Views and interviews: R.K.Singh's Poetry

VIEWS AND INTERVIEWS: R.K. SINGH’S POETRY

A compilation of articles and interviews by the Indian English Poet, Ram Krishna Singh

Copyright: R.K.Singh 13 June 2013

VIEWS & INTERVIEWS: R.K. SINGH’s Poetry

1.

Professor R. K. Singh interviewed by Patricia Prime Ram Krishna Singh was born in 1950 in Varanasi, India. He is a university professor, Indian English poet, critic and reviewer. He received an M.A. (English Lit., Banares Hindu University, 1972) and PhD. (English, Kashi Vidapith, 1981). Dr. Singh has been on the faculty of the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, since 1976 and teaching English language skills to students of earth and mineral sciences. He is married to Durga Singh and has two children, Vikram and Winny. Professor Singh has published more than 130 research articles, 140 book reviews, and 26 books, including ten collections of poems.

His major collections have been well received and include: My Silence and Other Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1996), Above the Earth’s Green (1997), Every Drop Stone Pebble (1999, jointly with Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime), Cover to Cover (2002, jointly with U. S. Bahri) and Pacem in Terris (2003, jointly with Myriam Pierri and Giovanni Campisi). His poems have also appeared in over 125 anthologies and 170 journals and e-zines.

Below is an example of R. K. Singh’s poetry for readers who may not be familiar with his work. It is taken from Above the Earth’s Green (1997): there is a bay in each of us depression mounts to cause hurricane crumbling caged life and its traps submerged in rising water and wind wipes pressure in silence unweave years of network roots of upturned faces PP: When did you first start writing?

RKS: I think it just happened when I was hardly 12 and wrote my first poem in Hindi: it appeared in the children’s magazine section of the daily Aj (Varanasi). I dabbled in several poems and succeeded in publishing them in Hindi newspapers and magazines. I also published over 150 journalistic articles besides around ten short stories in Hindi up to 1971-72. As I became aware that my articles were more popular than the poems, from 1968-69, I started writing in English as well, and produced a large number of third-rate verses.

As the influence of the Romantic, Victorian and Modern poets waned, the phase of ‘preparation’ completed with my attempt at writing my ‘diary’ in verse from October 1972 to December 1973. There was a lot to feel and say after leaving the monotonous life at Varanasi, and going to Pulgaon (to teach) and returning again and visiting several places (in search of a job), going to Lucknow (to work in the Gazetteers Dept.), New Delhi (as a journalist trainee), and finally to Bhutan (as lecturer) where from March 1974 to November 1975, I composed almost a poem a day. It’s a different matter, in retrospect, that very few of the poems could be published.

PP: Which Indian poets/writers have most influenced your work?

RKS: I don’t know. I doubt I have read many established poets with a view to emulating them. I give credit to none for influencing my work, but I did enjoy the work of Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, A. K. Coomarswamy, S. Radhakrishnan, Jawaharlal Nehru, M. K. Gandhi, Nirad C. Chaudhury, Nissam Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Shiv K. Kumar, Krishna Srinivas, Khushwant Singh, Amrita Pritam, et al.

PP: Which European poets/writers do you most admire?

RKS: Frankly speaking, after becoming a teacher I couldn’t get much free time to read writers outside my limited academic and professional concerns. But till my early twenties, I could read with great interest Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Mayakovski, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Illich, Herbert Marcuse, Satre, Herbert Read, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Kenneth Clark, Marshall McLuhan, Albert Camus, Fritjof Capra, Somerset Maugham, Pablo Neruda, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Northrop Frye, Murray Krieger, and my American poet friend, Lyle Glazier. There are others too, but I can’t readily recall their names.

PP: In what way did the move into another language and culture influence your writing?

RKS: Human nature is the same everywhere, so it hardly affects me when I move from my Indian culture into the English speaking culture and verbally share what is our common experiences, feelings, attitudes, fears, expectations etc. I seek to express something universal just as when I write in English. I think in English, remaining my own true self. As I said elsewhere I am my own veil and revelation and as long as my poems read well, it’s o.k.

PP: Has bilingualism influenced the way in which you write?

