The Splinter Factory by Jeffrey McDaniel

Jeffrey McDaniel is a heartbreak, wisecrack poet, and his poems contain a potpourri of metaphors that astound, amuse, hurt, and linger in your imagination. Though there is often a subtext of dysfunctional family, unrequited or unsavory love, crack or alcohol addiction, in nearly every line Jeffrey invents a language for human condition that is scintillating in its originality and imagery. Do not attempt to read these if you are a prude, do not attempt to recite these if your lips have never been silted by tears or blood. In poem after poem, Jeffrey stuns you with his metaphors, and his wordplay brings to page a gorgeous imagination that thrives in the surreal landscapes of "The Utopia of Scars" co-inhabited by desolation and hope. I find his poems intoxicating, and as I sip his punchy phrases, I feel I am at a cocktail tasting, as a special guest of a bartender renowned for discovering savory concoctions, made with unexpected ingredients.

In "Renovating the Wall", he writes: "I enjoyed my time in the uterus, reading / what the previous fetuses had written / on your walls. That's how I learned / to spell. That's how I came out speaking."

In a poem titled "Dear America", Jeffrey talks about addiction: ... In college I took so many drugs / the professors looked at the samples of my urine / just to know what books I'd been reading./"

Jeffrey has a remarkable ear and eye for curious word combinations that are charming, endearing and apt.  "The Scars of Utopia", he says: "... There should be Band Aids // for what you don't know: whiskey breath minds so sober people // can fit in at wild parties; a Smithsonian for misfits: / an insomniac's mucky pillow hanging over a naroleptic's // drool cup, ..."

The collection is as spectacular as his poet titled "The Jeffrey McDaniel Show". "The Archer of Gluttony" or "Old Flame Thrower" enthralls us with sounds and images so crisp and finely crafted that you delight even at phrases that are highlighting desperation or melancholy. The poems showcase the skill of one of the finest metaphor makers of our times, and yet the poems are very readable, very likeable.

The seemingly autobiographical or persona poems are full of razor-sharp observations and unforgettable sentences: "...your tongue,/ ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts". Or in a poem about Grandma, he says: "I press my ears to her lampshade-thin chest / and listen to that little soldier march towards whatever / plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats." I highly recommend this collection by Jeffrey McDaniel and also recommend all his other books. Like me, you will discover that within the poems abides a sensitive, compassionate, witty, sympathetic and remarkable, self-effacing voice that must be celebrated word by word, line by line.

Middle-class Traditions Featuring Lemon Tree Leaves

- for Stephen Dobyns and Dean Parkins


Adolescent cousins sneak out, smoke
cigars, hukkahs, cigarettes, beedis,
opium sometimes, chillum fumes.
Cousins chew lemon leaves before
returning home. Explain why my uncles,
aunts, (their parents), cousins, neighbors,
never smell a lemon? Why not count
how many leaves vanish each night?

Cousins inherit the trick,
but fathers ignore the nostalgic lemon.
Mothers go on washing kurtas / shirts,
give head massages, hugs and career
advice. Mothers descry each drab stain
but fail as spies in a smoker's domain.
Is it maternal instinct to nurture
ignorance of chewed leaves?

Middle-aged uncles sneak out to savor
scotch, dancing women, rum quaffs,
sacrilegious ham or beef kebabs.
Though their lemons control
their households, the habit
plucks a leaf or two.
Rich don't care, poor brawl,
middle-class avoids confrontation
by swallowing bitter leaves of lemon.

To ward off evil-eye, grandmas
string lemon-chilli necklaces
for cars and all entrances.
Aunts treasure lemon trees,
they occasionally worship.
Lemons – spice up their dishes,
scare away unwelcome spirits,
and add flavor to their kisses.

My dead grandpa's friends
resent guilt and thrills of their young.
I imagine them unzip trousers,
loosen pajama strings with flourish
and tremble with a sly joy as they spray
golden, odorous drops, offered as ablutions
to the life's deceits and to all lemon leaves
that their spiraling, musty jets can reach.

--

First published in Muse India, 2016

Advice from Saraswati and the Muses

Write what is wrung from your tongue
a blistering song, a howl from your lung,
strum every veena vein muscle string
of your throat and your thumb.

Write with a bite that goes below, to the bone,
to marrow and to moan, to the seed of a seed.
Write to merit a sigh, a smile or a sob
from a granite idol or a brass snob.

Embrace the past, encompass eternal, vast
feelings. Empower -- under the thumb, mum,
conquered -- with hymns. Leave no crumb
unversed. Croon with aplomb.

