Monthly Archives: October 2013

Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri

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Shailen Mishra, Blog Editor & Series Contributor

Shailen’s series “Space in Culture” explores the motif of space in the works of Indian poets and poetry.

In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Jon Stewart talks of how the content in The Daily Show is developed: “We don’t do anything but make the connections.” In the show, the facts (those incriminating media bites) are put together to present the larger truth, the broader context, without which the gut-stabbing humor of the show would not exist. Connections are at the heart of human expression. Rhetoric can be potent because of it. Arguments can capture the outlying detail in a meaningful manner. And similarly, poetry fires up imagination through connections. What are metaphors, metonymy, personification, connotations, if not implied connections?

Arun Kolatkar’s poetry collection Jejuri reminds us of our connectedness. Claims about Jejuri range from “one of the great books of modern India” to its being the poetry equivalent of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. But the sad reality is that many literary-minded Indians haven’t even heard of the poet or his work (including myself until some time back). So, what’s the value of Jejuri for the Indian writing in English and for Indian literature in general is a debate I won’t go into detail here. But the fact that I was unaware for such a long time of such a fine piece of modern Indian literature is a deeply humbling fact for me. So as I was saying Arun Kolatkar’s poetry collection Jejuri reminds us of our connectedness. At the level of narration, symbolism, and affect, Jejuri is about reminding us how densely we’re tethered to multiple beings and things in our lives. We’re always attached to places for obvious material and sentimental reasons; such connections are discernible. But then there are many illusive ones, which require traveling back in time, retrieving the details that’s faded/fading from our minds, searching cluelessly for that moment of original register, or paradoxically, not noticing the connection because it’s so deeply ingrained with our reality. And we wonder that if this illusiveness could be pinned down and articulated, then the fragile impression of our connection could be bolstered to some extent. Jejuri is a project in that regard. Kolatkar probes connections not only as a skeptic but also as someone enchanted. And in that simultaneity lies the excitement of the place Jejuri, and Jejuri.

Jejuri is a small pilgrimage town, not too far from Mumbai/Bombay, in the state of Maharashtra in Western India. As the Notes section of the book proclaims, this town is dedicated to the legacy of Khandoba, a popular local god who cuts across the caste barrier. Even more, this mythic figure had a Muslim wife and a Muslim name, Mallu Khan. The legends of Khandoba are numerous and so are his devotees. Hence, Jejuri’s history largely derives from the tales of Khandoba, the legends his devotees have spun, and the hold the god has upon his devotees which has fueled the lore in the first place. Kolatkar writes in the poem “Scratch”: “there is no crop / other than god / and god is harvested here / around the year / and round the clock / out of the bad earth / and the hard rock…scratch a rock / and a legend springs.” And these legends, their copiousness, their free peddling by the Jejurians do not stop amusing Kolatkar as he asks the priest’s young son, “do you really believe that story…” The answer is irrelevant because a believer is not going to turn a skeptic; not in Jejuri. The bonding between the believer and his/her god is cemented here. Miracle-wielding Khandoba is too good a catch for the needy and afflicted devotee; so why let a poet’s skepticism play spoilsport? Here, the big issues of life, death, mystery, universe, and love are on the side of the devotee, while the poet only has reason.

The lifestyle in Jejuri has a predictable rhythm. Complacently caught up in the monotony, its inhabitants take the routine for granted, like the legends around them, the hills, rocks, temples, ruins, and devotees/tourists. Is it a surprise then that the book Jejuri begins with the image of the sunrise and ends with the sunset? The chronology is respected since the poems seem to follow the timeline of the poet arriving in Jejuri in the first poem and leaving from the railway station in the last one. And in between, each poem seems to be linked to the next as the poet is strolling through the town and discovering it bit by bit. More or less this pattern is maintained, explicitly or implicitly. For example, one could speculate as the order of the poems progresses that “The Bus” arrives in Jejuri, which is observed by “The Priest” and the poet disembarks and notices on his way to the temple features of the town like “Heart of Ruin”, “The Doorstep”, “Water Supply”, “The Door” until he arrives at “A Low Temple” etc. But the orderliness of sequence is synonymous with the ubiquitousness of shrines, temples, and scared places in Jejuri. Like time, the routineness of space is taken for granted here. And the mastery of Kolatkar lies in how slyly he undermines that predictability: “The door was open. / Manohar thought / it was one more temple…It isn’t another temple, / he said, / it’s just a cowshed.” Again, in the poem “Hills”, Kolatkar tries to point out this regularity: the ubiquitousness of shrines and legends equals the repetition of rocks and boulders on a hillside:

hills
demons
and sand blasted shoulders
bladed with shale

demons
hills
cactus thrust
up through the ribs of rock

hills
demons
kneequartz
limestone loins…

What is then Kolatkar’s mission at Jejuri? Just to expose the blind faith, the irrational legends? No, he’s not a cynic. In fact, he is an empathetic skeptic. He would not be the priest, his son, or any of the devotees, but he understands why they’re that way. His need for comfort is no different from theirs. Hence, he finds a god in “Yeshwant Rao” who’s marginalized (“a second class god”), more appropriate to his needs, and more understanding of his skepticism. Kolatkar writes: “He is merely a kind of a bone setter. / The only thing is, / as he himself has no heads, hands and feet, / he happens to understand you a little better.” Yeshwant Rao comes from the untouchable caste and his shrine is placed not inside Khandoba’s temple compound, but outside, as a “gatekeeper.” That’s the gift handed to him for his dedication to Khandoba and Jejuri.  A second rank god for a second rate devotee like Kolatkar, and together they extend the core of Jejuri to its periphery, its margin. And in that extension Kolatkar makes Jejuri appear larger than it could have been. It’s not just a land of uncontested miracle and myth as Jejurians like to believe, but it can bear with dignity a more humane topography to the satisfaction of a skeptical outsider amidst its dysfunction, ruins, and contrasts. That Jejuri is both is Kolatkar’s point, and he connects the two ends to remind us how to make better sense of things.

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Shailen Mishra is a book hopper, story whore, poetry pariah, novelist, three times failed guitar learner, and an aspiring didgeridoo player. He holds a Ph.D. from Illinois State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University. In his spare time, he edits SRPR’s blog and manages its website.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 5

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Jake Young, Guest Contributor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

My two passions in life, writing and wine, sometimes seem inevitable. I was raised in the Santa Cruz Mountains around books and literature; my father Gary Young is a well-regarded poet, and his writing studio, which sits on a hill above our home, is a short stroll from one of the finest wineries in the Santa Cruz area. For the past three years I’ve worked for the vintner across the road, pouring wine for customers in the tasting room, labeling and boxing new bottles, and helping with the harvest and crush for the first time last year. I realized the many invisible hands and hearts that go into the wine that I was serving, and I realized I want to combine my passions for wine and poetry.To distinguish wines from different vineyards, French winemakers developed the concept of terroir, loosely translated as “the taste of place.” The central tenet behind terroir is that every individual wine can reflect the land where the grapes were grown and the wine is produced. Implied by the concept of terroir is the notion that wine has metaphorical value. In one of his odes, Pablo Neruda shouts out to wine:

more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.

Neruda knew the terroir of the human heart. He knew good writing, like good wine, must be balanced, well constructed, surprising but not overwhelming. And the best writing, like the best wine, appears so natural it seems to originate not from a person, but straight from the earth. Neruda recognized the labor, cooperation, reliance on nature, commitment, and luck necessary to make fine wine, and he seemed to insist that wine, like poetry, is more than an integral aspect of human life: it is a metaphor for everything that holds a society together.