RKS: I have not written in Hindi in the last three decades. Writing in English poses no problem: it comes to me naturally, easily, and conveniently. But, if at times, there is any unconscious influence, well, it should be more enriching than negative. For a writer bilingualism/multilingualism is a strength.

PP: How does that kind of compromised relationship with language relate to your connection with two cultures, as an individual, and as a writer?

RKS: There is no ‘compromised relationship’ as such. I have been writing in English by choice. But, don’t you think the geographical spread of English both as an international and international language has strengthened global integration? The acculturation, the international functional range, and the diverse forms of literary creativity the English language accommodates today is unprecedented. I am happy as a poet to be contributing towards it. There is no cultural conflict or tension in my use of English. Let me also remind you what George Steiner said about 25 years ago: “To know another language well, to penetrate the reflexes of awareness and judgement in its idioms, to experience in personal immediacy the transparencies or opaqueness which link or divide it from one’s native speech, to do these things is, quite literally, to harvest a second self. It is to open a second window on the landscape of being.”

PP: As an individual, do you see a kind of gap opening up between your native culture and language and the adopted one of English?

RKS: As I indicated, since the English language as a medium has been an integral part of my environment, it doesn’t interfere with the native culture as such. Whatever is culturally relevant in the local situation happens in the local/native medium, without any problem, even if one used English most of the time, including at home. In fact, English has already been well acculturated in the native environment and if one sees any gap, it is merely political. However, as an individual poet, I may not be accessible to the audience not knowing English.

PP: Would you describe yourself principally as an academic writer, a reviewer, a poet, or critic, or perhaps all of the above?

RKS: Presently, perhaps, all of the above. But I have always tried to keep the academic writer separate from the creative poet in me, though when I review, or do a critical article, the academic in me is also working.

Yet I must admit I have always tried to maintain a balance between my academic activities that give me my bread and professional status, and poetic creativity that gives me an identity in Indian English writing but no money. As I hope I will continue to write and practise poetry, I should be principally known as a poet.

PP: What criteria do you think makes a good critic?

RKS: A good critic, besides knowing the subject matter, is also a sensitive reader with broadness of outlook, understanding, tolerance, sensibility, and vision. He/she is free from prejudices and able to empathise, recognise, and respond. He/she is free from rigid literary orthodoxies and capable of negotiating differences and facilitating communication. The critic should help to develop reason, emotions, senses and tastes to a great measure, by re-searching art, re-viewing media and meaning, re-making minds, rethinking aesthetics and traditions, re-imaging the past, re-interpreting the present. The good critic is essentially creative and contributes to knowledge in a positive, futurelooking mode.

PP: What criteria do you think makes a good reviewer?

RKS: Almost the same as what makes a good critic. Empathy, recognition, and responsiveness are the basic traits of a good reviewer, too. The reviewer must have faith in the author and view his/her work in the present. He/she need not be a scholar, but able to communicate the author’s text and context with a view to objective presentation.

He/she must be able to negotiate between the author and the reader and provide a reasonable critical space to appraise the former, who may be different from the reader, culturally, socially and politically.

PP: As a writer of various genres, and different cultures, which particular books have influenced you?

RKS: Though the Holy Bible has been most inspiring, I can’t recall what specially I read at different points of time that might have influenced my work. Most of the time I read a book or article or poem, enjoy it, and forget about it, looking for something new or fresh.

If it is informative, I may take notes, if it is creatively thrilling, it may incite me into writing a poem. So, if one finds any influence in my work, it should be a collective influence rather than an individual influence. Also, I have no patience for a long work, so I hardly read it, unless academically/professionally necessary. My involvement has been more with poetry, mostly by new/less known people, irrespective of the country or culture of origin.

PP: When did you first become interested in writing haiku and tanka?

