by feminisms, Marxisms, psychoanalysis, culture studies, new historicism, modernism, post-modernism, ecocriticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, super-structuralism, formalism, lemon squeezer criticism or close reading, reader response theories, narratology, stylistics, linguistics, discourse analysis, post-colonialisms etc.

There is that of the intra- and inter and transdisciplinary methods of reading whereby we can connect a text not only to itself within or to other texts but also to other disciplines like branches of philosophy of which aesthetics is one, psychology, sociology, eco-aesthetics, theology, eco-spirituality, comparative literature, anthropology, the sciences, new disciplines like design etc.

There is that of studying it in terms of literacies where one compares medium to medium which is really a new approach where, to take but one instance, one would learn to 'read' a book and then 'view' the film based on it in two entirely different ways, and compare the two not in terms of better or worse but on new methodologies of interpretation that are only evolving but are worth following. The beginnings of such an approach can be found in Marshall McLuhan, to some extent.

Jacques Derrida, Franco - Jewish philosopher, deconstructionist, thinker and writer.

In a film on Jacques Derrida made in 2002, the world famous deconstructionist and philosopher was asked about his extensive personal library by Amy Ziering Kofman. She asked him if he had read all those books. He replied 'no, but I have read about four of them carefully, very, very carefully,' or words to that effect. This is similar to T.S. Eliot who once denied having read Marcel Proust as he had not read it with pencil in hand and paper to make notes on etcetera, meaning 'very carefully,' to repeat Derrida again. This also reminds us of Ezra Pound's refusal to read Wallace Stevens and vice versa as it would take too much time. This is true, that great writers and books demand a lifetime of reading from us and it can be very taxing and strenuous, but the gain is immeasurable as ultimately it is the reader who gains most, more even than the writer who often does not know the full significance of his work, of both what it means and what all it may come to mean or stand for.

The reader and the readers are the real kings. Readers make writers great and keep them alive or consign them to oblivion or the trash cans and garbage bins of history. It thus matters that the writer learns to write in such a way that readers come to love his writing enough to want to keep it alive.

To give an example of how to read one can turn to this poem by Barva Paramaz, a Laz poet from Turkey known for being a poet, writer, novelist and writing a manifesto on what world socialist poetry should be like, being anti- Islamic, working with Diamanda Galas, working for the Armenian Christian genocide survivors, criticizing even Marx though he says he is a Marxist  etc. As he told me once in response to my telling him I am a peace loving anarchist, his heart is anarchist but his mind is Marxist. However, this poem of his fits best into psychoanalytic criticism, as a framework for it to be interpreted.

Love Fucked My Mom, Baby

My heart is a swear-word ever after
Which I spit at Love
I vomited my youth to Pain's atlas

Love fucked my mom, baby

My long hopes crumbled up
Mountains tumbled down on my dreams
I kiss Death from its lips

Love fucked my mom, baby

Now shoot me from my verses
Crucify all my syllables
Barbarian cavalcades of my tongue are at full gallop

Love fucked my mom, baby

(c)Barva Paramaz, 2007
(from "Men's Heartbreak Anthology" published in USA, collected by Karineh Mahdessian.)

The love that 'fucked' the poet's or narrator's mom is obviously the Freudian father figure who castrates and that haunts him all his life. This also has biographical overtones. The poem contains in it barely suppressed images of violence towards the end that both historically refer to, perhaps, the poet's own empathy for the Armenian Christians who were killed by Islamic fanatics as well as to an anti-Freudian peace loving desire to be killed rather than to commit the crime of killing the father-figure, though the father figure is hateful. This is the poetry of the quintessential rebel who stands against all forms of authority and tyranny who has a long list of forebear-poets in this like Rimbaud and more recently, the late great Jim Morrison.

