'Poetry was a way of making sense of madness'

Blood, sword and suffering are the heartbeat of Fatima Bhutto's literary soul. And it was fear that propelled her poetry, says the heir to Pakistan's tragedy-scarred Bhutto family.

An accomplished poet, Fatima, 29, captures love, loss and the solitude of her circumstances in her verses.

"I have not written poetry for a very long time, but poetry like prose is ultimately a means of expressing what seems difficult otherwise," Fatima, who will be in India for the Kovalam Literary Festival from Oct 1-2, told in an email interview from Karachi.

"Kovalam will be my first visit to South India. And I'm looking forward to seeing more of the country and interacting with new audiences and opening bridges between our cities and stories."

Full report here Times of India

Texting, the future of modern poetry

Defending the use of text messages by young people, a poet laureate has claimed that texting is the future of modern poetry.

Carol Ann Duffy claimed the language of 'txt spk' lent itself to a new generation of young bards.

"The poem is a form of texting. It's the original text," the Daily Mail quoted the 55-year-old poet as saying.

"It's a perfecting of a feeling in language. It's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future, and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule - it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form.

Full report here Times of India

Poetry on a perfect pitch

It was by accident that Sir Neville Cardus started writing on cricket. He ended up becoming its most stylish chronicler and it's a delight to read him even now…

The otherwise comfortable lounge at Istanbul airport had one major failing: its sockets did not match the plug on my laptop's charger. Even the duty-free shopping mall failed to produce the requisite number of pins in the desired shape. I shuddered at the prospect of spending the next eight hours twiddling my thumbs while all around me people cleared mail, chatted on Skype, swished tablet screens, smiled absently into cyberspace.

But the horror subsided as I discovered the saviour, suitably adorned in a cover the colour of green grass, in my hand baggage: Cardus on Cricket, a selection from the writings on the game by its most stylistic chronicler, Sir Neville Cardus. So turning away happily from the nightmare of the present — both my technological incapacity as well as the Indian team's tour of England — I slumped into a commodious leather-chair and let myself be guided by a master into the sunlit past.

Full report here Hindu

Literature special: Night and Darkness

Darkness is such a strange thing. And yet so familiar because we are acquainted with it every day of our lives, for nearly half the day.

Stranger because it’s so enveloping, so complete. That we are unable to fathom its depths, skin its opaqueness or tear it down to discern what is beyond. It is so impregnable that our mind’s thoughts and vision cannot penetrate it.

That perhaps lends to it a mystery. A mesmerizing quality that adds to its beauty.

George Edgar Montgomery describes her loveliness in ‘At Night’:

“The Sun is sinking over hill and sea,
Its red light fires a spectral line of shore;
Night droops upon our half-world mistily
With sombre glory and ghost-haunted lore;
The stars show dim and pallid in the sky,
Vague, wraith-white glimmerings of volcanic spheres,
And a slim crescent of the moon appears
Like some young herald in the hours that die.”

Full report here Zeenews

Kurup, new young poets bring Malayalam poetry centre-stage

Poetry is making a comeback to the mainstream Malayali literature with more youngsters writing, reading and appreciating poetry.

The conferring of the Jnanpith award, one of the highest literary honours, upon veteran Kerala-based poet O.N.V Kurup has come as a shot in the arm for the genre across the state - with new poets emerging from their literary cloisters, writers said.

'At a time when poetry was thought to be dying, the Kovalam Literary Festival has honoured the genre by inviting a poet to chair the inaugural session,' Kurup said, addressing the inaugural ceremony of the festival here Saturday, Oct 2.

He urged organisers of literary festivals in the state - especially the Kovalam Literary Festival - to 'focus on the poet who sings of the paradise and the pandemonium'. Poetry should come out of the 'hot house' to make its power of healing felt, he added.

Kurup quoted poet Emily Dickenson to illustrate the power of poetry saying: 'If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.'

Full report here Sify

Close encounters of the literary kind

Mouths opened in surprise when Education and Culture Minister M A Baby appeared five minutes before the inauguration of the Kovalam Literary Festival on Saturday.

"There is a bit of adventure in inviting a minister to a literary festival. There is always the possibility of the programme being delayed owing to his late arrival. So I took precautions," he said.

Thank you, minister, for breaking the mould.

When Jnanpith award winner O N V Kurup arrived, everybody stood up. Baby held the 79-year-old’s hand and helped him on to the stage. ONV spoke about the dying art of poetry.

‘’Poetry is kept in the hothouse under the artificial lights of the Indian Coffee House,’’ he said.