Invoke immortal ideas, idols, ideals, idioms.
The wise mine for poems in realms forgotten
or uncharted. Seek, master the unknown,
the before and the after of Allah, Yesu, Om.

To celebrate and sing of the light like a skylark,
begin in the dark. Curate a spark within, burn,
transcend the limits of the Brahma and a quark.
Publish. Deserve immortal art.

--

--
First published in Muse India, 2016.
Saraswati: The Hindu Goddess of Knowledge, Speech and Music.
(My new year resolution for 2017: publish, publish, publish -- mostly science, also poetry)

People have a Native Sympathy for Crooks

Double up with laughter, regale the tale,

or play the wit, add eye-popping details,

rejoice at the dolt who trusts the cheats,

marvel at the idioms used for deceits,

they lie to you, never write it in books,

people have a native sympathy for crooks.

Pick any epic, romance, any heroic tale,

entertainment follows a scoundrel's trail.

Be it for jest, or suspense, or raw charm

or to seduce a duchess at a duke's farm,

its him, its his cunning that the world salutes,

people have a native sympathy for crooks.

He often inspires more than a cheeky grin,

a hope in Joe or Jane, who're poor but alive,

who do what they can do, to just survive:

bribe and steal, use every conceit, lie, sin.

All find it titillating to hoodwink the sleuths,
people have a native sympathy for crooks.

Is mischief charming, is it a Freudian thing?

Do joys ensue from an addictive suffering?

Every holy book spends most of it rhymes

in detailing human failings or sinful times.
Why do we prefer wine over fruit juice?  
People have a native sympathy for crooks.

Movie audience bursts with awe or guffaws
as he partakes the best lines, guilty pleasures
throughout the saga, he, the breaker of laws
controls the reins, the keys to all treasures.

Only in the climax, unconvincing he looks,
people have a native sympathy for crooks.

Not Jesus or Buddha, but Krishna, Zeus, Dionysus

proclaimed that the life's sauce is Baronesque.

The crafty seem to win, while the honest wait

for karmic redemption, for delayed gifts, grace.

As they know, in the end, he'll going to loose,

people have a native sympathy for crooks.

--
(First draft Jan 2014)

Valentine's Day Proposal, 14th February 2013 (by a Romantic Academic)

Darling, on this Valentine's day,
all night and day, I worked on a proposal.
Each word chosen carefully, promise
after promise, crafted with more heart
than Rodin put into his sculptured art.
I worked on a proposal, brought forth
from the deepest recesses in my memory
ideas, idioms, examples that were apt, stark
and phrase after phrase, page after page,
I sung like a lark. Darling, let me sleep now,
if they fund my proposal, I will be at your disposal
the next Valentine's day.


--
(In honor of the academic owl
who works through the night
without fail, without a scowl).

**
(Imagined first as a poem from my colleague and friend Randy Ewoldt.He was finalizing his research proposal in a conference hotel, and kept working on it through the night).
14th Feb 2013

Neend ke Shahar / नींद के शहर

नींद के कई शहर घूम आया हूँ ।

जस्बा, जज़्बात, कस्बा, कौम,

सब धुत सोये पड़े हैं । सरेआम

चोर लूट कंधे पर टाँगे गलियों

गलियों से गुजर रहे हैं । कुत्ते,

पुलसिये भी जागे पर अलसाये

तमाशा देख-से रहे हैं, अधखुली

पलकों से देख-से रहें हैं । तालीम

कह कर, बच्चों तक को
छोटी उम्र से सुस्त-दिमागी,

आलसी-सोच पिलाई जाती है ।

इक्का-दुक्का बल्ब-सा रोशन

हेडलाइट बुद्धिजीवी सरपट
दौड़ रहा है, मानो कोई बेताल

पीठ पर चढ़ा उसे सता

रहा हो, घर-घर का हाल,

अलार्म घड़ियों का अकाल,

मुर्गों की कमीं और बदहाल,

धुत, गहरी नींद में बने बुत,

लाशों-से निश्चिंत जनमानस

दिखा कर कह रहा हो, जगा!

हिम्मत है तो जगा के देख !

Twenty-first Century Buddha

In this century of misquoted Buddha
his statues walk into Las Vegas bars
and stare at the bodies abandoning
their worldly disguises.

Award winning poets
admit spirituality into their poems
by pronouncing his name.

Smiling or sulking, in bronze or wood, Buddha
does not protest when devotees of Herman Hesse
transcend their consciousness
with forlorn fumes.

Always epitomized as good Buddha
leaves his son and wife, midlife
and embraces dhyan-cha'n-Zen,
preaches abandonment.