In the lyrics of the song found in Francis Ford Coppola's famous American film Apocalypse Now (that is based on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men and the Vietnam War)  in a song called The End, Morrison - the lead singer for the cult rock band The Doors who died mysteriously probably of drug overdose at the age of 27 -, puts it more blatantly, from the point of view not of the castrated 'son' who tries not to kill the father but of the one who does not repress or suppress the libido or the ego.

Jim Morrison, American singer, songwriter and poet and the lead singer of The Doors

"The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
"Father" 

"Yes, son?"
"I want to kill you."
"Mother...I want to...**** you.

(Morrison screams)"

Sigmund Freud

Those who have read Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and his reading of the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles will easily understand both Barva Paramaz's poem and what Morrison is writing. Freud can surely and definitively be called the father of psychoanalytic literary criticism.

This is why it pays to learn how to read. It makes texts easily accessible to us and also explains why certain kinds of art fascinate us. Here what holds us is the expression in the language of poetry of the irrational or subconscious/unconscious sides of ourselves that deal with sex and violence or Eros and Thanatos, which also find an echo in us as they deal with primary and primal relationships and urges, desires and drives that all of us do not speak of but none of us can deny, as they appear in fractured forms in slivers like broken glass that can cut our hands in our dreams and - yes - in our nightmares and from our past wounds, bleeding but transformed and bringing us (at times, salvation) through their re-making into art and poetry.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/doors/theend.html (Lyrics of The End)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_JHeHcjrIg (The video from the movie of The End.)

Canons | Literature DIY | Dr Ampat Koshy

Canons | Literature DIY | Dr Ampat Koshy

How To Enjoy a Poem: Taking the example of Langston Hughes' 'Harlem' or 'A Dream Deferred .' - Learning and Creativity

How To Enjoy a Poem: Taking the example of Langston Hughes' 'Harlem' or 'A Dream Deferred .' - Learning and Creativity

Indian English Literature, Literary Criticism and Theory - Learning and Creativity

Indian English Literature, Literary Criticism and Theory - Learning and Creativity

Keralite Writing in English-II | Literature DIY | Dr Ampat Koshy

Keralite Writing in English-II | Literature DIY | Dr Ampat Koshy

Poetry and Keralite Writing in English - 1 - Learning and Creativity

Poetry and Keralite Writing in English - 1 - Learning and Creativity

Written on August 18, 2012

The diary of leaving Leaving is not leavings. The landscape of a childhood with its plantain trees yams and creeping bitter gourd vines is the richest source for one's future discovered much later. The language unlearned is a loss. Living in books, printed pages and far away realms of the imagination is not enough, dear Breath Looking at the 'kaduvas' from a distance and not knowing what the others were up to, not being sunk in native soil as if they were oddments, all of it was something that added up to and increased my losses. Not that I don't hate the culture terrorists or the moral police and the religious fanatics but the broadening, widening canvas of colours also loses much specificity. Search for essence makes one lose all sense of belonging. The child now forever floats in an empty sky like those winged seeds, tiny parachutes in which unseen fairies cuddle my 'appooppan's thaadi' with its silvery gossamer filaments so ethereally beautiful, but searching desperately for crannies, places to lodge, safe catchment areas, sheer and mere good ground to call home and flourish but all that's left is the nature of the 'udumbu' Won't you love me? We are different and most of what you are or what I am will never be known by each other separated by languages and customs and rituals and rites and a million other things of strangeness and differences. Yet love me, please - sex is not a construct and touch, taste and smell can create memories - a new his and herstory that can overlay if assiduously pursued an eternity of palimpsests and give us for a while or ever , if destined, a feeling of completeness but even that is not real anymore in these new whorls where the voice I hear is once removed from reality as is the moving image I see, the words are not material; your hands made no paper want to make you blush and the writing is deflected as if by the lack of calligraphy that might have charmingly hid more than it revealed. So, as in under the water experiments for seismic disturbance from a great distance I hear the earthquake faults being plumbed and if everything collapses like the new games that thirst more for destruction than alleviation or value, brownling, my Breath, let us close our eyes and return to our childhood gardens, a little kanthari will spice up our poor man's meal of kanji and salt and a few button onions balance it off while the swing awaits and your ribboned pleats fly in the air already in anticipation of the hands that will push you up up up unreachable into the infinity of the blue sky and the spinning green up there and the white clouds and sunlight dazzling in the summer with crow pheasant calls and kuyil songs the leaves falling down occasionally under the mango on your hair and blouse and skirt. Still the heart beats with restless questions. Who am I? Why born? When to die? What is life? Like the pulse and breath and heartbeat, air, water, food and the other unanswered because unasked question Do you love me? Did you ever really love me? Will you, forever? Eternally? Village girl, can't you see it was that in you that I loved and that imaginary imagined child that usurped my heart leaving me and you helpless, bleeding silently mutual this suffering but endless now my wandering leaving leaving leaving... walking endless roads alone. Is this leaving like leavings? I refuse to acknowledge it.

