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Photos: K.V. Srinivasan, M. Vedhan, M. Karunakaran and S.R. Raghunathan

Reclaiming relevance: Poets at the Prakriti festival (from left) Gieve Patel, Amadou Lamine Sall, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Vivek Narayanan and Jeet Thayil.

In India, readings often evoke a reverential atmosphere with the audience quietly awaiting the dispensation of wisdom, wit and perception distilled through the skill of the “word”smith. How do poets recreate the necessary authority for their own voices within a public context? In an urban culture dominated by the film aesthetic, how does the audience react to poetry (read mainly in the English language) when it invades shopping malls, coffee cafés, fabric stores and book shops? And how does poetry, often considered to be an elite form of art, lend itself accessible to entertain a common crowd of diverse religions, languages and cultures? The poetry festival provided ample scope to enquire into these issues and observe how poetry works or fails to work in the public arena, raising questions about the reluctant audience on one hand, and the unrelenting poet’s competency to be heard, on the other hand. In the difficult transition from the private to the public voice, what seems to matter is the direct communal appeal of the poet to a collective audience. This unique feature was strikingly demonstrated in the reading by the French Senegalese poet, Amadou Lamine Sall which triggered off the poetry fest on December 15 at the Alliance Française of Madras. The reading was quite conventional in style and resembled what Derek Walcott described as poetry which “has the drone of the human voice”. The African-Francophone poet’s reading resonated through the human community as he voiced his concern on the issues of social injustice, misery and poverty. Echoing strains from the poetry of Ben Okri and Pablo Neruda, Amadou Sall asserted that to him, poetry was a “messenger of love and peace”.

The reading at Pasha, The Park, had a sizeable turn-out of poetry-buffs who were alert to the diverse cultural expressions presented in the reading by Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Jeet Thayil and Vivek Narayanan. One of the anthologies, entitled Open Spaces: 50 poets, 50 Poems, promoted during the reading, displayed a remarkable fusion of global poetics. The collection focuses on the need for dialogues in a contemporary condition of contradictions and dogmatic definitives. The volume includes a wide range of poets from India and elsewhere — such as, Gieve Patel, Adil Jussawalla, Keki Daruwalla, George Szirtes, Meena Alexander, Ranjit Hoskote and Tabish Khair, to mention a few.

Anjum Hassan’s reading at the “Evoluzione” was a poised presentation, taking the audience through a journey of her childhood memories and the places where she lived. Sketching a townscape peopled with friends, families and the common lot, Hassan involved the listeners in the skill of a subtle performance breaking the stasis of a conventional reading. Gieve Patel’s interaction with young students at The School, KFI was indeed a revelation of poetry’s potential in influencing the young minds. To Patel’s credit, he has brought out a brilliant collection of poems entitled Poetry with young people published by the Sahitya Akademi, written by the students of Rishi Valley School, Andhra Pradesh. The book was an outcome of Patel’s poetry workshops conducted for the students. Patel’s poetry largely concerns itself with the common man’s experiences in relation to society and environment.

In public cafes and in the Landmark bookshops, the readings drew little attention and poetry to the passers-by was a mere recitation way back in school. Arundhathi Subramaniam, who read from her volumes Where I live and On Cleaning Bookshelves, chose apt poems to cater to the interest of the audience. Although the seminal theme of her work centres on displacement and the issue of belonging, her varying registers of the cultural, the classical, the linguistic and the psychic were conveyed with simplicity and finesse.

Vivek Narayanan strolled across the bookshelves in Landmark “assaulting” the unsuspecting public with his verses. His reading was experimental (as is his poetry), often defying notions of fixity and permanence. Laced with humour, cynicism and bold stylistic devices, his reading up-fronted the element of theatricality, avoiding passivity of objectification. Narayanan was joined by Kuttirevathi who rendered her verse poignantly in Tamil. The translated reading in English synchronised with the Tamil version in the form of a jugalbandhi.

If one has to find a common link among the various readings, of which only a handful could be discussed here, the poets seem to be pre-occupied with the theme of “where I live”: as a consequence the cityscape and the way of life it breeds was a predominant subject matter that engaged the poetry fest. A case in point was film-maker Sujatha Shankar Kumar’s brilliant presentation interfusing film and poetry at Fab India using Chicago as a central metaphor for the world cities. While there is an attempt to take poetry beyond several fixed boundaries, personal stories claiming “i is not me” tended to be tedious, provoking one to question the value of subjectivity. Although the audience seemed to be asking for more poems on bomb-blasts and terror (not content enough with the television images), the problematic question of where one belongs seemed to loom large in the readings. In these times, when publishers often influence what writers have to say, one wonders if poetry festivals can also shape what poets have to say in the future.

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