Full report here New Indian Express

Indian, French poets to translate each other’s works

For poetry lovers in the city, this weekend will be a rare, multi-lingual treat — three poets from Mumbai, coming together with three from France, reading some of each others’ best contemporary verse in English, French and even Marathi. The French poets Caroline Sagot-Duvaroux, Danielle Memoire and Franck Andre Jamme, have been in the city for the past five days, having their work translated into English and Marathi by three Mumbai bards in intense workshops at the Alliance Francaise.

“It’s important to have poets translate other poets, since they can best convey a poetic musicality and cadence,” said poet Sampurna Chattarji, who, along with Mustansir Dalvi, has translated the French verses into English. These were then further rendered into Marathi by poet Hemant Divate.  

The intense translation workshops as well as the public readings on September 25 and 27 are part of ‘Import/Export’, a translation exchange programme organised by the International Centre of Poetry, Marseille (cipM), a French poetry forum. Every year, the programme promotes inter-cultural translation between poets from Marseille and another city, and for this year’s Mumbai-Marseille edition, cipM has collaborated with the Delhi French Embassy and the PEN All-India Centre.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Shaharyar conferred Indian honor

Fifteen Indian poets brought the annual celebration of Urdu poetry alive with their choicest couplets as legendary professor Shaharyar, professor Waseem Barelvi and Meraj Faizabadi did the star turn at a Mushaira (poetry gathering) here on Thursday.

Ghazal, the traditional genre of Urdu poetry, was the penchant of all poets during the evening, but some of them stole the thunder with their impeccable content and delivery of the lyrical rhyme and metered verse that was enjoyed by a crowd of over 2,000.

For Shaharyar, his visit to this holy land proved rewarding with India conferring on him the most-coveted literary Gyanpeeth Award for 2008 on Friday. An elated Shaharyar thanked the jury for recognizing his services to Urdu.

This year’s annual mushaira, organized by the Indian Pilgrims Welfare Forum (IPWF), began with the connoisseurs of Urdu poetry receiving the initial fare on a lukewarm note.

Full report here Arab News

Hindi unites Indians

Once again, it is time of the year, for us to pay our attention to the upkeep of our national language Hindi. Though Hindi may be spoken by more people from the North and Central India including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, yet it has made an unreliable  mark all over India. Though English is finding more and more place in the Hindi newspapers, it only shows large heartedness of the people. But, Hindi remains a unifying force!

The emphasis on use of Hindi during the fortnight is mainly restricted to Government departments. Hence need is for reaching out the message to more sections of the society. Especially our Bollywood stars, who are making name and fame, by acting in Hindi films, ought to speak in more Hindi terms than English when appearing for various programmes.

During this time we should focus on the progress being made by the language. Use of poetry in any language enhances the interest of the reader or the listener. Recall AB Vajpayee and the ilk. The Government would do well to train teachers for promoting Hindi language in even more effective ways and see that the language assumes even more importance in the days to come.

Some daily Hindi papers are these days giving undue importance to the use of English words in their reports and special stories. This shows scant respect for the language. For either  the writer is from an English background or he does not want to make extra effort to search the equivalent Hindi word in the dictionary. Or he is trying to lure the English readers towards its side. Or call it a fashion of the day!

Full report here Central Chronicle

Hijam Guno passes away

Renowned novelist and short story writer of Manipur Hijam Guno has passed away around 5 pm on Sep 14 at his residence at Keishampat Thokchom Leikai in Imphal.

He was 85. Shri Guno had written the classic novels Laman (1968), Khudol (1968), Aroiba Poadam and Bir Tikendrajit Road. He won Sahitya Academy Award for the latter.

He had also written a short novel Eikhoi Tada (1966), which was translated into English and published titled My Elder Brother. He was given Dr BR Ambedkar Fellowship on the book.

He had written a book of poetry titled Tonu Laijinglembi Sheitharol.

Full report here e-pao

Poetry Africa international poetry festival

Poets from around South Africa, Africa and the world will descend on Durban for an exhilarating rollercoaster of words, rhythms and ideas.

The 14th Poetry Africa international poetry festival takes place from 4 to 9 October. Organised by the Centre for Creative Arts (University of KwaZulu-Natal), and with principal support from the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, Poetry Africa's exciting week-long programme is preceded by a three-stop Poetry Africa tour to Cape Town, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

The tour will go to the ICC in Cape Town on 26 September, Harare, Zimbabwe at the Manneberg and Book Café on 28 and 29 September and the Blantyre Arts Festival in Malawi on 1 October.

Over twenty poets from twelve different countries will feature in the main Durban programme and the full line-up will each present an introductory poem on The Opening Night of the festival (4 October, Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre), providing an ideal précis of the diverse voices the public can expect during the rest of the week.

