Aneek Chatterjee

You

In a faraway land I search for words, in boulevards, by-lanes when you evolve In my native village green paddy fields swing in air, sunshine when you evolve In my birth I first felt you, in school my verse carried you to earth in a cloudy morning, in march Syllabus in college was you; syllables you, And in a busy office, the wooden desk, unknown file, you In near and far In paddy fields, and boulevards, in birth and daily death, only you evolve

Outsider

Fresh sapling in between stones, outsider, looking up to feel the sun. The sun is an outsider too, here in this planet. I don’t have that charisma, I don’t have that energy,

& the power to enlighten every mind. Waiting like an outsider, if you bend down a bit if you come & sit on the stone & if I receive a splash of that irresistible odour. Waiting in anxiety, pain, with newly composed love tunes, if you recognize the outsider in between stones & tunes

Aneek Chatterjee is from India. He has been published in reputed literary magazines across the globe. His poetry has been archived at Yale University.

Agnes Meadows Poetry – expressing the inexpressible

What is poetry? Answering this question – defining its nature and purpose – was not something I thought about when I took up the mantle of poet and began writing poetry seriously over twenty years ago. Ask any writer why they write, and the answer is rarely for money, fame or recognition. It’s for the sheer joy of writing, of expressing themselves, and hopefully having other people relate to what they have written. So, why do I do it? I do it because I must, because I am driven to do so…I can’t not write!

For years, I was a journalist, both here in London and overseas, and although I have always written poetry, until I reached my early 50’s, I only produced two or three poems a year. And then, at the age of 53, I was taken to the Poetry Café in Central London for the first time, and discovered their Poetry Unplugged open mic sessions, which are still running every Tuesday evening, and hosted by the excellent Niall O’Sullivan.

I was immediately hooked and began to read my work their regularly. It didn’t take me long to realise that if I was often going to read my work there, I needed to write a lot more poetry. Of course, there are some poets who have made a whole career out of reading the same half-a-dozen pieces, but I was gripped by ‘poetry fever’, and soon had a robust and growing collection of work, which people seemed to like.

I self-published my first collection ‘Quantum Love’ in 2000, as well as producing a CD of my poetry with specially commissioned music, but it was always the book of my work that sold rather than the CD. It was also during this time that I learned how to perform my work. I’ve always been amazed that some poets, often really well-known ones, read their work incredibly badly, as if they were reciting words from the telephone directory instead of their emotive poetry. As a performer of your own work it’s incumbent upon you to learn how to bring out all the emotions, colours, feelings, and textures of what you’ve written in as dynamic a way as possible. The better you read, the more your audience will appreciate your work, and ultimately, you’ll sell more books! And then in 2003 I was picked up by Nii Parkes, himself an accomplished poet, writer, editor, and performer, who published my first full collection, ‘Woman’ under the Flipped Eye/Waterways imprint. He subsequently published several other full collections of my work, and remains my main publisher (and good friend) to this day. While poetry has never made me rich, it has taken me all over the world. I have featured at Poetry/Literature Festivals from the USA to Bangladesh, from Norway to Nicaragua, as well as Israel and Palestine. I was also invited to read three times at the Babylon International Arts & Culture Festival in Babylon, Iraq, in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and it was these three visits that inspired my ‘Back to Babylon’ collection (Palewell Press 2019). I have also produced a dual-language collection with 15 poems in English and their Taiwanese/Chinese translation, which I read from at the Formosa International Poetry Festival in Taiwan in 2017. I am hoping that a new collection will be coming out sometime during 2021, as well as a ‘Silk Road’ focused pamphlet of new work inspired by further travels along parts of this fabled highway. But back to the question, why do I write? I was attracted to writing poetry because the form enables you to express in a few words what you hold in your heart. You enter a world of urgency, vibrancy, passion and extreme emotion. Nobody writes abut humdrum love, a love where the heart doesn’t beat faster, or the