RKS: I think my first exposure to haiku was via the haiku/translations by Ezra Pound in one of the books of his collected poems in the late 1970s. I used to see haiku in Poet (Madras) also, but I couldn’t understand it much till about 1981-82 when I started using 5-7-5 stanza structure in my poems. Occasionally I wrote haiku, senryu and tanka from 1983 onwards and published them in various journals in India and abroad, but I developed a serious interest in its art and craft from about the early 1990s and subsequently published some of them in Prophetic Voices, Noreal, Manxa, Azami, Micropress NZ, Micropress Yates, WinterSpin, La Pierna Tierna, Creative Forum, Poet, Poetcrit, Skylark, Sparrow, Paper Wasp, RAW NeRVZ, Mirror, Lilliput Review, Hobo,

Forum, Puck and Pluck, Kanora, Moongate, Simply Words, Timber Creek Review Cer*ber*us, etc.

Thanks go to Sid (Mohammed H. Siddiqui of Baltimore, USA), who exposed me to quality haiku writing through his liberal gift of the copies of Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Haiku Headlines, Lynx, American Tanka, Tanka Splendor, Tanka Journal etc., and above all, his own theme-based selections of Seasonal Haiku Greetings (SGL) that he has been mailing to friends all over the world since 1990.

Credit also goes to you, Pat, for helping me understand haiku, senryu and tanka so that we could publish our joint collection Every Stone Drop Pebble (1998).

David McMurray of asahi.com has also helped me to write haiku in 3-5-3 syllables. My latest collection of haiku ‘Peddling Dreams’ in Pacem in Terris (2003) reveals the variety in my three-liners.

Below are two examples of R. K. Singh’s 3-5-3 haiku taken from Pacem in Terris (2003): Rain-soaked sun sheds its sultry light : her bare back Face hidden at the window hear known voices PP: How does this short form of Japanese poetry find expression in your work in progress?

RKS: Because I have been mostly writing brief personal lyrics for the last 25 years, and because I love personal poetry, I have found the Japanese verse forms in English suited to my temperament. In fact, in most of my regular poems, the haiku rhythm should be easily discernable. It seems to have been the basic unit of my poetical expression.

PP: What do you think your aim or goal is as a writer?

RKS: To have a sense of relief, or feeling of emancipation to feel lighter when the tension is resolved with the birth of a poem or article. And, if the poem pleases the readers, or the article motivates them I feel blessed. I don’t think I write with any idealistic notion.

But if you are referring to my academic writing, or research or teaching, then, the aim is to demonstrate or achieve a higher level of professionalism.

I am also committed to promote a study of new/less known Indian English authors that have been ignored by the media and academia alike.

PP: What is next on your agenda as a writer?

RKS: To have a collection of my tanka published as early as possible. I would also like to bring out a collection of my regular poems besides a collection of essays on my poetry to help interested scholars probe my creativity in perspective. The manuscript is already lying with a publisher, but let me see when it sees the light of day.

PP: And what more long-term projects or interests do you have?

RKS: To reach out to a larger audience as a poet; to motivate scholars to study new/less known/ neglected Indian English poets and authors; and to promote collaborative literary practices internationally.

PP: What do you think is the status of an interview like this, and its format?

RKS: It’s an exercise in international/cross-cultural mediation, which exposes a relatively less known author to new audiences. It should also help in promoting global understanding and integration.

First published in MOONGATE INTERNATIONAL and INDIAN BOOKS CHRONICLE -----2.

PROFESSOR R.K.SINGH TALKS ABOUT HIS POETRY IN AN INTERVIEW WITH Dr. ARBIND KUMAR CHOUDHARY, Rangachahi College, Majuli, JORHAT (ASSAM) AKC: 1. Why do you write?

RKS: Basically I am a poet and I write when I am moved by certain thought, idea, feeling, emotion, or experience. Any sensory, intellectual or spiritual experience may arouse me to articulate a lived or experienced moment. I write because I want to feel lighter, liberated or refreshed within. I write to seek a release from myself as much as from others; to feel free by unburdening myself in verses; to experience an inner balance, feeling, probing, sensing, recalling, or whatever. If it turns out to be a good poem, it has beauty and meaning created out of a pressing sense of inner emptiness or purposelessness of existence.

2. Will you please tell us something about your childhood memories? How was your parentage and bringing up all about? Was there conditions conducive to flower your genius?