And ever-idolized Buddha (how ironic!)
finds his monks living under tyrants.
Too meek are lambs, are hunted and must be
by wolves who never turn Buddhists.

In our world, the 'Americanized' Buddha
survives in University halls,
in tantric sex talks, in celebrity balls -
stupefied, satirized, stoned.

--

First appeared in Muse India, 2014

An Olympian Heart

After he turned thirty, without a breakthrough
or a clue to a Nobel-worthy scientific discovery,
without a bestseller book, a Booker or a Pulitzer,
without even a proper job, with uncertainty
as his daily wake-up call and nightmare,
he began to respect the millions: the also-rans,
the have-beens and the almost-theres, the faceless
ants, and the termites in foreign sweatshops.

He spent an entire week making paper planes
from his unpublished research articles
and poems. Mass circulation of his ideas
using aerodynamics cleared his desk,
ever so cluttered like his mind. Imagine
hundreds of equations and verbs swirling
down to earth like his ideas about science,
art and self! Humbled by the sadhu time,

he grumbled first about the lost rhyme
and reason of his curious, lyrical self.
To this day, he had considered delayed
gratification a virtue. Now a voice,
his own, classed him as a bygone dream.
Not every fermentation ends up as wine.
He consoled himself with a serpentine logic
that mediocrity, after a sustained effort

at glory, is thermodynamically the most
favored outcome. He finally forgave
his grandma for saying that grazing goats
educates better than his pricy school's
English rhymes, and tie & coats.
After a half-life of borrowed idioms,
he began seeing his unoriginal affairs
as a destiny of desires forged

by an overhyped education. His toolbox
contains every artifact of acquired fact
and abstract training. Tentatively he prods
on, blowing a longhorn of dote learning,
but now he knows -- creativity is a jackfruit
dessert that not everyone who plants a sapling
gets to taste. To pack his bags and leave
would be an admission of grief or lack of belief

in his talents and the establishment. No,
he must persist, for existence is an act,
and he resents an exact estimation of his self.
He is a mass of clay-dust like everyone else,
and immortality is earned by getting churned
in the random eddies of life. Whoever yearns
and stakes his elemental self into the kiln
called life, burns... but only a fraction return

as gold or God, which the mirror suggests
might not be his fate. After he turned forty,
he learned that forgiving faults and failings
helps in retaining self-respect. Outcomes
reveal neither neglect nor unworthiness, not
always. Disillusioned by persistent biases
that favor white or black sheep in a flock,
egg-laying hens to an egoistic fighter cock,

he forged for himself a featureless dream-bowl,
then threw it away. To beg or canvass for votes,
or use family connections or political ploys he felt
would destroy his last caricatures of self-respect.
But if every man were to forgo his dreams, live on facts,
we would regress into a song-less, unchanging universe.
He knows he must persist, for all existence is an act,
we are merely players and before the hero/villain is revealed,

all actors on stage (and some backstage) are suspect.
One breakthrough it takes to light a lamp or an epigram,
one breakthrough! He could be but one step away from the finish.
They who don't ask will never know if the answer is yes or no.
He refines his act, but he is circumspect. Victors revise
biographies; wipe out the salt of doubts from their cheeks.
Since he knows he could yet write himself into a myth,
he braves the daily grindstones, and hopes, and persists.

--

First published in Muse India, Vol1, Jan-Feb, 2014. 
Version 1, Nov 25-28, 2011; V2: July 2012...

In English

Do we, westernize desi sentiments, when we write in English?
Do we, our longings, appear bastardized or contrite in English?

I concur, puns lack the cultural context. Metaphors lack that bite.
Don't we Indians suffer from a self-imposed exile in English?

In Hindi and Urdu lie the battles of Sanskrit and Farsi roots,
I escape Indian divisions but territorial wars I fight in English.

More Indians speak/read it, than Americans plus British do.
Why is the universe surprised if I choose to delight in English?

Blacks, Southerners speak in drawl, British have an accent!
Should I worry if we can't count syllables right in English?

Can I become a revered poet-prophet without writing in Hindi?
Even my mother insists, I sound foreign, uptight in English.

Restrain, veils, euphemisms, religious propriety, traditions:
I break chains; let my Muse celebrate her respite in English.

Even the most illiterate in the East sing verses of the great poets.
I seek that ideal, immortality. Can I scale that height in English?

For ten centuries, the East has glowed in the candlelight of Ghazals.
Vivek blazes with the passions Shahid too sought to ignite in English.

