January 17, 2012
"I am hoping that I can make it to the afternoon session of the Kritya poetry festival that is going on at the Vylopilli Samskriti Bhavan. 2 p.m. onwards. Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri, Anvar Ali, Vijayalakshmi, Sugathakumari, D Vinayachandran, Rafeek Ahmed, V Madhusudanan Nair, Vishnu Narayanan Namboothiri, Rameshan Nair, Chemmanam Chacko, Balachandran Chullikad, Ezhacheri Ramachandran...too impressive a line up to miss!"
That was the last para of yesterday's note.
I took an autorickshaw around 1:15 to the Vylopilli Samskriti Bhavan. As I walked in Kavi Yakoob was reading his Telugu poetry. A translator was standing on the other side of the stage. After each of his poems, she would read out the Malayalam translation. All the while, the English translation was projected on a screen between them.
On stage were three other poets: the absolutely stunning Hanane Aad, the rolly polly Swedish Bengt Berg and Arif Raja (Kannada). The 'koothambalam' style auditorium was sparingly populated.
Brazilian poet Francesca Criscelli walked in in a red gown. In the afternoon light that flooded through the wooden framework that formed the porous walls of the venue, the gown assumed an unintended transparency making it impossible to miss her intricate black lace lingerie. Sheer poetry, I suppose!
Lunch was announced at 2pm with a request to hurry up as the sessions were running late. I was apparently the only listener other than the poets and the student volunteers, so I was also offered a lunch coupon. I declined and sat around preparing Vishnu Narayanan Namboothiri's translation of Bhasa's Karnabharam and Akkitham's "kavitha our valiya sathyam aanu" on which I hoped to get the autographs of those poet-authors.
There was a book sale as well. The works of the poets taking part in the festival along with the translations was compiled into a book. Rs. 160 was prohibitively high.
Soon Perumbadavam Sreedharan, the President of Kerala Sahitya Academy walked in. Poet D. Vinayachandran, much emaciated than my memory image of him, followed. Few other poets who I couldn't recognize gathered.
The standard dress code and general appearance of poets seem to be undergoing rather slow evolution. The cloth bag finds some variation as a Zach Galfiniakis-type male purse or satchel. The unkempt hair, beard, careless clothing all very much remain.
There was a student with a neatly trimmed 'intellectual' beard and a copy of the poetry collection book trying to chat up the foreign female poets. He was sitting in front of me for a while and dropped the plastic wrappers of his snacks right there. I might be called a conservative in these matters, but I think a deeply sensitive mind is a requirement for good poetry. Folks who litter carelessly will never make good poets, no matter how good their beard, how much they can drink or how many partners they bed!
Two Indian poets were taking a lot of pains to carefully take the photo, with their cellphones, of the photo of Rabrindranath Tagore that was on stage!
Post lunch session began around 2:30 with an introduction from Rati Saxena, the organizer. I noticed that despite her north Indian surname and appearance, she spoke in Malayalam to the local poets. On stage, she switched to English, which clearly was not a language she is comfortable with. At the outset, she said that some of the international poets have taken off to Kovalam beach and she doesn't mind that because none of the Malayalm poets showed up listen to those foreign poets so this was tit for tat.
She said the international participants will soon find out how wonderful Malayalam poetry is. She erred in saying Bengali and Malayalam are the two main languages in India with a vibrant poetry scene. "Though Kerala is such a small state" she emphasised in a language that originated in such a small island!
A student volunteer came to read the bio of Akkitham. The poet himself was not coming. Bummer! The rest of the poets stopped the announcement midway and congregated in front of the stage. I guess disruption of organized structures is the fundamental duty of poets! Quick discussion. The three session plan was thrown out of the windowless windows of the venue. 5 poets got themselves seated on stage and the reorganized session began.
Prof. Vinayachandran might look emaciated, but he is still 100% dynamite on stage. Wearing a Nepali topee, he brought back memories of Balachandran Chullikad and Kadamanitta recitations that I remember from childhood. The first poem he presented was titled 'Koonthachechi' (Elder sister Koontha). He said he didn't want it to be translated. It was about an orphan servant maid girl who desires to have her own baby. Captivating recital with switching tones and intermittent dropping voice. And the whole 10 minutes from memory! Dramatic! The complete package.