I come from a humble family of Varanasi. For generations my forefathers had lived in the narrow lanes of Kashi, partaking of a culture which flourished on the bank of the Ganges that still attracts everyone, though the uniqueness I experienced in the 1950s and 1960s is gone. I was born, brought up and educated there, beginning from the School nearest to our residence, to high school, intermediate, and graduation (1970) from Harish Chandra Degree College, to M.A. (1972) from BHU, and Ph.D. (1981) from Kashi Vidyapith.

As my grandfather was a freedom fighter, frequently imprisoned along with other Congress leaders in Banaras, my father could not have formal education. He learnt to survive by himself, and learnt to read and write and did petty jobs before he could settle down in life, as he told me once. I am the eldest of his eight children who are all postgraduates and/or doctorates and fiercely independent in their views and thinking. I am proud to say that we all grew up in a secular environment with freedom to think, read and express our views.

3. How would you define a good poem?

A good poem generates some physical, emotional or psychosexual sensation, stimulates some sensuous, spiritual or exalted pleasure, or provokes some ideas.

I have no taste for didacticism in poetry. I love brevity, rhythm, and “colouring of human passion�; personal, lyrical, honest and free expression, with seriousness in reflection and interpretation. Poetry lies in creating the image (like the painter who celebrates sensuality), and in capturing momentness of a moment, which stirs the mind.

4. How have your writings been received?

Perhaps, with a sense of difference, or maybe, indifference? The established academia and the media have ignored me, as I have been writing from the margin, from a small city, where creativity in English is simply not bothered. A handful of friends and readers have, however, been very encouraging and enthusiastic about my poetry, book reviews, and articles.

5. Who did help and inspire you the most in writings? : Help? I doubt anybody helped me in my writings. But I did learn the art of editing (my poetry) from my poet-professor friend, Lyle Glazier (USA). He helped me edit my first two collections, My Silence (1985) and Music Must Sound (1990). He was a very positive reader of my verses and he inspired me most in the 1970s with his liberal comments and/or suggestions.

6. What is your masterpiece?

It is difficult to say which of my twelve collections is a masterpiece. Perhaps the best is yet to come out. However, the first collection, My Silence (1985), is a significant volume just as my latest collection, The River Returns (2006), should be a milestone in my poetic career.

7. Tell something about your masterpiece.

My Silence may be treated as a mini-epic, with ‘silence’ as the common thread. The 80 poems in the volume bear no titles; titles tell too much. But here one may discover my formal taste, personal vision, and sexual orientation rooted in Purush-Prakriti union. It is significant for open eroticism, seriousness, candor, and exaltation of Rati “to a plane where the apparent glamour of the flesh merges into a universal principle of creation,” to quote R.S. Tiwary.

8. What is your philoshopy of life?

I believe in unity of mankind and equality of sexes, and am secular and non-moral in my attitude and values. I recognize the world as one earth, one nation, one country just as I love all the races, tribes, nationalities, religious, and languages. I accept the spiritual oneness of people and my concerns cut across national boundaries. I believe in living without prejudices as man belonging to the whole world, honest to my self.

In creative writing, I trust the autonomy of readers who must read and recreate a poem’s meaning according to their own intellectual potency, taste, and sensibility without any suggestions or comments from the poet (or critic). I love my poem’s exposure to different kinds/levels of meaning.

9. Which of your poems/stories are specificially autobiographical in nature?

Though most of my poems may have one or the other personal elements to refer to, I would not like them to be explored in terms of autobiography, for facts and fiction are so fused in my brief personal lyrics/poems, haiku, senryu, and tanka, one would succeed only in distorting and reaching the wrong conclusions.

10. What, in general, are the themes of your writings--poems and stories?

I am realistic and try to present facts. Maybe, sometimes I am not palatable but I don’t think the aesthetic appeal is reduced. The themes of spiritual search, an attempt to understand myself and the world around me, social injustice and disintegration, human suffering, degradation of relationship, political corruption, fundamentalism, hollowness of urban life and its false values, prejudices, loneliness, sex, love, irony, intolerance etc

are prominent. In my haiku/senryu there is a deeper understanding of the quotidian as well as things in their complex simplicity.