--

Published first in Contemporary Ghazals, 2013

Seven thousand a day stillborn

-->

Seven thousand a day stillborn worldwide

says the headline, forgetting seven thousand

a day mothers with voids in their wombs,

infected by slurs bursting like pus from hackneyed lips

of their own kin. Seven thousand a day mother-hoods

stillborn, destined to bear a viscous grief in their eyes

while their own flesh turns into a monument of mud.

Seven thousand a day fathers ushering doubt into doors

beyond which science and religion appear futile;

only an angry pain gnaws at the soul with stillborn

claws of memory. Seven thousand a day nearly-parents

resuming with a dreadful rancor, a bitterness unmitigated

by gossip, tv, cricket, a fury concealed within their breasts.

The countless aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors keep

reminding them that pity has a tenor which like a rake

keeps scratching at the surface, while the worms of sorrow

penetrate the deeps within. Seven thousand a day questions

forsaken by an age-old habit of accepting a stillborn future

as fate. Seven thousand less is like an absent ripple

unnoticed by the ocean that sloshes and surges; the shells

and sand left in its wake become new ground for feet to sink in,

for hands to build fragile dream-houses, and forget

how each day, seven thousand disappear without a word

or a smile or a tear. Seven thousand a day stillborn souls

recalled to the base-station or wherever they come from.

While two-and-a-half million per year retreat without a syllable,

to have each one of us alive, day after day, isn't it, a miracle? 

**

Appeared first in Reading Hour, July-Aug 2012.

Translation: Don't Go Far Off by Pablo Neruda

दूर न जा, दिन भर के लिए भी न जा, क्यूंकि,

मैं नहीं जानता कैसे कहूँ -- दिन लम्बा होता है

और मैं रहूंगा तुम्हारे इंतजार में, जैसे खाली स्टेशन 

जबकी रेलगाड़ियाँ खड़ी होंगीं कहीं दूर, सुसुप्त |

न छोड़ना मुझे एक-आध घंटे के लिए भी, क्यूंकि

तब दर्द की सारी बूंदावलियां बह निकलेंगी एक धार|

मुझमें समा जायेगा किसी घर की तलाश में भटकता

धुआं, मेरा हृदय को अटका जायेगा |

ओह! तुम्हारा साया न धूमिल हो कभी सागर तट पर 

कोरी दूरियों में न कभी फड़फड़ाएं तुम्हारी पलकें,

एक लम्हें के लिए भी न छोड़ना मुझे प्रियतमा 

क्यूंकि उस एक पल में तुम निकल जाओगी कहीं दूर,

मैं भटकता फिरूंगा सारे धरातल पर, पूछता 

क्या तुम लौटोगी? क्या तुम रहने दोगी मुझे यहाँ, मरता?

**

No estés lejos de mí un solo día

"No lejos de mí un solo día"
Pablo Neruda

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.

No te vayas por una hora porque entonces
en esa hora se juntan las gotas del desvelo
y tal vez todo el humo que anda buscando casa
venga a matar aún mi corazón perdido.

Ay que no se quebrante tu silueta en la arena,
ay que no vuelen tus párpados en la ausencia:
no te vayas por un minuto, bienamada,

porque en ese minuto te habrás ido tan lejos
que yo cruzaré toda la tierra preguntando
si volverás o si me dejarás muriendo.

**

"Don't Go Far Off"
Pablo Neruda

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying? 

(PS: My translation is a Hindi translation from an English translation; you can say it is twice removed from the original. I recall Neurda's poem after Tagore, probably that was written in the same spirit. I found the English translation online, and I do not know who to credit for this translation. I will love to hear comments from someone who know all the languages involved. This poem is part of a self-assigned translation project to bring some of my favorite poems (translated and otherwise) into Hindi, and as the idea is to master the process of translation over time, all criticism will help me to make better versions in future.)

Ghazal - An Eastern Inheritance

Ghazal: the last words of a dying deer to its beloved, strung together in the form of rhyming couplets. Ghazal is an elegy and an ode, a lyrical and stylized lament, a whimsical play of words, a wistful cry rolled into five couplets or more. Ghazal, like sonnet or villanelle or haiku or sestina, is an example of a formal poem and is supposed to be written under strict metrical and rhyming constraints. Each couplet (sher) is a complete thought and a poem in itself. Each couplet ends with a repeating word or phrase (like tonight is the refrain or radif above), and the word immediately before the refrain (expel, cell, hell) rhymes across the couplets. The opening couplet (or matla) announces the refrain and the rhyme scheme (called kaafiya) in the first line itself, and the remaining couplets arrive in the same meter (bahr). The meter, rhyming penultimate word and the refrain synergistically provide an effect of passion, obsession, perhaps even a periodic sob or sigh, and though each new couplets begins with a first line that can travel a different landscape of feeling, the return to refrain in second couplet is like a homecoming. The penultimate word signals the return. The last couplet (maqta) often contains the chosen name or pseudonym of a poet (takhalus), as if the poet signs off with a couplet that contains his last words, his epitaph. These constraints within the form are similar to the constraints imposed by the society on love, thought, liberty and ideas. The English language is one of the few Western/European languages where ghazal (pronounced ghuzzle) has made an appearance on the page. My essay is formally about the Anglicized ghazal, but to imagine, inspire, write and judge poems in a particular form, requires an awareness of its clichés and characteristics. No poet in English must write an essay or a collection of sonnets without a certain familiarity with Shakespeare, though missing out on sonnets written in Indian languages is perhaps permissible.

