Siamese Compassion Cover Art

‘Reviewing’ Poetry with Siamese Compassion

Is it possible to ‘review’ poetry? Every time I sit to write about poems or stand to speak about poetry, this question confounds me. A friend sent a poem of his about 4-5 years ago and asked for my opinions. I read it, a critic would have perhaps trashed it owing to its form. I asked my poet friend if he had written what he thought of and what he thought like. He said yes. I told him it was good. With poems as with any other form of writing, I try to see through the feelings and the honesty in expressing them. If there is a match, I am up for more from you. However, if I find a mismatch or if I feel that the work has become a matter of form over emotions, I am turned off.

The category where form dominates feelings – I call it ‘attempt to poetry’. Attempt to poetry and poetry stand so close at times that it is often impossible to distinguish between the two. Most often attempt to poetry passes off as poetry and readers end up spending time either reading structures, rhymes, rhythms, cadences, and meters or bore themselves to dislike poetry once and for ever. Like for any other form of creativity, it is sad but it is true. I have never attended a poetry workshop, so I keep wondering what they teach there. Teaching to read and write your feelings? Must be an arduous task.

Now, to ‘review’ poetry is in a way reviewing emotions. ‘Reviewing’ poetry is ‘reviewing’ the innermost expressions whispered from the communion of mind and the heart – technically possible but spiritually speaking, it can only be an ‘attempt to review’. To review what the poet views is not plausible unless you become one with the expressions of his poems. One may decide for himself how easy or difficult that is.

I wrote a reply to the poet singing his songs inside the pages of the book that I have on my monitor at present. It is I believe the final draft of the book in a pdf form and has been published in kindle and paperback versions on amazon. The paperback version is a tad heavy on your wallet. The kindle version is sweetly priced and you may want to own it at the earliest. The reply was an answer to the poet on his enquiry on the status of the review that I had committed myself to. The ‘review’ comes much delayed than expected on a ‘conventional scale’ of time as I was reading the poems slow. While Kafka turned into a vermin while writing Metamorphosis, I turned into a snail while reading Kaushal’s poems. I was hit by the strongest of forces ever known to humanity – the force of reality – the nice, the ugly, and the vulgar. I withdrew like a snail each time on being hit, I came out again after some time until at last, the repetition of the lyrical attack found a pattern and I became used to the world of Siamese Compassion. Kaushal Suvarna wanted to check on the progress of review. I offered him my thoughts on ‘reviewing’ as excuse to buy more time and continue with my withdrawal-perseverance game with his creations.

The poems make you think about a lot of things, about a lot of people, about a lot of lives, and about a lot of hypocrisies we exhibit while living this life. From the cover to back and back, the reader never feels left at the mercy of an idealist. You are on a journey of reality and the poet puts you in the zone and leaves you alone there by the end of every poem. You have two options in that room – you either say this is enough and quit or you decide that you want to continue. If you quit, the stage of realism is auto-saved in your mind and you can always come later to resume from where you left. You will find the poet with his arsenal of realism-devices standing there, waiting for you. In case you choose to continue in the world of stark realities, you find the poet standing there nevertheless. However, he doesn’t make a promise to stay with you in between the pauses of two creations. He leaves again by the end, leaving you alone with your thoughts. Now, you have the same two options again. Either way, you will have to come back and continue. If you are not prepared to die today, you will come back to die tomorrow.

If you ask for my suggestion on where to start, start with the title-poem ‘Siamese Compassion’ and then spread your wings toward other pages in the book.

“Sure, one man’s martyr
Is another one’s terrorist
And horses must be shod
And bulls castrated for their own benefit
For society’s a venomous centipede
Whose legs can’t be knocked off the stool
Lest we all tumble in mindless anarchy

 You may have suffered greater tortures than I
Your degree of fortitude may be greater than mine
But I felt your cuts deeper
While you endured in silence
Are we not both brothers in pain?”

(Siamese Compassion, reproduced from Siamese Compassion by Kaushal Suvarna)

These thoughts must have matured through myriads of experiences of life and the shape they have taken in the poems of Siamese Compassion, make Kaushal one of my favorite contemporary poets of the present time. He is honest with his feelings and hence naturally, feelings gain primacy over form, not that I have any complaints against the form. It is also a sad commentary over our system that promotes a superstar culture where mediocre works are making millions through traditional publishing while such work of finesse has to be self-published. I don’t want this book to get lost in oblivion. The poems are to be read on loop until we see through our sins and take the first step towards washing them away. Once more, that brings me to a question. Is it possible to wash away our sins? Is there a hope somewhere to live a life untainted by the artificial idealism that we are born in and taught about but keep violating all our lives? You might have to turn to this book to find that out.

 

A blunder of Poetry – Po’try

Bangalore got its own Poetry Festival this year. Considering the fact that the city has a strong and vibrant poetry community that thrives in the bookstores, cafes, and parks; a poetry festival was in fact due and perhaps should have even come earlier than now. The festival was liked by most of the attendants. I must most sincerely thank the organizers for such a Herculean effort.