The second poem titled 'Clinic' was translated after he recited it. The volunteer young couple who sat in front of me had trouble controlling giggles when the word vagina was repeated.
He finished with a poem titled 'Ela pozhiyum kalam' (Fall season). If anyone was lurching towards a post nap lunch, Vinayachandran shook it away.
Next Akkitham's poem was read by a volunteer girl who completely missed the mike and was barely audible. Not good at all.
Young poet Anwar Ali followed. Three modern poems and their translations. Two of these translations were done by poet Satchidanandan: 'The night I read Tsvetaeva' and 'Neila Omar'. 'Neila Omar' is about the woman who accompanied poet Mahmoud Darwish to Seoul in 2007 few months before his death. The third poem was titled 'Kashtam' (Alas).
I hadn't heard about poet P.N. Gopikrishnan. After listening to him today, I will check out more of his work. He has already published two volumes even while working as a manager at KSFE.
His first poem for the afternoon was called "Assalum Pakarpum" (The real and the counterfeit). It is a prose-poem. The poet's friend Unni asks him for Rs 5000. Since he doesn't have it in his account, he borrows from his ever helpful friend Sainudeen. With the cash from Sainudeen, he goes to the bank to deposit it in Unni's account. The cashiers at the counter suspect that the currency notes of Rs. 500 that he handed over are counterfeit. The moment he mentions his friend's Muslim name, the specter of fake currency from Pakistan is raised. The poet instantly begins to
suspect his friend. But the notes turn out to be real and just like that, in a minute, his friend goes back to being a normal guy in his mind.
With Kerala currently dealing with the 'email hacking gate' of the police department targeting exclusively Muslims for email monitoring, this poem was rather timely.
His second poem 'Mandan' (idiot) was hilarious dark humor. The poet had always been clumsy with machines; his bicycle chain routinely came off, audio cassettes got erased when he pressed record, grinders and mixers blew up! Yet a friend gifts him a mobile phone. Terrible idea, indeed! Now he dials wrong numbers, erases info when he wants to save, alarms go off at the wrong time. He is so fed up that he texts the friend who gifted him the phone, "I will kill you!" Unfortunately the text is send wrongly to a minister's phone. He is arrested and finds out that if you are an idiot, the army is not at the border but within the state.
His final poem: Anungal Karayunathinu Pakaram Attahasikunnu (Men laugh loduly instead of crying!) a great take down of the male domination.
Next up was a new generation poet from Kodungalloor, Sebastian. He recited 'Chitrapadavali' (Illustrated Text Book) which was impressive symbolism.
Final poet of the session was Indrababu. Of the qualities of art that Tolstoy lists namely universality, originality, sincerity and clarity, I think it is ok for a native poet in a local language to skip universality. Indrababu didnot have the other three as well. It was announced that he had won some awards. May be today wasn't his day or I might have already been verse saturated!
Rati Saxena came back on stage to wrestle with English again. I wish she had prepared her remarks in advance. She has managed to organize a very impressive international poetry fest singlehanded, she could ensure the finishing touches are flawless too. She said there is someone among us who is a"very very sick person!". She meant good old Sugathakumari teacher, beloved poet of Kerala. The introduction continued, calling her a 'real poet' clarified as 'her life is also poetry' because she ' rescues girls from the streets and mentally retarded children and protects them'.
Sugathakumari said she wanted to keep Malayalam to a minimum considering the international nature of the audience. She recited the translations of two of her poems: What is the color of love? and Colossus. After she ended with a few lines in Malayalam, majority of the foreign poets gathered around her on stage. Tea break was announced, but the poets stayed on stage for half an hour.
I realized that even the other promised poets like Vishnu Narayanan Namboothiri and Madhusoodanan Nair were going to show up. So I treated myself to a free tea and wondered why the obsession with mother's milk is a Malayalee poet phenomena. Though a gathering of poets and poetry enthusiasts, the tea session had left enough paper cups, crumbled and otherwise, on the beautiful lawns of the venue and some even treated flower pots as garbage bin. I did some trash collecting as a mark of gratitude to the good afternoon of poetry.
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