Organic

Not just the size
the shape
the form
the feel
the colour
the smell
the texture
the taste
the contours

all -
matter

Earthshake

Earth, you are killing
unreasonably
not where you should
but where you want
Have you also turned
human like us?
Please return
to your goddess-ness

It hurts me

It hurts me
only when I think of you
trapped in a body
wordless

Maybe it hurts me more than it does you?

The tears fall from my eyes
like torrential rain
thinking of how
when I go away
you cannot express -
I cannot ever know -
what you feel, then
and when I return
you cannot express -
I cannot ever know -
what you feel, again
and then, thinking of that one day
when one goes away to stay
my chest constricts more
my tears fall faster
even as I pray
that I will not be the one to, first
or you
or she or them
but it may all happen together
though I know such prayers are not answered
so I hope again, that it may happen the other way
you first, then she and then I
but if it  goes the way of nature
then I know it will go thus
I first, then she, then you

Thinking of that
I get upset
but do not know what to do
except to wipe my eyes
go on
as if
there is a choice
when there never was one.

War Plane

War is over
but it is never "Happy Christmas"
anymore, on earth
Copters still fly overhead
Border skirmishes continue
Last night a bomber flew overhead
loud and thunderous
penetrating into my sleep
so deeply
that war seemed  real, its price as steep
as ever, and night its only natural keep.

http://www.rankopedia.com/CandidatePix/35396.gif

Reuel

Can you understand God?
Do you need to? No
For to you He is not the Word.
Is He the Image?
You do not need to understand God
You "live and move and have
your being in Him."
He is for you beyond word and image
in love, in deed and being.

Earth, make me move, under my feet

As earthquakes have an epicentre
so are you mine

Wild, the tremors rip through me
in increasing magnitude
The last one was 7.6
on the Richter scale

The bed was shaking
the lights swaying
though the time was day
and the windows, closed

I wondered if it was Exorcist
and you had come to possess me
lovely in your disheveled state

You are my earthquake
but I cannot stay away
anymore
though the panes are rattling
the pots and pans
haunted by your sway

Whether the tremors subside
or you kill me
I want you there, to make us quake
I want  you, to stay.

Breaking the Rules

When I said she should pay
she went away.

The Significant Anthology

Review of Wake Up India by Shruti Goswami (Bengali poetess)

Review by Shruti Goswami (writer) of Wake Up, India Essays for Our Times by Dr A.V. Koshy & Dr Bina Biswas