In the beginning, in seventh century, ghazal was Arabic. By the tenth century, she conquered many hearts and lands in the East. The form reached its maturity as a form in the hands of Persian masters. In the West, when Goethe and Lorca experimented with this form: they were primarily inspired by the ghazal of Hafiz (or Hafez), the fourteenth century Farsi poet, said to be the greatest exponent of the form. The celebrated thirteenth century poet, Amir Khusrau was probably the first major poet to popularize ghazal in the Indian subcontinent and first to infuse words from khadi boli (early version of Hindi/Urdu). Subsequently, Urdu poets like Wali Deccani, Mir Taqi 'Mir', Ghalib, Dard, Dagh, Zauq, Momin, Faiz, Faraz, Firaq, Faiz and Faraz, as well as Dushyant Kumar (Hindi), Shiv Kumar Batalvi (Punjabi) and numerous Bollywood lyricists contributed to the popularity of ghazal in India. Ghazal, performed by celebrated, classically trained singers in varied languages have supplied many unforgettable rhymes to love-stricken as well as to literary minded classes and masses in India, Pakistan, Iran, Arab world and elsewhere. Mirza Ghalib, whose ghazals are infused with philosophical questions, is probably the most celebrated poet in the Urdu language. The introduction of ghazal to American poets is often linked to the Ghalib translation project of Aljaz Ahmed in 1960s. Adrienne Rich, William Stafford and W. S. Merwin all worked with a literal translation of Ghalib's Urdu ghazals to render their own versions in English. The translation project spawned an interest in the form, but early on, American poets wrote ghazals without an awareness of its rich, multi-cultural, multi-layered history, and without attention to any formal constraints.

In fact, before Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) took a loudspeaker and a sledgehammer to chide poets for calling any string of couplets written by them as a ghazal, English (American) poets created verses without constraints, without refrain, without meter, without a unity that is enforced by the rhyme scheme and the lament-like undercurrent. They created so-called ghazals without allusions or gratitude to a rich Eastern inheritance. Anguished by reading what passed for ghazal in English and acutely aware of the sub-textual richness of the form due to his Indian heritage, Shahid pointed out that "the Americans had got the ghazal quite wrong". Like a teacher and Eastern mystic he patiently explained, with examples he created, how to craft a ghazal in English. He later edited an anthology "Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English" where many contemporary poets wrote ghazals that Shahid accepted into the fold (many that I would dismiss as unrealized or unsuccessful attempts). Before revisiting the formal elements necessary for composing a ghazal, here are selected couplets from a ghazal by Shahid that appears in his collection titled "Call Me Ishmael Tonight":

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?

Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—

A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;

Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.

No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—

God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

Celebrated ghazals by masters in Arabic, Persian, Urdu or Hindi have all the formal elements woven into a tapestry that is intricate, complex, and beautiful. In these cerebral yet popular ghazals, even through all constraints (social and literary) are respected, the resulting verses are musical and lyrical, ready to be recited or sung to diverse audiences who marvel at every turn of phrase, every choice of rhyme, and find relief, release, joy in the ageless words of the poet. In fact, performance of a ghazal in the East involves a protocol unmatched by any I know of in the Western poetry. The poet first recites a line, then repeats it, accentuating the effect by changing the tone or by stretching out or stressing a word. The audience repeats a phrase or the line, an expectation is built up. Now the second line of the couplet is released amongst much fanfare. Soon the refrain is on only everybody's lip, but the mystery of what could come before the refrain sustains the excitement. One couplet won the approval of the audience, now the next is another battle, another farewell, another journey, another quest, till the final verse brings the lament to a halt, after which only a silent ache, a memory remains.

