22 February 2010

Southern Hospitality

A city passing in eyes--

everywhere people--

eyes sipping coffee and smoke

frozen, eddying swirls of neon
ಕನ್ನಡ
Kannada, English
                 ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್




rounding from blue to purple

or eyes don't seem

to discriminate.

a tongue, nose, or mouse caresses

you control the pressure, do press.

Some clicking, too.

Not of growing bamboo,

but the equally speedy-to-develop buds

of friendship, buddies.  Sweet, huh?

All this on the first date!

Taste of morning chai, The Hindu and The Economist;

a sip of ras, Mālavikāgnimitram;

Evening tide: 

waves magical hips blooming to boom box boys.  

Men, samosa, kingfisher,  

a German, too!  Carlsberg for good measure.

Like black coffee, a real,

one-of-a-kind experience.


Pleasant people and poetic pass-age

in Bangalore where

dance moves tell smutty stories,

a back-bend smile, mental acrobatics;

modern art, media outlets, and food fun.

Cucumber?  Spicy Pineapple, anyone?

Hear this: It was all for a good cause!

Queer Film Festival.

18 February 2010

namaskaara mysooru!

I love this ophthalmologist's billboard advertisement!

07 February 2010

If My Words Did Glow, with the Gold of Sunshine...

Wow!  How does one define an exceptional day?  Today.  That's the definition.

For the past three days (3, 4, 5 February), the Central Institute of Indian Languages (where I study Kannada) has been hosting an international poetry conference, Kritya 2010.  This is a venue wherein poets from all over the world come together and share their work.  I attended the first few days anticipating more of a 'local' flavour, but the 'international' rang more true at the end of days one and two; today, though--day three--was exceptional!

I will post some of the more specific poems as I meet with the poets over the coming weeks.  I have been invited to attend a number of different classes, and even to deliver a lecture on my research to a class of M. Phil. students of English literature.  That should be interesting!  But it will give me something to sit down and plan out a bit.  I'll try to even throw in some of my thoughts related to queer theory, which will definitely be a crazy experience for the students of Mysore University.  But it'll be great!

The English-Kannada dual language setting at the Kritya conference really made today's poetry readings shine for amateur audience members like myself.  Compared with most audience members, I have a fair amount more familiarity with the diction these Kannadiga poets use from my background with Sanskrit.  Clearly, though, I can neither speak nor understand well poetry spoken in Kannada by any means.  Presented, as these poems were, however, on a dual language stage with effective follow-up commentary on each piece, I really enjoyed a nice taste of numerous styles from about ten different Kannadiga poets, ladies and gentlemen.

We can see historically that generations of Kannada speakers self-consciously formed and birthed this tongue from poetic sentiment.  All the earliest works of Kannada are responses to a dominant, subcontinental and enduring tradition of Sanskrit poetics.  These early writers shaped Kannada into something of its own flavour, and thereby created their political and social-cultural landscape.

One of the objectives that I would have liked to see the conference deal with a little more was this political, social-cultural element of poetry; this is probably just the academic in me.  I read some blurb at the conference or in a dream that was jotted down on paper, and it brought my attention to the necessary difficulty poets undertake to inhabit experience with language, to infiltrate the readers' senses and thereby affecting a particular reaction.  The ancients' knew this fertile strength of language, and nowhere on earth--ever--was it refined and refined and refined to the precision that it was by the men who made it their means to moksha, or liberation, dwelling in the pre-modern lands we now know collectively as India.

Today, after lots of centuries, a particular model of discourse, or maybe a peculiar grammatical disposition, or a language of law that predisposes a person to think of their self in a particular way occupies this spot of power.  It's peculiarly eurocentric; Western.  The dream object that I read at the conference spoke about how poets today often choose silence, how poets increasingly navigate the corridors of absence.  Just like diction, silence, too, is a choice.  A choice, I think, that is one symptom of the particular model of discourse, or peculiar grammatical disposition, or a language of law that predisposes a person to think of their self in a particular way: Poetry?

The quiet power of the Kannada language really 'wowed' me on day three of this poetry conference.  This quiet power was barely audible to me; maybe I imagine what I heard?  But this is precisely the point!  Even with all these other distractions emanating from a peculiar style of self-enactment that political and social-cultural tendencies of modernity proscribe and prescribe--and this being a force that the poet, subject of, often chooses silence--the undercurrents of sentiment from these Kannadiga poets shone through, doppling the ears and mind with its tambour, its rhythm quite unlike any language I've ever heard; its appeal direct to that of aesthetic concern.

[I am still in process on this writing, along with a number of other pieces.  Check back in the coming days, please.  I'll be posting pics of a quick jaunt to Hoysala temples at Belur and Halebeedu--VERY impressive.  I plan to be in Sringeri for Mahashivaratri this Friday.]