Out-closeting Myself

As is obvious from the previous post, I went to read some of my poems at a Public Place. Those of you who know me well, also know that I have been anti such things for years. I have had a deep theoretical dislike/distrust of the poet’s physical personhood being associated with the poet’s words. This one cryptic sentence cannot explain well enough the years of research that had gone into the formulation of my beliefs. However, certain events in the past few months have made me conduct an overhauling of sorts. I am ready to take off my garb of anonymity, ready to confront the dangers of embodied words. So well, I am ready to say sundry, stupid things like: Hey world, here I come, etc.

I rather liked the discussion afterwards. I was asked questions on nonsense verse (1, 2) , ghazals in English (1, 2) , form vs. free verse and my insect poems (1, 2, 3) among other things. Even though my closest friends will avow that my communication skills desert me when in a small group, I love talking to a crowd. One of the reasons why I am a teacher, I guess. So I quite enjoyed myself during the discussion. A friend/colleague asked me a very interesting question. She said that she felt my images were very intense and precise and wanted to know whether putting up my poems online somehow harmed the precision of the images…whether a kind of disintegration/dispersal of meaning happened to them when read on the computer screen. I gave her a vague-y reply. Would somebody like to answer that question?

PS: My first collection is coming out in August. I’m mighty excited.

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Poetry Reading

Please do come for a poetry reading at 3 pm tomorrow [19-06-08].

Hindi poet, Hemant Kukreti and I shall read from our work at the AV Room, Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, Arts Faculty, University of Delhi.