Ghazal is by nature an address by a poet-protagonist (dying deer) to a beloved (who could be imaginary, distant or absent). Ghazal is always a declaration, but hardly ever a monologue. A farewell song with a detached sense of a lost cause, and also craving expressed with a latent hope that it will reach the intended ears. Sentimentality, abstracted to the extent that it becomes a metaphor for any unfulfilled or unrealizable dream or desire or rather every cause worth pining, dying or fighting for. The sufi poets of the subcontinent and of Persia compose verses addressing the almighty as the ultimate beloved. All good ghazals arrive in multiple incarnations, sensuous from the lips of a courtesan, spiritual in the company of dancing dervishes or sufis, entertaining when recited in a drunken party and thought provoking for critics and casual listeners. In Farsi or Urdu, every ghazal engages in a dialogue with verses that came before, and the task of writing fresh verses involves a heightened sensibility that helps in creating suspense, surprise, pleasure, catharsis, nirvana. Why must a ghazal in English care for the inheritance of loss, these cultures full of constraints, semantics of unfulfilled desires or the mysticism of foreign lands? One compelling reason, I think, is the fact that just India alone has more English speakers than the US and UK combined. If we account for all the countries and cultures that have memory of ghazal in another language, ignoring this inheritance is like imagining that English language without the backdrop of European history, religious practices, politics, literature and languages.

Is an Arbaic, Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi ghazal translatable into English, or is it so deeply rooted in a culture that is so alien to the Western culture and audiences that every translation is bound to fail as a poem in its own right in English? Can any English ghazal appear as true to the form to readers and poets with a bilingual imagination, familiar with excellent ghazals in another language? The difficulty in writing ghazals in English for someone like me is how to recreate her tension in a way that can appeal to a reader from the West as well as from the East simultaneously (though often due to different reasons). When the Muslim poets express their desire for wine, praise the goblet or a tavern, they break religious or regional laws. Lines can cost lives, breaking the constraints can bring shackles and prison cells. The audience in such cases derives a guilty pleasure in hearing echoes of protest within a poem outwardly addressed to a distant, lost, unresponsive or unattainable beloved. The presentation of sensual desires through seemingly platonic or Victorian lines, and the pronouncement of doubt in another (God, king, beloved) appeals as extraordinary literary feats only when insurmountable barriers exist and words carry throbbing of an anguished art. A lament, a near-blasphemy presented in such style that the listener is forced to marvel at the music and the meaning and scream in pleasure: Wow (wah!). Poetry in the west is often a leisurely activity of Lord Byrons, Emily Dickinsons, and New Englanders but when saying anything or everything is permitted, how can you find the tension, tacit protest, that sustains the paradoxical, wistful writing of a ghazal?

I personally feel that Anglicized ghazal is in an early stage of development and a Hafez or a Ghalib will arrive in English when the language and the world is ready for him (or her). I began writing ghazals in English after my friend and mentor Thomas Lux urged me to to. He tested my sensibility for the form by first giving me so-called ghazals of an American poet. After seeing my disgust, he introduced me to the Shahid's ghazals. My personal quest for the lines that are of inevitable, inexhaustible beauty continues. The biggest challenge is how to write lines that a bilingual imagination like mine does not corrupt with ideas untranslatable for listeners arriving with only one shared language. I believe Shahid managed to bring the sensibility of the East to ghazal in English. Years ago, I acknowledged the form has a formidable future in English, when I listened with astonishment, pleasure and joy to Heather McHugh recite "Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun" with a gusto that would make any Urdu or Farsi poet proud:

Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person? 


I blame the soup: I'm a primordially


stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings. 


The apparatus of his selves made an ab-

surd person.

The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar. 


But howling I become an ever more un-

heard person.

McHugh, you'll be the death of me -- each self and second studied!

Addressing you like this, I'm halfway to the

third person.

**

 (PS: The poems quoted by Heather and Shahid are quoted here are the intellectual property of the poets or their representatives, and are quoted here with a deep reverence for their excellent command of the form).

Juhi, Daughter-in Law of Roohi

- For Gurudev Thomas Lux*
                   


Roohi, my mother's father's uncle's fourth daughter-in-law
was Ma's father's only relative in our father's village.
Even Roohi's husband's great-grandfather was related
as a brother to my father’s grandpa's grandpa. I called Roohi
grandma, and she treated me well. But she was one vicious 
matriarch, and her docile son married Ma's friend Juhi.