11. Tell some memorable instances that have moulded your writings.

My chance encounter in 1971-72 with the poetry of Lyle Glazier for writing the M.A. dissertation proved a strong effect on my poetic sensibility. It seems it matured with personal correspondence between Professor Glazier and myself on our poetry. Further, the more I suffered rejection slips, the more determined I became to prove myself, especially in poetry. I have proved my distractors wrong, whether they recognize me or reject me.

I also learnt the art of criticism in the learned company of my teacher, the late Dr B. Chakroverty, a Tagore Scholar and critic. It was during the period I was jobless that Dr Chakroverty moulded my literary and critical sense.

Later, interaction with poet friends like O.P. Bhatnagar, I.K. Sharma, I.H. Rizvi, Krishna Srinivas, Y.S. Rajan, Niranjan Mohanty and others has also been memorable.

12. Will you tell something about your visualization of the futuristic society and ethos to emerge as portrayed in your books?

The ethos my poetry projects is characterized by mutual love and respect for others; tolerance of social, sexual, political, religious, and linguistic difference; and cultural dialogue and assimilation. I visualize a more liberal and tolerant mind; a more creative, more assimilative, more skilled, more aware, with a sense of caring and sharing, society. I see a future which is conscious of mutuality of concern and action, which is more integrated into global trends, which is more international, intercultural, nature-conscious, and internally spiritual.

13. Is it not dream would of your books in which a thought of harmonization surfaces amidst awful conflicts and competitions?

As a believer in the unity of humanity, I value the spiritual oneness of people and seek harmonious relationship. The ‘dream’ world of my poetry is very much real, exposing social attitude, morality, hypocrisy, the socio-sexual standards that determine ‘civilized’ norms, that discriminate, enchain, and debase honest aspirations as lust or vulgarity. The very exposure is an act of criticism. The lies are revealed to strike a balance and harmony in relationship.

14. Are you a satisfied person vis-à-vis your literary and academic pursuits?

RKS: No. Frankly, I feel sad that despite 32 books, including 12 poetry collections, about 150 academic articles, and more than 160 book reviews to my credit, I get little attention. The mainstream academia do not recognize my contributions as an Indian English poet nor do they explore my poetry for doctoral dissertation. No big press has published me yet.

Though there seems a peculiar apathy/indifference all around, I am happy I have not wasted my time and done whatever could be possible within the constraints of my situation. I have been supported and sustained by small press all these years, and to that extent, I am very satisfied.

15. Do you want to give any message to the readers?

It will serve the cause of Indian English Writing well if you could read the new, unknown poets/writers seriously and critically, and then, if you think so, dump them, instead or rejecting them without even looking at them. A change in academics’ attitude is essential.

And, please support the small press, ‘zines, and journals!

December 13, 2006 Professor R.K.SINGH, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad 826004 , India

3.

AN INTERVIEW WITH R. K. SINGH -K. RAJANI

K.R.: What is poetry according to you and what prompted you to write poetry?

R.K.S.: If the context is my poetry, it is rather you who should define it on the basis of what you gather from my poems. And, if it relates to poetry in general, there are as many definitions as poets. I doubt I would do any good by adding my ‘own’ definition which is unlikely to be original or fully applicable to my poetry.

Having said that, I would agree with the view that poetry is an art, a verbal art, which when effective, generates some physical, emotional or psychosexual sensation, stimulates some sensuous, spiritual or exalted pleasure, or provokes some mood or aesthetic sentiments, feelings, thoughts or ideas. It is also the subjective expression of a social vision, reality, or protest, and an extension of the poet’s self.

However, I have no taste for didacticism in poetry. I love brevity, rhythm and “colouring of human passion”, personal, lyrical, honest and free expression, with seriousness in reflection and interpretation.

Sometimes I also think that poetry lies in articulating momentness of a moment as lived or experienced and in continuity of memory, which is free to make illusion of a truth or reality, and truth or reality of an illusion. To write poetry is to envision in a timeless frame of a moment inhering the pressures of the struggle for survival.

