The human world is styled in words. While nature provides the style, it is the poets who provide the words. A vibrant cosmos of words emerged in Delhi last week at the Indian Poetry Festival “The World within the Word”. Shaping of words was the first act of poetry, said vice-president of Sahitya Akademi, Vishwanath Tiwari, who opened the festival. Poets, he said, are creatures who thrive on words, “Poets like Tukaram eat, wear and live on words.” Having said this he paused, “This is the day of poetry, so we will keep prose at bay,” and briskly drawing out his papers, he presented two of his poems in Hindi: Jagah (Place) and Aatma (Soul).
Nearly 25 poets from different languages and different parts of the country followed and a master symphony of ideas and emotions emerged. Poets presented at least one poem their native language and the rest in translation.
Eminent Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh drew attention to the poetry of international expats in India. He said it was a genre which had not received enough attention. Citing the example of Tibetan poetry, he read out lines from a piece by a young Tibetan on exile in India: I am a Tibetan-Indian/ I live in India/ I dream of dying in Tibet. With the constant struggle for identity at its core, the poet, a young man, narrates in simple words how he must carry his certificates to prove his identity and how easily he is mistaken for someone from India’s east or north. On the power and life of words, he presented a poem Shabd (Word). ”Words don’t die in cold / it’s the lack of courage/ that kills them.” Kedarnath said that considerable growth is taking place in poetry but on the fringes. New voices that challenge and break the centre are emerging. “These voices must be heard if one has to understand the reality of the 21st century India,” he added.
In the vein of Romantic poets, well-known Dogri poet Padma Sachdeva emphasised that only that which emerges from the heart qualifies as poetry. Her verses carried an acute awareness of nature and projected its forces as alive and communicative. In one of her poems titled, Air, she says the villagers had “packed’ some of it for her as they had bid her farewell. She carries the village air around with her and uses it whenever she missed home. The pristine village air with its unique aroma of incense in the morning, crops in the afternoon and wet soil in the evening is a part of the heritage that she has received and wishes to pass on to her daughter. In another poem, she is the sky that says: I am not the king without an heir/ My lap is filled with children/ I am India’s sky.
Another poet who brought the inanimate to life through her verses was Varsha Das. Two of her poems were titled Mitti and Daraaj. While in Mitti (Soil) she spoke of a dead soil made fertile by a person’s dreams, in Daraaj (Drawer) she gives a beating heart to a piece of furniture. In Daraaj she is an old woman who keeps misplacing her things. To solve this problem her daughter gets a cupboard with several drawers. The drawers are labelled alphabetically so that: the job is just to set/ specs in S/ watch in W/ and pen in P. But things get complicated as the watch lands up in another drawer that has a throbbing, loving heart.
Tamil poet Salma came up with poems on women issues and sensibilities. In a moving piece she drew upon the life of Somalian women who suffered the terrible tradition of sewing up of the vagina to prevent their “pollution”.
The subject of each recital was unique and as a result the poems ranged from the Berlin Wall to Irome Sharmila, from a key to a wall, and a stammer to a secret. While one poet like Subodh Sarkar (Bengali) came up with politically charged free verses another one like Nisar Rahi (Urdu) broke the pattern with witty and insightful couplets. Each poet took you to a different journey into a different world lighting the way with his words. The event, organised by Sahitya Akademi, was thin on audience. However, those present were serious fans, shedding an occasional tear or breaking into a frequent “wah wah”. Looking at the audience Padma Sachdev recounted her young days when iconic poet Ramdhari Singh “Dinkar” would moan that perhaps the era poetry had ended. But he was wrong, she said, we still write poetry and there are people who can’t have enough of it.