From their primary school days, whisperers Ma and Juhi

shared stories. After marriage, both talked of Mas-in-law.
Roohi, villagers said, had magical powers. All the vicious
events, deaths or diseases of cattle or men in the village,

were begotten by her squinted, accursed glance. Roohi

spewed the vilest curses… on villagers related, unrelated


to us. I was ten that morning, when an uncle, related
to Roohi, told us that on a dung-heap lay beaten Juhi.
No one dared to help her – for all were scared of Roohi.
No one dared to help her or suggest the recourse to law.
Ma and I carried Juhi back from the Shamshaan of the village.
She was turned into a red-blue pulp by that vicious


ma-in law. No movies show that bodies can face such vicious
blows. After twenty stitches, an enfeebled Juhi correlated
her story: “…for bringing the lowest dowry in the village,
for stealing and misusing Roohi's son’s money.” Later Juhi
testified: “I was attacked by ghosts.”  As if the men of law
couldn’t tell! But who could have dared to implicate Roohi?


I was fourteen, when we caught a rumor that Roohi
was starving a pregnant Juhi, another whim of her vicious
wisdom. My Ma carried prasad as food to Juhi's ma-in-law,
and fed Juhi. Ma succeeded as her father's family was prerelated
to Roohi. On the pretext of my birthday, next day we rescued Juhi
and smuggled her our on a bouncy tractor to her father's village.


At twenty-five, after three years in the US, I visited our village.
Grandma and I visited a bedridden, cancer patient Roohi.
I saw she was a shriveled dried grape now. So was Juhi,
who after twenty-six years of strife, was nursing her vicious
nemesis. Roohi had to be reminded about how we were related. 

She said, "Be good Vivek, be as good as is my daughter-in-law."


Fanning away Ma-in-law's flies, sits an aged Juhi. I feel awed by the village.

How many times have I related this story: the image of a dying Roohi,

juxtaposed on with her former vicious avatars and the ever forgiving Juhi.

Notes: Prasad is sanctified food served at Temples and the villagers believe that it cannot be refused if offered.

Globalizing English by Indianizing English

When I sing or recite, follow only the melody.
My lyrics wear dresses foreign to your memory;
widows wear white, brides red. The saffron priests
praise the un-manifested or incarnate divinities. Beasts
feature in my dances and myths. Chants obey rhymes
where consonants alien to the West accent these lines.

Follow only the melody, for I decorate my lines
with mustard-oil lamps. My bamboo flute melody
recounts the deep-song of ancient cowherds, rhymes
farmers composed for harvest dances & a memory
of wheat-colored beauties and sacrosanct beasts.
Echoing hymns older than myths, like Brahmanical priests,

I invoke all deities before the fire god, Agni. Priests,
my ancestors from the Vedic times, composed such lines:
"Revere the alive and the dead, wind, water, fire, beasts,
ether, nether. Every being, thing is divine. Om is the melody
the hymn, the hum of the universe. Aatma is self, a memory
of Paramaatma, the Grand Self. We are a billion rhymes,

chimes of the Grand Self. Incoherent, unspoken half-rhymes
of the present / absent Self. Juvenile egos, minds. Our priests
are within, any knower is a Brahmin. Our harvest is a memory
grown by centuries of soul-farming". What is obscure in my lines
conceals a lyric beyond English. If you follow only the melody,
the Westernized you will notice that we are two thinking beasts,

divided only by our memory. After rebirth as ignorant beasts,
we are conditioned by our space-times, by accidental rhymes.
My wild hope, instinct, belief ever seeks to arrive at a melody
that shall bring joy and dance to every territory. All the priests
within me, with verses I forget or dread or echo in my lines
insist, all humans are blessed with a transcendental memory

enriched by soul-farming. In spite of our divergent memory,
drives, lusts, cravings and myths, we, logical, liberal beasts,
surpassing our space-times, can traverse beyond these lines,
beyond dresses alien to our memory, beyond babel rhymes,
to Ananda -- bliss and tranquility. To Moksha beyond priests,
beyond prejudices, in harmony with the universal melody.

Though I sing in English, I adorn my lines with an Indian memory.
If we focus only on the melody, we argumentative, rational beasts
could reach the locus of rhymes of our primordial verses and priests.


***
A version appeared in Muse India in 2012; this is a highly revised nth version.  

Bravado

The twilight song is a lantern’s hum
the foxy echoes have just begun
a leopard breathes in fields, unseen
crickets coo in communal whispering.


A mother, a grandmother, and a sister hold
their tongues in their sleep. The nine year old
who watches over them, drifts into a valour
Bollywoodish, in dream-scope colour,


and fights off the leopard with bare hands,
thrashes those foxes like only dhobis can,
but before he kills, the daaku sardar’s men,
the cursed night always ends.


Published first in Reading Hour, 2011.

