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Poems in action

Vivek Narayanan's reading from his debut poetry collection took the audience through a dramatic trip of experiences

NEW TAKE The range of experiences in the collection perhaps comes from the poet's somewhat `universal' location

Wondering why this book launch report is not accompanied by the customary picture of guests and the author smiling with copies of the book in hand?

Well, because Vivek Narayanan does not want to wake up in the morning and see pictures of himself staring at him from the newspaper page. "That's eerie!" says Vivek. "Photographs steal the soul." So photographing was strictly forbidden at the launch of Vivek's debut poetry collection Universal Beach (Harbour Line, Rs. 150) at Crossword last week by Toto Funds the Arts (TFA). One wouldn't know about souls being stolen by camera lenses. But if there had been a picture, this one sure would have come with lots of action that you wouldn't expect at a book launch function. For, Vivek believes in enacting rather than reading his poems. As a reviewer puts, he "builds a poem both for the published page and for one of a number of possible deliveries."

After the formal release of the book by theatreperson and film-maker Prakash Belawadi that took about a minute, Vivek, who was somewhere behind the bookshelves till then, emerged slowly reciting "Train Song", complete with sound effects of a chugging train.

Vivek's style may have seemed a bit gimmicky to begin with, but as he took the audience through some 20-odd poems, it grew to be quite a trip that packed a range of experiences and emotions — familiar, exotic, jolly, sombre... All this with voice modulations, chanting, singing and some dramatic gestures, even as he paced up and down the aisle. The performance was punctuated with a couple of interesting "true life" stories. For instance of how he nearly drowned in the course of a midnight adventure on a frozen river and how this freaky behaviour was attributed to him being the "prince of Botswana who'd not known ice". After reading "An Ode to The State Banks of India" he asked the audience to send him any anecdote they might know about nationalised banks as inputs for an epic poem he is planning on them!

The range of experiences Vivek packs into his poetry perhaps comes from his somewhat "universal" location. (Vivek might want to qualify it as "a particular version of the universal", as he describes a duty-free shop in one of the poems!) Born in Ranchi and brought up in Zambia, he now lives in Delhi and works for Sarai. He has widely travelled in India, South Africa and Trinidad as a part of a project, taught at the University of Natal lecturing on the South Asian diaspora and was the British Council poet-in-residence at the University of Kent.

In his poetry you travel through Bombay, Gujarat, New York and African towns. You meet South African communist leader Chris Hani who was assassinated. You also meet the greatest South-Indian sex bomb, Silk Smita, who hanged herself and left a short suicide note in Telugu: "I was an uneducated woman. No one loves me." His "Three Elegies for Silk Smita" is striking, like many of his other poems, for the way it sounds funny and tragic at once. The poem ends with: "Woman of the famous breasts and thighs and/ the only seductive eyes, you were/ the secret darling of Censor Board/ auditoriums — capacious/ and full of faces turned/ from the projection's/ breaching beamlight."

Vivek concluded his performance with "Deathwish" where he seems to define his "version of universal". He says he wants to be "sweet and clear and free, as half a line of Auden, or an episode of Powerpuff Girls"; be "deep like Zulu, and tight like Tamil"; and finally, be "insouciant, insufferable, just like me".

BAGESHREE S.

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