Imagine then, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema so much as the darkness of the king and queen’s pillared hall, where guests are gathered for feasting and for telling stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes up with his harp and starts to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, return… Read More ‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros
Apoorvanand “ Why did Muktibodh became uniquely significant in the summer of 1964? Why did …almost all the weeklies, monthlies and dailies started introducing him to their readers?” Fifty years ago, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, asked this question in the preface to Chand Ka Munh Tedha hai, the first anthology of poems of Muktibodh being compiled. Muktibodh then,… Read More Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh: Put fire back into firewood / The Ultimate expression: Muktibodh’s poem, “Andhere Mein”
Wake up: Song by Arcade Fire – 2004 Somethin’ filled upMy heart with nothin’Someone told me not to cry Now that I’m olderMy heart’s colderAnd I can see that it’s a lie Children, wake upHold your mistake upBefore they turn the summer into dust If the children don’t grow upOur bodies get bigger but our… Read More Wake up
NB: I found typewritten copies of these two prose poems among my parent’s papers, which are so rich and diverse that my mind can’t take it all in. DS (The Gestalt prayer is a 56-word statement by psychotherapist Fritz Perls taken as an expression of Gestalt therapy as a life model of which Perls was a founder) I do my thing and… Read More The Gestalt Prayer (1969)
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 – 1861) Margaret Drabble on “Say not the struggle naught availeth” This poem by Arthur Hugh Clough unfailingly brings tears to my eyes. It speaks of hope, and effort, and disappointment, and per- severance. As I read it, it is a poem about social hope, about hope for humanity. Most of… Read More Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth
Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) I came into the cities in a time of disorderAs hunger reigned.I came among men in a time of turmoilAnd I rose up with them.And so passedThe time given to me on earth. I ate my food between slaughters.I lay down to sleep among murderers.I tended to love with abandon.I looked upon… Read More Bertold Brecht: To Posterity (1938) / Pablo Neruda: Nuevo Canto de Amor a Stalingrado (1942) / Victory: Ilya Ehrenburg, 9 May 1945
Stephen Harding on the Modernist Poet and His Fascist Politics By the spring of 1939, the widely acknowledged dean of Anglo-American Modernist poetry, fifty-three-year-old Ezra Pound, had lived in Europe for three decades. After leaving the United States in 1908 at the age of twenty- three, the poet had initially settled in London, then moved… Read More Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, and American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound?
Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . .… Read More The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
NB: The bitter pain inflicted upon the Palestinian people over the past two years, and indeed for over eight decades remains with many of us. It continues to unfold. We can only hope that the people of the world will see this terrible and undeserved fate for what it is; and (especially) make amends to… Read More Wallace Stevens: Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. Wallace Stevens’ “Description without Place” was composed for and delivered at the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony at Harvard in 1946. Here are a few lines from this remarkably abstract but in fact… Read More Wallace Stevens: Description without place (1946)
After the truth-shower 