ordinary day where nothing much happens – eat, sleep, work, repeat – a pale love or life, grey and lacking shape and tone; nobody writes abo0ut a dull life, one containing no passion, nothing to get excited about. Poetry highlights passion and emotion, giving you a tool to change the world, to challenge whatever you find unacceptable, to question, communicate, change misconceptions, and alter world views. It is a mechanism for social change, or to highlight beauty in all its forms, and to stroke the features of love with your pen. Ultimately, for me, it gives me the mechanism to express the inexpressible. Without the freedom to express yourself, there can be no genuine harmony. Simplistically, self-expression is a way of articulating love of self, with self-love being a reflection of how you love the world…the place you live in. One of the questions I have always been asked when giving readings or attending overseas poetry festivals, is where do I get my inspiration from? Of course, sometimes it’s easy to identify the sources of inspiration, when you witness something cataclysmic or life-changing, such as in my ‘Back to Babylon’ collection where I was writing about the things I saw and experienced in Iraq. But often it’s much subtler, and requires a lot more thought and focus. Inspiration comes from paying attention to what is happening around you, listening to what you’re being told, hearing both text and sub-text in every conversation, absorbing and engaging your imaginative awareness, finding the uniqueness in what you are seeing/witnessing/experiencing and pinning those images down on the paper. If you go around with your eyes, ears and heart closed, then that lack is going to be reflected in what you write about, and ultimately in the power of the poem. Inspiration isn’t only something that comes to you out of the ether, but something you must actively seek by paying attention to your world and what is happening around you.

I often like writing poetry to being a jeweller, where only the exact gemstone will fit into the piece of jewellery that is being produced – likewise, each line of poetry is made up of exactly the right word(s) fitting into each space to build the line, stanza and poem. As I have written before, it’s also my job to make the reader see what I see, hear what I hear, and feel what I feel, because until I do that, the reader is blind and deaf to what the poem is saying. If I can’t/don’t do that, then I have failed in my job as a poet. Over the years I have often given poetry writing workshops, either free-standing or part of the programmes of the Festivals I have been invited to read at. It has always given me great pleasure to encourage budding writers to improve and polish their work. Every poet, whether they are experienced or new to the form, has a unique voice, although many are still in the process of discovering it. I believe that as a published international poet I should encourage participants in my workshops to find that unique voice, their platform of self-expression, and run with it. Whether the language they use is raw or more polished, what they write is a tool of empowerment for them, challenging, questioning, observing and commenting on what they see in their world, both positive and negative in a distinctive and dynamic way. In early 2019, I was fortunate enough to be invited to read at the Dhaka International Poetry Festival, run by the internationally renowned Aminur Rahman, whom I had first met in Iraq back in 2012 at the first Babylon Arts and Cultural Festival. Being in Dhaka was an extraordinary pleasure, and I found Bangladesh a truly inspirational place because there was a real sense of everyone working together to make Bangladesh better today than it had been yesterday, and better tomorrow than it had been today. The Dhaka Festival introduced me to many new poets both from Bangladesh and international, and the readings I did at the university there were incredibly exciting, the students an intelligent and lively bunch it was a pleasure to read to. I even managed to work with a few of them, getting them to write their own poetry, which they had never had the confidence to do before. I only

hope that they continued to write, and that I might have been instrumental in sowing the seeds of a new generation of poets in far-away Dhaka. Unfortunately because of the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 Dhaka Festival had to be cancelled, although Aminur Rahman has invited me to return to Dhaka some time in 2021, when we are allowed to travel again, so I can lead a series of workshops and sessions with students, young people and would-be writers. Hopefully, whatever grows out of this visit will flourish and grow strong in the sunlight of new inspiration. We all have a poet inside of us – it’s just a question of unlocking that inner poet. And if I can help people to do that – to help them express the inexpressible – then I am happy that my job is done. November 2020

Agnes Meadows is a London based poet, writer who has toured nationally and internationally, giving readings, workshops, and residencies all over the world, encouraging people to express themselves through poetry. Agnes has run Loose Muse Women’s Writers Night in London and spearheaded regular satellite events in other parts of England.