This week in Poetry - Episode Eight. In the coming weeks, we shall explore the amazing variety of poems in English written by Indian poets from the Pithamahan of Modernism, Nissim Ezekiel to the very young like Sivakami Velliyangiri, with their 'thoughts weaned in silence, but spoken as poems'. This is a whole new generation of poets exploring creativity with utter disregard for labels and canons, reading aloud, or performing their poems and expressing themselves on a dazzling variety of themes; provocative, transparent, and at times damning. 

In this episode, we shall read some of the poems of K. Satchidanandan, born in 1946 in Kerala, he believes Poetry is performance. Poetry is theater. He writes his poems in Malayalam. And he himself translates them into English. 

A bilingual, literary critic, playwright, social activist, and recipient of many awards, including the Sahitya Academy Award in 2012, Satchidanandan is heard and read with respect by his readers around the world. 

Now to his poems. 

STAMMER

A stammer is no handicap.

It is a mode of speech.



A stammer is the silence that falls

between the word and its meaning,

just as lameness is the

silence that falls between

the word and the deed.



Did the stammer precede language

or succeed it?

Is it only a dialect or a

language itself? These questions

make linguists stammer.



Each time we stammer

we are offering a sacrifice

to the God of Meanings.



When a whole people stammer

stammer becomes their mother tongue:

as it is with us now.



God too must have stammered

when He created Man.

That is why all the words of man

carry different meanings.

That is why everything he utters

from his prayers to his commands

stammers,

like poetry.

GENESIS

My grandmother was insane.

As her madness ripened into death,

My uncle, a miser, kept her in our store-room, 

Covered in straw. 

My grandmother dried up, burst,

Her seeds flew out of the windows. 

The sun came, and the rain, 

One seedling grew up into a tree,

Whose lusts bore me. 

Can I help writing poems 

About monkeys with teeth of gold?

THE MAD

The mad have no caste

or religion. They transcend

gender, live outside

ideologies. We do not deserve

their innocence.



Their language is not of dreams

but of another reality. Their love

is moonlight. It overflows

on the full-moon day.



Looking up they see

gods we have never heard of. They are

shaking their wings when

we fancy they are

shrugging their shoulders. They hold

that even flies have souls

and the green god of grasshoppers

leaps up on thin legs.



At times they see trees bleed, hear

lions roaring from the streets. At times

they watch Heaven gleaming

in a kitten’s eyes, just as

we do. But they alone can hear

ants sing in a chorus.



While patting the air

they are taming a cyclone

over the Mediterranean. With

their heavy tread, they stop

a volcano from erupting.



They have another measure

of time. Our century is

their second. Twenty seconds,

and they reach Christ; six more,

they are with the Buddha.



In a single day, they reach

the big bang at the beginning.



They go on walking restless, for

their earth is boiling still.



The mad are not

mad like us.

GANDHI AND POETRY

One day a lean poem

reached Gandhi’s ashram

to have a glimpse of the man.

Gandhi spinning away

his thread towards Ram

took no notice of the poem

waiting at his door,

ashamed at not being a bhajan.

The poem now cleared his throat

And Gandhi glanced at him sideways

through those glasses that had seen hell.

“Have you ever spun thread?” he asked,

“Ever pulled a scavenger’s cart?

Ever stood in the smoke of

An early morning kitchen?

Have you ever starved?”



The poem said: “I was born in the woods,

in a hunter’s mouth.

A fisherman brought me up

in a cottage.

Yet I knew no work, I only sing.

First I sang in the courts:

then I was plump and handsome

but am on the streets now,

half-starved.”



“That’s better,” Gandhi said

with a sly smile. “But you must give up this habit

of speaking in Sanskrit at times.

Go to the fields. Listen to

The peasants’ speech.”

The poem turned into a grain

and lay waiting in the fields

for the tiller to come

and upturn the virgin soil

moist with new rain.

That's all we have in this edition of This Week in Poetry with Professor Nedumaran. Thank you for listening to some of the great poems of K. Satchidanandan. I hope you have enjoyed his poetry and there is more to come. And I shall meet you again next week with more voices from Indian Poetry in English.

Till then, take care and goodbye for now. This is Professor Nedumaran signing off.

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