A Review:
I have been asked by Dr Koshy to read and comment on the book Wake Up, India Essays for Our Times by Dr A.V. Koshy & Dr Bina Biswas jointly .While going through the book the first thing that came to my mind was that both in our schools or colleges, we have been mugging up the same syllabi and most of the teachers and professors have been passing on the same notes down to us over generations with little or almost no updates to them. Here, I felt we need more teachers like Dr. Koshy who dares to think out of the box and also dares to implement them in his own way.
I am not much of a reviewer. However, I found almost all the topics in this book related to my interest areas, either personally or professionally or as a mere reader who takes interest in a variety of things. In this book, a variety of subjects ranging from population to poverty to land to autism to planning to politics and politicians to environment has been dealt with in a new way. For example, in the chapter where Dr Koshy addresses poverty and creates a new index for it, far removed from what we know as the standard parameters for determining poverty, namely, clean air, potable water, access to health care etc as against the calorific measure of food intake is an idea worth pondering. Similarly,Dr Koshy in his attempt to rationalize the fact that we must be informed enough to oppose development, mainly in moving from the primary to the secondary and tertiary sectors, and that blanket opposition without even knowing the pros and cons of a particular development does more harm than good,is something I heartily agree with. India, as he rightly points out, is a fertile land and most states have double cropped land. Since land is an essential component for any development, crying hoarse at every instance some double cropped land is taken in public interest isn’t really conducive for development and people should be well informed before opposing such a cause. The case in Nandigram is one such glaring example where neither the car factory came up nor the land could be returned to the land owners due to land policies that exist.
Since Ananya has already touched on the autism project which is also very close to my heart due to personal reasons, I would just like to mention that people need to be more sensitized specially in respect to differently abled persons. That, to me is proper education. Dr. Koshy has started an excellent job regarding this and I wish him all success. The plans for his Autism village are an excellent one and I hope it translates his dream into reality. His take on Mahatma Gandhi is also different and while I would say he was a great politician, I am not very sure about him being a great person, having read his book My Experiments With Truth. But then very few people in India actually can dare to bare all in their autobiographies. His take on black and white money and gradual loss of faith in politics and keeping faith in humanism only is something I can identify with and yet, it is educated people who should foray into politics and not goons and muscle men if we are really to have some work done for the people of this country.
I found one thing lacking in areas where Dr Koshy has proposed new ideas. It is the lack of statistical backing of such ideas or the quantification of those ideas. Many a great idea never translates to reality or is not executed due to lack of statistical parameters. I would request Dr Koshy to look into this area in his next edition. With proper quantification, they might well turn into some path breaking ideas.
Dr. Bina Biswas's writings are very concise and a pleasure to read. The feminist in me could well relate to the struggle of the Irom lady and admire and look up to the life and deeds of An Sang Su Kyi. Most people turn the word feminism as a tool to ridicule the fights of women for other women. Feminism is not demeaning the rights of others. It is to restore the rights that women have as human beings and they are for nobody to give. Sadly, most men don’t realize it. Dr. Biswas has also rightly pointed out the plight of the North East people and how they are discriminated against. The issues of E- waste are a burning issue and it’s an irony that countries like USA who are among the leading ones to produce it did not sign the treaty. Another topic, the loss of honesty in today’s world is something I can well relate to. The moral fibre of the citizens of a country very often determines its progress. If each and person decides to be honest, we wont need god men and god women and corrupt people preaching about honesty. Honesty is imbibed during the formative years, and then thrown for a toss because people have started measuring success in terms of money and power and not by the kind of person he or she is.
The book is a must read for people who want to have a different perspective of the same problems we face and for students who are tired of reading the same text books that have seldom anything new to offer.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

by Shruti

Reflections

The houses I stayed in were always full of books, the main treasure my dad and mom had to give me, over and above love, food, shelter, coffee, clothing and education. It was my eldest brother's gift to me too. When I won the Shanker's I got a huge cheque and went to Pai & Co in Trivandrum with him and my elder brother and sister and we bought books to our hearts' content. I did not know what to buy but my eldest brother did. I got my first Tintin that way, 'Black Island', and became a lifelong fan of Herge ever since. Though we were Christians we did not buy any book based on the Bible but when Shanker's sent me the certificate and anthology with my poem in it they also sent me, strangely enough, a book of Bible stories, beautifully illustrated and published from abroad! Four such incredibly unique collections made of unforgettable children's books by four of us prize winners in the same family made up my infant years of reading! As a result I started to live in my own imaginary world and was often found talking to myself. I never wanted to visit the places in the books I read as visiting them in my head seemed a better option, besides which such things were, of course, beyond my reach then. As I grew up my love for children's literature remained. Though led astray briefly by the tortuous language of literary criticism and theory and by the impenetrable density of philosophical language what I really got from years of reading children's books was the ability to write in a clear, flowing, transparent and limpid style that was easy to understand.