As regards the second part of your question, I write a poem to seek a release from myself as much as from others; feel free by unburdening myself in verses, and experience an inner balance, feeling, probing, sensing, recalling, or whatev. If it turns out to be a good poem, it has beauty and meaning created out of a pressing sense of inner emptiness.

Like everyone, I too pass through time, through unfulfilled desires, dreams and passions, through meaninglessness and purposelessness of an existence which questioningly stares into my eyes all the time just as I try to preserve all those small moments that offer pleasing sensations and rest to my disturbed nerves and inner being.

I also experience poetry in the brief interfusion with sex which has a rare subtlety of awareness. I feel myself in words that acquire their own existence in the process of making in a form I may not have control over: I read a new meaning in and through my verses that are, as I mentioned in a poem, often an extension of my self.

K.R.: What do you think is the prevailing trend in Indian English poetry today?

R.K.S.: Indian English is not area-specific: it is a collaborative effort of Indian poets from every region/part of India, like Sanskrit or Urdu, with distinctive ethos. Some of them with English Literature background and aware of the ‘theory revolution’ of the 1970s – feminist, Marxist, Postcolonial, pragmatist, cultural materialist, etc. – may also have a ‘different’ understanding of ‘literariness’, but most of the practicing Indian English poets demonstrate a wider sense of community, social harmony, tolerance of differences, and cultural and religious integration. Some of them are more international in spirit than poets in regional languages though many of them (writing in regional languages) do seem to share the same international or global attitude as against the on-going barbarisms and political correctness, and misplaced notions of superiority or guilt. When I view thus, I ignore all those poets who present a moralizing discourse, preach or assert cultural authority and dogmatism, or make Romantic-apocalyptic utterances.

K. R.: Can you specify the reason for the decadent morality in the youth of India?

R. K. S.: Poetry has nothing to do with the decadent morality of the youth….What you observe as decadent these days is simply part of the new consumerist cosmopolitan culture. I won’t call it decadent. It is rather fast pace of development of the IT dominated new world of work, making the old link between the adult world and the child world very weak.

The new changes, or the crossover of trends and fashions, may be generating a feeling of existential urgency; the sublime seems to be melding with the trivial and the creative with the conventional. A sort of re-orientation is going on so rapidly that the established old concepts of morality etc. appear outdated. I won’t call the shift from the idealist to the materialist view as decadent.

You may feel out of the place or irrelevant in the new or emerging society, but it is today’s reality: this is going to stay, even if ‘decadent’ or mad, alongside the old, till the process of transformation is complete, and people everywhere, across cultures and societies, have something common to say, something new and different but universally shared.

K.R: Is it possible to rehabilitate the spoilt youth with the poetry of social reality?

R. K. S.: I don’t think. Nor do I agree with what your question implies. Poetry, of whatever hue or reality, can at best create some awareness, hone some finer feelings, present some specialist perceptions, reflect ones mind and soul, and remain part of cultural activities and a form of literary communication, but I doubt it can mould a society by itself. It has no utilitarian function, even as reading it could be liberating to those who can grasp what is at issue. Poetry doesn’t help in saving lives, winning wars, or rehabilitating a spoilt youth.

K. R.: Can ‘Peace’ be the perfect remedy to every peril?

R. K. S.: Hope, you are not replacing ‘Poetry’ with “Peace”. Peace is not synonymous with poetry but one can sublimate ones desperations and even outgrow the external threats through poetry. Peace is necessary for poetry, for interpreting perils of awareness.

K.R.: Is it good to drift away from ‘main stream’ literature, i.e. British Literature, so that an identity could by evolved for Indian Writing in English?

R. K. S: In this time of knowledge society and proliferation of technological artifacts, all traditional arts have suffered. Literature or poetry is no exception. The issue of its little utilitarian worth and relevance vis-à-vis the emerging hybridization of cultural (and literary) identity will continue to haunt till some new patrons appear on the scene and accord an identity to Indian English creativity. Moreover, the poets have always been in search of identity.