The week will thereafter feature 5 poets every evening, through to 8 October, before the rousing Festival Finale at the BAT Centre on 9 October. Each evening at the Sneddon Theatre will begin with curtain-raising performances by poets representing the various active Durban poetry circles. Another unique aspect of this year's festival is the residency of Concord Nkabinde and Erik Paliani. Nkabinde, an acclaimed bass guitarist who has performed with the likes of Johnny Clegg, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri, Phil Manzaniera, Zim Ngqawana, Darius Brubeck, Deepak Ram and many others, will collaborate with Malawian producer, musician and singer-songwriter Erik Paliani in nightly musical curtain-raisers. Nkabinde and Paliani's passion for collaboration provides the perfect metaphor for the cross-cultural artistic meetings that Poetry Africa seeks to stimulate.

Full report here Artslink.co.za

Emerging voice

Saheera Thangal, who has bagged the first Emerging Writer Award, says her literary flights are powered by her passion for writing.

“Her poetry is ‘a surprise that has opened a door and stepped out.' Its intensity makes me laugh and cry at the same time.” The late Kamala Suraiyya wrote this blurb for a debut poetry collection titled Njanenna Ottavara (Me, the Single Line) by Saheera Thangal in 2007. The introduction to this collection was written by none other than poet K. Satchidanandan. Saheera's Malayalam novel Rabia was also well received for its excellent craft and bold theme – polygamy.

The 36-year-old Dubai-based advertising executive, author and poet celebrates this Ramzan with more. She has bagged the first Emerging Writer Award that will be given away at the third Kovalam Literary Festival in October.

In a phone interview from Palakkad, where she is all set to celebrate Ramzan with her family, Saheera talks about her literary excursions, and influences that have shaped her as a writer. “I am very happy and thankful to God for this unexpected treat during this holy month. Awards give writers an inspiration to emerge into something better than what they already are.”

Full report here Hindu

Remembering Ayyappa Panicker

The friends and disciples of poet Ayyappa Panicker are planning to celebrate his 80th birth anniversary in a big way. A function will be organised at 5 pm on September 12 at VJT Hall to commemorate the late poet.

Eminent Kannada writer and Jnanpith Award winner U R Ananthamoorthy will deliver this year’s Ayyappa Panicker Memorial Lecture on the topic  ‘Indian Literature: Dalit Contribution.’ The lecture will be followed by a discussion on the subject.  Ayyappa Panicker Foundation president K Satchidanandan will preside over the function and vice- president T P Sreenivasan will be the moderator.

Poetry at Midnight, an English translation by P Ravindran Nayar of  Ayyappa Panicker’s last anthology of poems, ‘Pathumanipookkal , will be formally released at the function by Ananthamoorthy.

The function will be followed by a visual representation of selected poems by Ayyappa Panicker on stage. Groups of students from the All-Saints’ College; Mar Ivanios College; NSS College for Women, Karamana and the Departments of English and Malayalam of the Kerala University will compete with their adaptations of chosen poems of Panicker. The team selected for the best performance will be presented with the Ayyappa Panicker Poetry Trophy.

Full report here New Indian Express

Poetry in a matchbox

If poetry is all about firing your imagination, this one literally comes in a matchbox.

An avid poetry lover in Jorhat is emptying matchboxes, filling them with rolls of poems and selling them for a mere Rs 5 to help popularise Assamese poetry among the uninitiated.

The man behind the innovative idea, Bipul Regon, insists that the formula works.

“Innovative ideas always sell and believe me my messages in the matchboxes are selling big,” said Regon, a novelist himself. Aptly branded Firingoti (small embers), it is also a “great idea for a novel gift”.

“It was in 2000 that I and a friend, Syed Pervez Hussain, conceived the idea of doing something different to promote known and unknown poets of Assam. We felt that poetry was fast losing out to the pace of modern life,” he said.

In 2003, they began collecting matchboxes from their homes and transforming them into “poetry tinderbox”.

Full report here Telegraph

Layered with meaning

Jayanta Mahapatra's poetry unfolds into the landscape of Indian writing…

His verse, silent, subtle and intense, truly becomes him. For years he has ‘purified the dialect of the tribe' with his poetry of teasing indirection, sensuous suggestiveness and metaphoric interiority delivered in an idiom of enviable precision. Few poets have been able to do what Jayanta Mahapatra has done, turning poetry away from statements towards a delicately layered utterance and effecting thereby a noiseless rupture with the dominant tradition of Indian English poetry with the metropolis as its source and centre.

This comprehensive volume makes the reader relive the entire process of Mahapatra's significant emergence as a poet of India and of Orissa, who changed – aided in this effort by A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy and Kamala Das – the rules of versification by writing back in the small man, the small time and the small life. It has representative poems from fourteen out of sixteen volumes of poetry he has published till date, starting, appropriately enough, with the third volume, Waiting (1979). With this, Mahapatra burst onto the scene of Indian English Poetry in the nineteen seventies with his, to quote him, ‘language plus' approach to writing verse. The volume includes, alas, just one poem (“The Sprouting Grass”) translated into English by the poet from the original Oriya, permitting us a quick glimpse of his bilingualism.

