First posted August 31, 2017 The true and durable path into and through experience involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Seamus Heaney you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are… Read More Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young. By Maria Popova
First posted October 23, 2015 A poem is a glass, through which light is conveyed to us. “March… Someone has walked across the snow, Someone looking for he knows not what.” “Singeth spells.” The poetry of Wallace Stevens makes me happy. This is the simple truth. Pleasure springs from the sense of fluid sound patterns… Read More Susan Howe: The essence of Wallace Stevens: Roses, roses. Fable and dream. The pilgrim sun.
BY MARGARET ATWOOD This is the one song everyonewould like to learn: the songthat is irresistible: the song that forces mento leap overboard in squadronseven though they see the beached skulls the song nobody knowsbecause anyone who has heard itis dead, and the others can’t remember. Shall I tell you the secretand if I do, will… Read More Siren Song
NB: The title of my WordPress blog ‘After the truth shower’ originates in this poem, which was written one evening in 2010. I posted it on Blogger on October 12, 2012, after unsuccessfully attempting to publish it. It was written for my close friend Rabindra Ray (Lalloo), who passed away in January 2019. Here it… Read More My friend
NB: The spirit of these lines conveys the purpose of my blog. Freedom of the mind and the striving toward truth and wisdom are the underpinning of human life. In a time when the ruthless pursuit of power and mindless rhetoric is in danger of destroying the integrity of social life, co-operation and even speech,… Read More Where The Mind Is Without Fear
If biology was the soil of fascism, history and aesthetics were the manure.. Percy Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” No poet sought acknowledgment more enthusiastically than Ezra Pound. No poet legislated so ambitiously or disastrously, either. Pound was the impresario of Modernism. He stripped the Victorian padding from the verse of… Read More ‘The Poets of Rapallo’ Review: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Paradise
NB: An excellent review of an excellent book. Purushottam Agrawal has done us a public service. DS Kabir, the famous religious poet of Varanasi, lived from roughly 1440 CE to 1518 CE. He first became well-known outside of India in 1915 when Rabindranath Tagore published an English translation of 100 songs, or bhajans, attributed to Kabir. Tagore’s translation… Read More Book review: Kabir and the Question of Modernity
The Waterboys: This is the sea These things you keep You better throw them awayYou wanna turn your backOn your careless daysOnce you were tetheredNow you are freeOnce you were tetheredNow you are freeWell that was the river!This is the sea Now if you’re coming undoneMaybe been alone too longOr just you’ve been suffering fromA… Read More This Is the Sea
I cannot say that I know you well But you can’t lie to me with all these books that you sellI’m not trying to follow you to the end of the worldI’m just trying to leave something behind Words have come from men and mouseOh, but I can’t help thinking that I have heard the… Read More Sean Rowe: To Leave Something Behind
Brian Eno: Spinning Away Up on a hill, as the day dissolvesWith my pencil turning moments into lineHigh above in the violet skyA silent silver plane – it draws a golden chain One by one, all the stars appearAs the great winds of the planet spiral inSpinning away, like the night sky at ArlesIn the… Read More Brian Eno: Spinning Away / Gulzar: आहिस्ता चल ज़िन्दगी / Eliza Shaddad: Waters
After the truth-shower 