Boki Launch

I'm link-happy today

Especially if the links lead to nice things about my poetry.

I’m one of the featured poets on Poetry International’s India page. Arundhathi Subramaniam has written an insightful article on how this month’s features were conceptualised (for a special new edition called “Poets on Poets”). I found her introductory comments on editorial responsibility and the editors’ participation in canon formation particularly interesting. My inclusion in this issue is, I believe, serendipitous. Meena Kandasamy, a poet whose work (and political wit) I respect, decided to “present” me to the world. Meena surprised me when she announced in a mail that she wanted to write about me, or rather, my poetry. I, of course, felt like an ingénue being asked out on her first ball (:-P), and I agreed prettily. This is what she wrote after parking herself on my blog for two days! Read it in full here:
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A friend introduced me to the poetry of Nitoo Das early this year (2008) and since then, I have returned to it again and again. I love her critical, caricaturist eye because it shocks me in the most unexpected places. Sometimes she playfully populates her poems with insects and bugs; sometimes she escapes after getting one stuck in a multiplicity of interpretations.

Many of her poems appeal to me because they are about the secret life of everyday things – umbrellas, pencils, razors, scissors and safety-pins. That make-believe, that anthropomorphism might belong to the realm of the fable, but Das pulls it off brilliantly within a short poem. And because I am an activist obsessed about social ostracisation, I am moved by her poems about people whom society has trouble accepting: Pandita Ramabai . . . or a dreaded forest-brigand's daughter . . .

Her poetry raids the reserves of memory, so panic rises “like steam like heat like / Flashbacks of quick childhood slaps”. In the hands of Das, stanzas become embodiments of rebellion: “They could not / kill me. I erupted out / of the soil wailing / at the sun and pulling / at my hair. The earth / could not hold / my ankles.” She writes a lot about sexuality and gender, and her women-oriented poems, as in the ‘Street Series’, can be as brutal as they are beautiful: “The street grows / lewd hands / and sneering eyes / and slaps me until I shrink to a zero”

I admire her work because of its versatility, its ability takes on various voices while experimenting with the form of the dramatic monologue. She is by turns intuitive (‘The Water-Strider’, ‘Conjoined’) and seductive (‘Guwahati May’), fiery (‘Murder: An Experiment in Perspective’) and earthy (‘how to cut a fish’). And then, when her poems grow moody, she takes shelter in nostalgia (‘April is a remote place’, ‘School Sonnet’).

Perhaps because she is a visual artist, she is able to re-imag(e)ine every poetic cliché and so we are informed that “The sun jumped / headlong / into the river and killed himself / everyday by / the ghost trees.” She makes her poems stark and short, and within that space, she shakes her fist at a status-quoist society. I love her poems because they speak to me with a star-burst of spontaneity. Like a river in first flood.

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I’m sure that mention of rivers was designed to please a very foolish fond old woman.
The ‘main’ editorial by Sarah Ream on the PIW homepage also has a brief, incisive paragraph on two of my featured poems.

…[Her] poem ‘how to cut a fish’, through its use of energetic rhythm and syntax, imbues a seemingly innocuous domestic task – which has to be done sitting “properly / woman-like” – with violence and power, her use of the pronoun ‘he’ in reference to the fish introducing unavoidable overtones of gender struggle. Also displaying the verve with which she handles the English language is her poem ‘Love Song IX’, which is rich in medieval, Jabberwockian vocabulary: “Her wiggance is so gizsal. / So houndeous, so beauteous, / so imperfeccamble.”

Needless to say, I’m tickled. Very tickled.

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PS: “how to cut a fish” is poem of the week on PIW. Boki is book of the month on Booksy.

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