Howsoever despairing it might look today, including the drift from the mainstream, I see in the ensuing future through the upheavals today a process of perfection rather than destruction: “I have come not to abolish, but to bring to fulfillment”, to quote a verse (Mt.5:17) from the Bible. Something good is giving way to something more perfect in Indian English Writing, too. Yet, to maintain a reasonable academic standard IEW could be studies as part of ‘Literatures in English’ without excluding British or American Literature.

K. R.: What is your message to the reader of your poetry?

R.K.S.: I doubt I write to construct a ‘message’ as such. But I do think that we should understand our personal concerns honestly and broaden the mind; re-tune our beliefs and prejudices, promoting tolerance for differences and mutual respect, particularly at a time when power is being blatantly expressed through control of knowledge, technology, research, economy, and change, through manipulation of the media—print, visual and internet, through hegemonic politics of War on terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, human rights, third world poverty, democracy, environment, and globalisation et al; and appraise our survival vis-à-vis religious, casteist and ethnic conflicts, regional fundamentalism, violence of the right wing, and marginalisation of a large part of our society. I would feel rewarded if my poetry helps create cultural space for others to belong and defuses socioreligious tensions. Our living together in a global civilization or world peace will not be possible without some sort of global ethos on part of our poets and politicians.

K. R.: Is writing poetry of social reality easier than writing Nature Poetry/Romantic Poetry?

R. K. S.: No. As I said in the beginning, writing poetry is an art and it requires taste and sensibility to create, whether it is nature poetry or romantic poetry. The poet needs to articulate his creative perception of meaning in the world using meaning-making devices such as rhythm, tone, imagery, symbolism, myth, without excluding awareness of the present. This is what you also explore to highlight the poet’s social consciousness. So, nothing is easy.

K .R . : Will it be appropriate to use erotic metaphors in the poetry of social reality?

R K S: Why not? Social reality is not devoid of the private and sexual. Erotic metaphors reveal the secret and profound truths about the individual or his/her social consciousness.

In the oriental poetry and art, sexual experiences illumine realities and are not devoid from other human experiences such as eating and sleeping. Erotic imagery has a transpersonal dimension.

In fact, the problem is not sex/sexuality but social attitude, false morality, hypocrisy, the socio-sexual standards that determine ‘civilised’ norms, that discriminate, enchain, and debase honest aspirations as lust or vulgarity.

As I mentioned in an article somewhere, erotic imagery helps us to explore relationships, concerns, roles, ethical and cultural values. The image of the human body reveals the human soul, the inner landscape, besides interpreting the outer awareness. Isn’t it the basic truth that we are flesh in sensuality? And this is not without social reality. By denying or negating the erotic, the fleshly unity, we deny the social reality itself.

The assimilation of the world of everyday thing, including sex, and the world that is foreign, mysterious, or uncertain in the poet’s vision is an aspect of social reality but what matters is the poet’s ability to answer particular questions made out at a given time, elaborating and extending the commonsense world.

K. R. : How far does your poetry fulfil the social obligation of reforming the degenerating society?

R.K.S.: I don’t think I have written poetry with any idealistic notion. Nor do I share the view what poetry can teach one about politics, ethics, history, morality or social revolution. I don’t look to it for social salvation. Nor has poetry ever changed a degenerating situation anywhere in the world. It might assimilate, inhere or portray a degenerating situation, but it can’t change it. My poetry commits no such obligation. Nor can poetry or criticism become a basis for societal reform.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rajani Kalahathi, a researcher from Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, has explored socioconsciousness in the poetry of R.K.Singh, I.K.Sharma and D.C. Chambial for her Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr T.V.Reddy.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH POET-PROFESSOR R.K. SINGH

By Professor R.B. Singh (The interview was taken on 05 September 2012 at the residence of Professor R.K.Singh in Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad) RBS: Sir, you are a leading English poet today having published a number of volumes of poetry. Please tell me, what was your first poem and when you wrote it?

RKS: It’s so kind of you to have thought about me and talk to me about my poetry. I feel obliged to you.

I have been writing in English since my undergraduate days. If I correctly recall, the first poem in English was composed in 1967 and it appeared in the Deutsche Welle Club radio magazine in February 1968. I was 17 years old then. I would like to quote it for record: LIFE

This life Like a butterfly From this flower to that From this garden to that And— In the dawn Someone’s hand Catches its golden delighted feather Without carrying off the pleasant weather Extinguishes-It’s internal fire in a moment And creeps away Having the marks of its shades.

