This Week in Poetry: A. K. Ramanujan’s “Waiting,” “Farewells,” “Returning,” and “Daily Drivel”

Professor Nedumaran introduces an episode of “This Week in Poetry” featuring poems from A. K. Ramanujan’s Uncollected Poems and Prose (Oxford India, 2001) and recommends Journey’s A Poet’s Diary (Penguin Random House, 2019). He discusses and reads four poems: “Waiting,” where a speaker watches a family walk by while he waits without knowing for whom or where; “Farewells,” which turns ordinary leave-takings—train delays, a cooperative society presentation, and a dying patriarch’s family gathering—into conversational, humorous, and poignant poetry; “Returning,” in which a 61-year-old searches for his mother and suddenly remembers she has been dead for 40 years; and “Daily Drivel, a monologue,” a fast-paced list of chores that ends with the speaker contrasting his mundanity with a partner’s trip to see Othello.

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