There is one more thing that must be spoken about. A book was specially commissioned to be unveiled at the festival. Po’try was released as an anthology of poems that were shortlisted from the entries that were received in response to the poetry contest conducted as part of the festival. The entries were supposed to be in English, Hindi, or Kannada and required the number of lines to be more than 25.
As per the claim made by the publishers, some 300 poems were received out of which 159 were shortlisted to be published. The selected poets were asked to pay a sum of 1000 INR for 5 copies of the book. They were given a transaction code upon payment and were told to collect their copies after the unveiling of the book during the last session of Day-1 of the festival. 159 poets – 5 copies each, this amounts to a bare minimum of 795 copies of the book. However, the publisher company brought only about 50 copies to the festival. What followed reeked of complete absence of professionalism, humility, or any kind of empathy for the poets who had gathered to collect their copies. At this point, I must disclose the name of the publishing partner of the BPF 2016Raindrops Company headed by one Mr. Bernard Dsa. Though such a company must be ignored and not be given any kind of reading space on social media, I thought it prudent to write about the experience I had with them so that the people who are coming next are aware of the narcissism of the company. Rest of the evening of the festival was spent in remorseless series of selfies by the publisher while the poets stood by another poet who somehow had volunteered to keep 2 copies of the book on display so that people could come and get a photo clicked with the publisher holding their book.
Click. Done. Return the book. Next!

potry-1

I got hold of the book 2 weeks after I had forgotten about it. Though I was never much excited about my poem getting published in the book, it was still a good feeling to have the book in my hands. However, after having a glimpse of the inside pages, that feeling was short-lived. The book stands out for its shoddy editing, floundering the rules of the contest laid down by the organizers themselves, publishing same poem multiple number of times under different poets’s names and titles. Horrid editing will be an understatement. This book has not been edited at all. There are poems that are in Hindi but published in Roman script without any transliteration marks. In spite of all these blunders, the biggest irony of this book would be the strong-arming of the contributing poets to pay up 1000 INR in advance without giving them a control on the number of copies they wanted. Raindrops Company sent a sermon that the poets would need 5 copies each and hence they must pay 1000 INR in advance to receive those 5 copies. The company didn’t stop there. It wanted to spit in our face, so it priced the book at 180 INR on Amazon.

poetry-2

I still had sympathy for the poets who had landed up in the hands of such a terrible publisher and hence went on to read all the poems except 3 or 4 poems written in Kannada. Well, I found a silver lining. Please find below the list of 58 poems that I loved from the book. If you have already decided to not buy the book, try looking for the poets on facebook, they might be kind enough to share their published poems with you. Please note that this is not a ranked list.

  1. Hark! - Abhishek Kumar Singh
  2. Empty Piece of Paper Flutters Around - Dr. Aakash Dhruva
  3. Cracked & Splintered - Aishwarya Soni
  4. प्रतिबिंबित - Akanksha Bumb
  5. Distant Vespers - Amrendra Pandey
  6. I am Indeed - Ankit Mishra
  7. These Kindnesses - Ankush Banerjee
  8. पहाड़ और समंदर - Anshul Nagori
  9. Unfettered - Apoorva Viji Shivaram
  10. Aquarium - M. Ashitha
  11. Deathwish - Ashvani Sachdev
  12. Scatterbrain Syndrome - Avani Jain
  13. The Unchanted Souls - Dr. Debashish Sengupta
  14. She-An Unparalleled Work of Art - Debarati Saha
  15. वाद विवाद  - Gaurav B Gothi
  16. Antarctica - Gaurav Chauhan
  17. खून पतला हो चला  - Gaurav Tiwari
  18. Ice'scapades - Gayathri Rao
  19. Sun's Story -  Ilu
  20. प्रकृति हूँ मैं ही  - Jaya Srinivasan
  21. A Cuckoo Calls - Lovie D'sa
  22. Does a Bonsai Tree Dare Dream?  - Lynessa Coutto
  23. Theatre du Reve - Praveen Dhawan
  24. जन्मदिन  - Priyank Anand
  25. It was a Dream - Mahima Prasanna
  26. Bliss in solitude  - Mahua Sen
  27. Back Home  - Maitrayee
  28. Twilight - Mallika Bhaumik
  29. The Pendulum Heart - Mihika Shankar Shivni
  30. All Things Put Aside - Nishu Mathur
  31. Pacification - Nitish Nair
  32. The Impossibility of Us - Purnima Gopalakrishnan
  33. Sitting There - Rahul Raghunath
  34. कर्ण का धर्म   - Rajesh Joshi
  35. याद है सिर्फ  - Ranjana Tripathi
  36. A Trilogy of Musings - Rashmi Jejurikar
  37. Circling into the Center - Reshma Mudirakkal
  38. Us and Them - Rohit Nand
  39. Journey to You - Aimey Maggie Augustine
  40. Chikku Mara - Sandip Mondal
  41. No filter - Shachi Srivastava
  42. Death - Shruthi Vishwanath
  43. The Oracle - Shyni kp
  44. Meet - Srinivasacharya Darbhasayanam
  45. Disclaimer - Siddharth Shukla
  46. On My Grandmother - Sihi Nagathihalli
  47. A Disjointed Symphony - Simran Sethi
  48. Father  - Sindhu Verma
  49. The Earth you Fought - Soujanya K.
  50. Cry of Wicked Souls - Sarala Balachandran
  51. Saudade - Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
  52. Inheritance - Suganya Lakshmi
  53. थोड़ा और पकने दो - Tarundeep Kaur
  54. तलाश - विभूति/Vibhuti
  55. निशब्द - Vidya Krishna
  56. A gloomy rose - Vignesh
  57. H.O.M.E - Yamini Acharya
  58. Declarative Memory - Yumna Harisingh Jawa

This is not to suggest other poets were not good. Yes, there were a few who should have been more serious with their contributions but perhaps the publishers didn’t deserve better. Nevertheless, congratulations to every poet who has got published. Good Edit-Bad Edit – You are a published poet now and you have our best wishes.

Mandatory Disclosure – Writer’s poem was also published in the Anthology.