While doing my P.G. and my research I found many of my friends going abroad to UK, USA and Canada. I also tried for a scholarship once but did not make it. I did not pursue it by applying for more and more scholarships being tied down by the feeling of not having enough money or by what I now recognize as false ideas of patriotism or rather by a world view that taught me that excellence has no need of the props given to it by things like validation from foreign shores or universities and other colonial crutches. 

A long, long journey later through many jobs, I had learned to read carefully, analyze well, interpret well, and do critical thinking all on my own without knowing such a term existed, for a long while, In all this I was and am like Siddhartha. I was naturally led to writing which was where it could be put to most use and teaching, where its presentation-al and spoken skills aspects could be used. In a way my whole life has been, you could say, not about making and doing but about reading, thinking, speaking, presenting, teaching, writing, observing, describing, imagining, analyzing, questioning, critiquing, seeking and finding etc. But as all things are connected one cannot stay out of making and doing and learning by hands on experience eventually, and remain only in the ontological realms of being and existence, and I too started to 'do,' as the world around me changed from being word centred to technology centred.

I am on the verge of becoming fifty. I have achieved much and will more. I am naturally thankful to all who helped me on the way but most of all to the new technology which made it possible for me to realize what my gut feeling told me, which was that excellence cannot be hid under a bushel for ever, whether it has to face adverse circumstances or not. Seven books old now, my hugest successes have come about, not in terms of money, but in terms of popularity, respect, fame, name and influence, as a teacher, yes, but in more recent times in larger measure through making use of the global reach of the internet, new media and mixed media and not through the so-called to- me- outdated traditional routes of quality validation.

When tempted to get discouraged that I have not got much recognition in places I would like to get more of it in, a little bird on my shoulder tells me the other side of the story, how for a slow learner and late starter, I have achieved much. By writing to my readers directly, that too from the heart, I have carved out a niche for myself in their hearts and won literally thousands of readers. I have not let middlemen interfere in the process, my greatest strength. My books appear in Googlebooks, Amazon, Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and many other international online book portals and Indian portals like Flipkart, Infibeam and homeshop18, though not yet in bookstores for which I blame not myself but the partiality driven, cruel, faulty world of publication, advertising, marketing and distribution, a system that exploits writers and readers. Many people in all the English speaking countries and even other countries have read what I write in part or full and have liked it. All kinds of big writers and scholars and writing Prize nominees have told me that my writing skills as a poet and critic are extraordinary. Most of all, my readers keep on reading me and keeping my works alive, against all odds, and coming back for more. I am most grateful to them as they are the ones who have really made this whole enjoyable journey of discovery as a reader and writer online exciting and possible. Starting from on journalspace where I used to appear in the top ten often, under five different aliases, and going on through being 'learnertransmitter' to Urgent Evoke where everyone in the community waited eagerly for my posts to appear, to Facebook where I get enough attention without tagging I have proved, not alone, but along with the help of many other beloved friends, some of whom are also writers, that if one gives all one has to what one loves, which is writing in my case, being unsparing on oneself for the sake of what one considers as the best, which for me is the great books I have read by the great prolific authors of the past, the likes of whom are not so easy to find now on earth, one cannot but make it eventually.

With all my love and respect, and written at a point when I am going through what seems to be a trough in my life but is not, I wish this reflection finds you all in the best of spirits and wish you all too all the best.

To all my many readers and sincere and genuine well wishers,

Dr Koshy A.V.