Verse rules

All over the world, poetry is something of a publisher’s nightmare. On the one hand, nobody disputes that it is an important literary form. On the other, nobody seems ready to buy it either. Nor is there any popular criticism of poetry. There are literary critics applying one set of standards to all poetry, reviewing each other’s poetry and keeping the circle tightly closed.

But because the subject is so vast, and the styles so varied from the English-American school to the less structured European  poets, such criticism is often lost on ordinary readers. Renee Ranchan’s collection, Untwine the Wind, is not intended to serve notice that she is the next Nissim Ezekiel. Rather, it is an attempt to collect deeply felt, easily accessible poems in a beautiful package.

Untwine the Wind
Renee Ranchan
Konark
R750  pp 110 


Full review here Hindustan Times

Poetry makes the impossible likely

Can poetry lead to reform? That was the question that was up for debate at the launch of Mukunda Rao’s new book, In Search of Shiva.

The discussion was attended by Chiranjjiv Singh, retired bureaucrat, Dr Narendra Pani, professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies and Prasanna Chandrasekar, teacher of English and lover of literature and Jamuna Rao, MD of Dronequill Publishers.

The evening began with the launch of the book and Jamuna Rao reading excerpts from it. Mukunda Rao teaches English at Dr Ambedkar Degree College, Bangalore and is well known for his earlier novels like Confessions of a Sanyasi, The Mahatma: A Novel, The Death of an Activist, Trials with Truth and Chinnamani’s World.

In Search of Shiva is set in the midst of the social turmoil of the 12th century northern Karnataka when a socio-cultural movement was launched to annihilate caste and create a new egalitarian order. The reform inspired a cultural renaissance and the poetry that emerged pulsates with life even to this day. Mukunda Rao uses the freedom of fiction to make this period come alive.

Full report here DNA

Silver jubilee of Poetry Society of India concludes

It was all poetry, not only at NAB-PNM, Rehabilitation Centre for the Blind, Mount Abu, but also at St John's Senior Secondary School, Abu Road, where senior students waited with abated breath for the conclusion of silver jubilee year of Poetry Society of India.

It was a year ago when the silver jubilee kicked off at St Joseph School with visually challenged Manzar Khan reciting a 40 minutes long Hindi poem 'Dhukkhi'. Soon after that, not only in Rajasthan, but throughout the country the jubilee was celebrated with poetic passion.

Convenor for Rajasthan, Arun Sharma, said across Rajasthan number of schools, colleges, organisations and even individuals and ordinary families did much to glorify poetry, including Shiv Bari at Bikaner, the abbey of the abbot Swami Som Giriji, who held a three-day poetry meet there, where inmates of the Blind Centre Mount Abu participated.

Full report here Times of India 

Silver jubilee of Poetry Society of India concludes

It was all poetry, not only at NAB-PNM, Rehabilitation Centre for the Blind, Mount Abu, but also at St John's Senior Secondary School, Abu Road, where senior students waited with abated breath for the conclusion of silver jubilee year of Poetry Society of India.

It was a year ago when the silver jubilee kicked off at St Joseph School with visually challenged Manzar Khan reciting a 40 minutes long Hindi poem 'Dhukkhi'. Soon after that, not only in Rajasthan, but throughout the country the jubilee was celebrated with poetic passion.

Convenor for Rajasthan, Arun Sharma, said across Rajasthan number of schools, colleges, organisations and even individuals and ordinary families did much to glorify poetry, including Shiv Bari at Bikaner, the abbey of the abbot Swami Som Giriji, who held a three-day poetry meet there, where inmates of the Blind Centre Mount Abu participated.

Full report here Times of India 

Reason to rhyme

In the beginning, there was verse. Before people had anything to write with, or on, they found stories easier to remember when they set the words to a beat, and possibly a tune.

And yet, most readers today find poetry harder to follow than prose. They don't get it, or they think of it as merely ornamental writing. A poet closely weaves meaning and form together. A poet chooses a word for any and all of its meanings but also for its ambiguities, for its potential to mislead, and sometimes for the pure sound of it. A poem is coded, but when it is well-written, the reader leaps right into its meaning.

I usually pick up prose, but sometimes an event or even a gimmick hustles me into poetry. It was the strange title that started me on Interior Decoration, published by Women Unlimited. Once inside it, I found fury and beauty, from Amrita Bharati, Prathibha Nandakumar, Kondepudi Nirmala. I will dip into it for years, but just one line made it sing the day I picked it up: “In him the hungry haste / Of rivers, in me the ocean's tireless / Waiting.” (That's Kamala Das, An Introduction.)

Full report here Hindu