TRIBUTE
Poetic dialogues
THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN
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Ayyappa Panicker's poetry, like the person himself, has always had a sardonic and mysterious glint.
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Ayyappa Panicker: Delighted experimenting with forms. Photo: S. Gopakumar
HAD I approached K. Ayyappa Panicker for an interview when he was awarded the prestigious Saraswathy Samman early this year, he would have "politely" declined it, saying that all that he wanted to say had been said in his poems and essays, and that if I wanted to write anything about his poems and essays, he would have been only happy to give me free copies of his works. So, to coax him into an "interview", I deliberately called it a "dialogue". And, as expected, he agreed to cooperate, on the condition that no personal questions were asked. But it was by all means an interview that was intended to cover the various phases of his poetic career, but destined to be incomplete owing to his sudden illness, and his succumbing to it on August 23, in Thiruvananthapuram, at the age of 76. The major part of this dialogue was conducted through email, and, despite the stoic silence on personal matters, the unfailing punctuality with which he responded to the questions showed that he enjoyed doing it.
Enigmatic answers
When asked about the language used in his works, Panicker's reply was as enigmatic as his personality. He said there was a carnivorous glee in his language. Resistance to the dominant traditions in the poetry of a language, he elaborated, is a perennial challenge for a poet who chooses to write in that language. This is because of the peculiar relation poetry maintains with traditions, unlike other forms of literature. No poet, as T.S. Eliot observes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "has his complete meaning alone". In poetry, meaning is more historical and political than subjective and arbitrary with words having a long lineage of meanings that reveal only when they are activated in the multiple contexts of how they were used by the dead poets. At the same time, no poet can express himself completely remaining within the ambit of the tradition. This is a dilemma that often puts poets in a creative hibernation. And, one needs persistent passion for experimentation and innovation to emerge as an original. All living poets feed on dead poets, he said.
In a way, Panicker was talking retrospectively of himself. He began writing poetry in the 1950s; a period in Malayalam poetry when poets were overwhelmed by the influence of the legendarily romantic poet Changampuzha Krishna Pillai. And, definitely, Panicker's early poems were no exception. His poetry too had all the ingredients of the verbal mellifluousness and sensual pliability that easily caught the adolescent imagination of the period, as in:
O village girl, what is there for you to be so shy?
Sanguine youthfulness plays in the heart now
Looking at us the golden dreams come to sleep with us.
O village girl, what is there for you to be so shy?
But, what made the difference was that while in other poets of his generation and sometimes even in the generations that came after him, the Changampuzha influence continued as some sort of a fixation, in Ayyappa Panicker it was just a beginner's infatuation with sweet sounding words and prosody. He moved forward from the existing norms of poetry, experimenting with the language and form, juxtaposing the distant with the near, and integrating the conventional into the radical, and finally coming up with the trailblazing poem "Kurukshetram" in 1960, which inaugurated the modernist era in Malayalam poetry.
A new idiom
Ayyappa Panicker began writing "Kurukshetram" in 1952. He said there had been an inherent discontent in him not only with what others were writing then but with all that he too had been writing till then. "The atmosphere was saturated with the nauseating stench of decayed poems coming from within and without", he said recollecting the staleness experienced in poetic expressions, and suggesting the creative urge that the time had necessitated.
Panicker took six years to complete this 294-line poem in five sections. Asked about how the literary establishment reacted to it, he said the editor of a leading literary journal, himself a prominent poet of the previous generation, sent it by the return post. "Perhaps, it might be from this rejection that the poem imbibed its momentum", he said. True, "Kurukshetram" found its way to the readers by itself, and even crossed the borders of language
by becoming a 20th century epic in the language.
Significant poem
As K. Satchidanandan, one of the major voices in the post-Panicker generation in Malayalam says, "`Kurukshetram' is the first poem of Ayyappa Panicker with a definitive thematic and idiomatic significance." Though most of its themes, like "value and valuelessness", "repeated betrayal, failures and hazards in the country", had fleeting appearances in his earlier poems, it was in "Kurukshetram" that all of them were organically amalgamated into a "monologue of momentous hesitations", as in:
See us
caught in the labyrinth of our daily grind,
this crowded market
where we plunge and push and outsmart
to gain each our end —
And here they come,
come to buy and come to sell
themselves they buy and themselves they sell.
(Translated by T. R Doraiswamy.)
Ayyappa Panicker's poetry is a collage of poetic practices and moods. And, throughout a career that spanned more than six decades, he remained unpredictable with regard to what he would write next. The poet who startled the literary orthodoxy with an outright experimental poem in free verse the other day, would emerge as if from nowhere with a conventional hymn in traditional metre. The same poet who penned the saga of his family
("Kudumpapuranam") and the story of the perpetual exodus of mankind ("Gotrayanam"), with epic perfection was just as likely to sweep the readers off their feet with a four-line cartoon poem that lampooned the power hungry political contemporaneity.
Behind the smile
There has been always a mysterious smile in Ayyappa Paniker's poetry, just as there was on his face. A smile that could be interpreted as sardonic, but also deeply saddened. Was he asking:
Time does not end here, darling,
Let us moan no more.
From what depths wells up even this smile of ours!
Thachom Poyil Rajeevan writes in English and Malayalam. He can be reached at: rthachompoyil@yahoo.com
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