There is so much that goes into making a bottle of wine. Those who recognize terroir understand that wine tastes like the land, that the flavors tell a story, and that this story contains a sense of place. To work with the land, to cultivate and nurture the terroir of a wine, is to reveal the components of a place. Place greatly influences my poems; I feel a pull to the landscapes that are such an important part of my poetic project—praising the land, rows of grapes, fields of artichokes, and paths through forests. Through poetry, it’s possible to show how cultures are exemplified by what they consume, and examine how people are connected to the land. People are nourished not only by food, but also by the places where food is grown and by the people who prepare it. “There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher. A great wine reveals a sense of place, and poetry at its most sublime reveals this as well. Traditionally, wine writing has focused on tasting a wine, evaluating its flavors, assessing the bouquet, commenting on texture, tannins and acidity. I try to approach writing about wine and food from a different perspective. Through my poetry, I want to show how the fruits of the land exemplify culture, and examine how people are connected to the land.Wine and poetry have a long history together. Poets were the first wine writers. In ancient China, poetry was considered wine distilled from the mind. Even today, people retell stories of the ancient Chinese poets who played drinking games, floating wine cups downstream and composing a formal poem where the cup landed, drunk on the language of the land. Poetry, like wine, encourages us to love where we are, what we do, and who we are with. I want to praise the world. In order to better understand our own lives, let us understand our wine. Each sip of wine is a reminder of the complexities that tie things together, of the subtle connections that make life enjoyable.

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Jake Young lives in Santa Cruz, California, and works at Beauregard Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He Received his MFA at North Carolina State University. His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Red Wheelbarrow, Miramar, Solo Novo, PANK, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, phren-Z, and Gastronomica: Journal of Food and Culture.

The House of Loss, or, Hamlet and the Oyster

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Toby Altman, Series Contributor

Toby’s series “Bodies in Space” is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry.

“But who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet?” (Nietzsche)

I said that a house is an engraving that incites desire. But it is not enough to consider the house as an “object.” The house is a privileged entrail, transcending the anatomy of all the houses in which we have found shelter. In every digestion, even the richest, the first task is to find the shell of the essential: the intimate valve of inside space. For the house furnishes us. And the entrail deepens to the point where an immemorial domain opens. We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our entrails are perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that is loss.

What is poetry but the witnessing of a moment that causes one to say entrail? For some, the poem enacts and re-enacts queasy rituals of defilement and revulsion, an obsession with corporeality that reduces everything to appetite and excretion. The poem is then a desire for aperture coupled with a disgust at openness; a need for, alongside a rage about, bodily closure. And, the unction of lyric seals up the skin, leaving the diseased interior to fester “unseen.” One is left with a set of fantasies of access to the other’s interior—concrete fantasies of eating, purging, or penetration—and this is called, often enough, ethics.

Put another way, it is the essential myth of the lyric that the higher the art, the more one may capture that which is art, that thing that lies within language. Here in the graveyard, the soul (which Walter Benjamin calls “earth-bound”) comes to inaugurate the form, to dwell in it like the flesh in an oyster. But this particular creature is the object of Hamlet’s greedy love. He slurps it down, and the slurping is a kind of music. And thus only the eater seems to possess the ultimate truth of entrails: there are no oysters in Hamlet (or Hamlet); only the armor of the Ghost.

But, paying heed to “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is hair to” does not necessarily turn one against the body; on the contrary its very fragility may elicit a tenderness toward the facts of moral embodiment. For instance, there is no doubt that Rilke liked locks. But who doesn’t like both locks and keys? Gentle closing calls for gentle opening, and we should want life always to be well oiled, in the (libidinal) manner of the Eucharist.

Speaking of resurrection, let me start over. I said that a house is an engraving that incites desire, and the word is delicious with itself: in-grave-ing, [a] writing which is also [a] ritual of mourning. [A] ritual which is also the making of [a] place. A house for the body which is also an image of it. For the house furnishes us, and deepens the entrail until it opens on a reservoir of oil, black, Eucharistic, distilled from the body itself. I mean language, which is built to envelope and sustain itself. I mean: all sorrow is booty sorrow and all mourning is a form of eating. Praise its salvific unmaking.

The author would like to thank Gaston Bachelard, Vanessa Place, and David Hillman, for donating their language to this essay.

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Toby Altman is a conceptual poet. His poems have appeared. He is the author of and the recipient of. He currently lives in, where he works as and serves on the editorial board for. For more of his, please visit his and follow him on.