This is a noon for beggars with whining Voices, a noon for men who come from hills With parrots in a cage and fortune-cards, All stained with time, for brown Kurava girls With old eyes, who read palm in light singsong Voices, for bangle-sellers who spread On the cool black floor those red and green and blue Bangles, all covered with the dust of roads, Miles, grow cracks on the heels, so that when they Clambered up our porch, the noise was grating, Strange. This is a noon for strangers who part The window-drapes and peer in, their hot eyes Brimming with the sun, not seeing a thing in Shadowy rooms and turn away and look So yearningly at the brick-ledged well. This Is a noon for strangers with mistrust in Their eyes, dark, silent ones who rarely speak At all, so that when they speak, their voices Run wild, like jungle-voices. Yes, this is A noon for wild men, wild thoughts, wild love. To Be here, far away, is torture. Wild feet Stirring up the dust, this hot noon, at my Home in Malabar, and I so far away.
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
Obituary
By A.K. Ramanujan
Father, when he passed on, left dust on a table of papers, left debts and daughters, a bedwetting grandson named by the toss of a coin after him,
a house that leaned slowly through our growing years on a bent coconut tree in the yard. Being the burning type, he burned properly at the cremation
as before, easily and at both ends, left his eye coins in the ashes that didn't look one bit different, several spinal discs, rough, some burned to coal, for sons
to pick gingerly and throw as the priest said, facing east where three rivers met near the railway station; no longstanding headstone with his full name and two dates
to holdin their parentheses everything he didn't quite manage to do himself, like his caesarian birth in a brahmin ghetto and his death by heart- failure in the fruit market.
But someone told me he got two lines in an inside column of a Madras newspaper sold by the kilo exactly four weeks later to streethawkers
who sell it in turn to the small groceries where I buy salt, coriander, and jaggery in newspaper cones that I usually read
for fun, and lately in the hope of finding these obituary lines. And he left us a changed mother and more than one annual ritual.
Journey to the Interio
Journey to the Interior –
Margaret Atwood
Sound
Effects
Read the poem aloud.
Comment on the Sound Effects, verbal music. It’s rhyme. Rhythm and
melody. Assonance, alliteration. onomatopoeia. etc. (Blending repetition
patterns. slow/fast movement, harsh, discordant, sibilance, sotto,
allegro, Rhapsodic, lyrical, elegiac, upbeat, blue,
staccato, dirge, ode, Melody. tone. mood. atmosphere. voice.
This is a subtle, many
layered poem with nuances that may be contradictory and therefore wide open to
multiple interpretations. The dream like (surreal) mood is created by a
pensive, reflective musing tone, at times morbid or melancholic. Written
in post-modern style with multiple allusions and disparate images, it
communicates in lateral thinking rather than logical sequential
processes. The free verse with few euphonic or melodious words evokes
sombre responses. The intimate conversational voice of the persona
seductively engages the responder inclusively with involvement and
identification .
II
Subject Matter
The poet (persona) is
embarking on an imaginary or inner journey and compares it to that of an
explorer broaching new undiscovered, unchartered and unmapped territory. (A
Heart of Darkness) It is the inner mind, minus its public face or mask
interiorising, re-evaluating, analysing the purpose and direction of life
While the similarities
of a voyage of discovery are more tangible and concrete, the differences
suggest intangible or metaphysical aspects of the interior life.
III
Themes
The inner life is
complex and if delved into too deeply can be confronting, demoralising and
depressing, leading to madness, even self harm.
Life can be absurd,
meaningless, directionless, even futile.
Sensory perceptions and
rational thought processes are not always reliable to gain true self-insight
rather a holistic emotional and lateral thinking are needed.
Language can be
inadequate or an obstacle to express the depth of our feelings.
IV.
TECHNIQUE
Structure: linear, circular, episodic, flash backs,
climatic. Images: (visual, auditory,
o1factory, tactile, ,gustatory) figures of speech: similes,
metaphors, personification, analogy, synecdoche, contrast, antithesis, unity,
irony, Allusions, etc
Clearly two stanzas, one
of similarities juxtaposed with the differences between a physical Journey and
an introspective one. There is an element of Déjà vu in the “a
fallen log I’m sure I passed yesterday”.
Images : Hills - deceptive - an
optical illusion – mirage?
Swamps,
poor country - suggestion of a deprived upbringing?
Cliff –
deceptively smooth from a distance.
Squares (of
maps) circles – globes – “walking in circles”
Tangle
of branches, brambles, sodden log, all nuisance –
impediments
Light
and dark - bi-polar experiences of life.
Maps,
charts, compasses - No reliable answers in dogma or formulae
Shoe
among brambles under chair – careless or neglect?
Lucent
white mushrooms - trance- hallucinatory?
Paring knife - dual function of: sustenance
or death – affirmation or denial of life.
Sentence crossing my path – futility of language no communication.
Sun – archetype of law,
reason regularity. Not in modern absurd world.
V.
LANGUAGE:
Approach: Subjective/Objective, Attitude or Tone, Audience, Style:
diction, word play, puns, connotative/denotative, emotive
(coloured biased,) /demotive, (technical, dispassionate) clichés,
proverbial, idiomatic, expressive, flat, Jargon, euphemisms,
pejorative, oxymoron. Gender biases. Register:
formal, stiff, dignified or Colloquial; relaxed, conversational,
inclusive, friendly or Slang; colourful, intimate, Rhetorical
devices; Questions, exclamations, cumulation,
crescendo, inversion, bathos, repetition, 3 cornered
phrases.
As the subject is
ruminative, the approach is intensely subjective, private, personal and
intimate as indicated by the language, especially first and second person
pronouns.
The
possessive, “your shoe” is inclusive and universal seducing us
to identify and accept the situation as similar to our own.
The informal register,
colloquial language and lack of proverbs, axioms or rhetoric combine to create
a relaxed appealing introspective mood.
The major repetition the
demonstrative adjective, “that” (six times) which not only
identifies but distinguishes.
A River
By A.K.Ramanujan
In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
baring the sand ribs,
straw and women's hair
clogging the watergates
at the rusty bars
under the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun
The poets only sang of the floods.
He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.
The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verse
of the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.
He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries away
in the first half-hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.
In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
baring the sand ribs,
straw and women's hair
clogging the watergates
at the rusty bars
under the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun
The poets only sang of the floods.
He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.
The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verse
of the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.
He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries away
in the first half-hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.
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