Kavita: Tattu (Mule)

टट्टू 

जुगत लगाए,

भक्ति दिखाए,

उपवास करे,

सब्र करे या 

गुनगुनाये,

बोझा ही ढोता है, 

जो अपना स्वामी न बने

वह अंतर्मन से खोत्ता है |

Your Heart and Philosopher's Pushcart

The lurking emotions in your heart are dark,

like nights, your longings will last their hours,

no fires consume them, no wisdom makes them depart. 

You carry within a memory of forests as your habitat,

you know death will reclaim you, end your farce,

The lurking emotions in your heart are dark.

You love faces as if facades are a preserve of art,

no brush strokes can conquer your ideological scars,

no fires consume them, no wisdom makes them depart. 

You cultivate mystery, void within your every quark,

and chase the game to splatter blood over holy grass,

The lurking emotions in your heart are dark.

The instinct beckons you to treat the other like a tart,

the jackal ego and owl intellect like travel in luxury cars:

no fires consume them, no wisdom makes them depart. 

The philosopher sells bread from rented pushcarts,

but you desire bargain-items, exotica from chor bazaars.

The lurking emotions in your heart are dark,

no fires consume them, no wisdom makes them depart.

Published first in Muse India, 2012

Deified War

When I ask the warriors:        Why do you fight war?
They say,        it is for a beloved.          It is a justified war.

But isn't slaying humans                 a sin in every religion?
They smile at my naiveté,    avow:       It is a sanctified war.

What is your fascination with        unfurling flags over graves?
Ask Homer or Ved Vyas,         it is the poets who glorified war.

Enemy women are raped daily:      Why media never reports it?
Press ought to suppress inhuman truths.       It is a dignified war. 

Don't you know that battles destroyed     Napoleon, the British empire?
They fought for glory, we for money.       It is a commercialized war.

If the quest is of peace, then        why keep bombing the Middle East? 
It is a shock and awe measure               to banish a terrified War.

Why are millions condemned to die           at one President's war-whim?
Its of the people, for the ..., by the ... --       it is a democratized war.

Isn't the altar of War-God overrun           by blown-up bodies, refugees?
He requires human sacrifice.                   How else can be pacified War?

Give Vivek a hope for a future           without guns, bombs or wails.
Why lie?       For God, land, money, women, oil -        we'll ever fight war.

Published first on The Ghazal Page (Volume 1, 2012)

Almond-Breath Assassin

(After 26/11, Mumbai attacks)

O almond-breath assassin, who roused the bloody thief in you?
How many heart-huts will you raze before tasting a relief in you?

Perhaps you are convinced, you are acting as scripted, you are faithful.
Have you objectively examined, the passages of belief in you?

Are you lusting for a false paradise, Kashyap's ill-fated Kashmir?
Rather than exiling that fanatic urge, did you give it a fief in you?

Wasn’t heart’s anarchy forged before wordless Snake's whisper?
Won’t you be punished again by whoever coded this mischief in you?

You uproot secular gardens, treating Vedic inheritance as infidel weed.
Will you turn Punjab into a cactus country? Is there no olive leaf in you?

How I wish you had given me a chance to prove my love is sincere!
Don’t you ever perceive a desire to converse, maybe brief, in you?

They claim you’re suicidal and my love shall stay unrequited:
Who knows, beloved! Vivek’s song might evoke a sufi grief in you.

Published first at The Ghazal Page (Volume One, 2012)

Refugees in Love

Lured by her hazel eyes, I entered her town, as a disguised refugee.
Then she married another, leaving me, a lovelorn, despised refugee

I am a Pandit forced to leave my apple paradise in Kashmir.
In my own nation I reside in shanties as a compromised refugee.

You are a Muslim dear: but weren’t your ancestors Hindus like me?
What are Pakistan Hindustan … excuses for a new domicile: Refugee?

In my veins you’ll find the trails of the so-called Aryan blood.
Do I have a homeland or am I, my inheritance, lies? Refugee?

O Beloved, you squandered me for faith, migrated to Pakistan.
To be called a Muhajir there? To become a despised refugee?

Even in America, this land of prosperity, puritans and pilgrims.
Don’t they resent Hispanics and me: often baptized refugee?

Your contradictions are so Middle-Eastern, I call you Israel or Palestine:
You've forgotten your ancestor too arrived here as an ostracized refugee!

Were Adam-Eve first exiles on Earth? Did Manu row the Ark?
Questions of faith, beloved or who was the first scribed refugee?

Can’t you see I have obliterated each trait of my ethnic self?
Yet I’m not counted as your own. Ah! To be identified refugee!

Is there no space for Vivek in your realms of religion or love?
What about the nations where we both are descried refugee?

Published first at The Ghazal Page (Volume One, 2012)