As far collections, My Silence is the first volume. It was published in 1985 by late Krishna Srinivas’s Poets Press India, Madras. Till now 14 collections have appeared. I should, however, mention three, The River Returns (2006), Sexless Solitude and Other Poems (2009), and Sense and Silence: Collected Poems (2010), that drew international attention. My newest collection, Selected and NewPoems Tanka and Haiku appeared a few months ago.

RBS: But, weren’t you writing in Hindi also?

RKS: Yes, I remember having written my first poem in Hindi at the age of about 12, in June 1962. The poem appeared in a Hindi daily AJ of Varanasi, where I was born in December 1950, brought up and educated. My interest in literary activities and enthusiasm never waned since then.

RBS: Could I get a copy of the poem?

RKS: I’m afraid it’s lost now. I had it I a file till about the end of 1990s. But now the file is missing. I can’t locate it. In fact, the file contained ‘cuttings’ of many of my poems, journalistic writing, and even a few short stories….

RBS: Could you tell me more about your writing in Hindi?

RKS: From my High School days onwards, I dabbled in several poems and published in newspapers – dailies and weeklies—and magazines in Hindi. I remember some of these appeared in Sanmarg, Gandiva, Samachar Times, Yugpath, Friends Eorld, Rawanti, Jyotishmati, Tarun Vishwas, etc under the pen-name ‘Tahira’. The missing file I mentioned contained over 150 journalistic articles besides eight to ten stories published upto 1971-72.

But, as I realized that my articles in Hindi dailies and weeklies were more read and popular that the poems, from 1968-69 I started writing in English, too, and produced a large number of third-rate verses. Possibly, for this reason, a couple of my teachers in

BHU, where I was a student of M.A. from 1970 to 1972, dissuaded me from writing verses in English. But I persisted in my efforts according to my own evolving sensibility.

In retrospect, I am happy what I could not do in Hindi (which indeed is now very advanced and comparable with literature in any country) I have been successful in doing in Hindi.

RBS: That’s quite interesting. You are essentially a bilingual poet.

RKS: In a way, yes. But I have not been regularly writing in Hindi, even as 2 or 3 poems in a year or two may naturally happen in Hindi. If you like, I may share my last poem composed in Hindi on 22 March 2011: िसिलवटे /वैसिी ही जैसिे /महीनो़​़​़ं पहले .

RBS: Sir, This leads me to another basic question: what inspires you to write poetry? Do you feel differently from others?

RKS: I don’t know. One may be inspired by anything. Literally, any thing, any body, any event, any person. Sometimes, even while reading a book : you start reading and you feel that you can write something, and then you start writing. Or simply, you feel like writing, and write! The source of creative inspiration has always been mysterious. I have composed poems while walking, eating, taking bath, defecating, or even interacting with people. You may also say, my personal experiences with people in waking life, my dreamt dreams, seeing good paintings, and reading good writing have been inspiring my creativity, though some part is also played by the completely demotivating environment of camps life in Dhanbad.

As for the second part of your question, I think one can’t be effective as a poet unless one is different from others. I would not have survived as a poet if I had not been feeling differently from others. I suspect I suffer with my sensitive and generous nature and have been aware of my vulnerability too. Sometimes I also feel that I have been trying to discover and celebrate who we really are vis-à-vis the chaos of life, or burst of adrenaline and confused thinking that results from it? Or perhaps, I ask questions and seek answers from within, and remain true to my self.

RBS: Do you have any target audience?

RKS: Yes, whatever I write, I write to communicate with the educated, English-knowing audience at home and abroad. Using the internet, and particularly my blogs, I seek to reach out to a larger audience.

RBS: What is the concept of sex in your poetry? Are you obsessed with sex?

RKS: I am not obsessed with sex but it interests me most. Sex is a very vital presence in our life; it is a major constituent of our body and mind. We can’t deny it. When God created us as male and female, he created sex and wanted us to live in harmony. God didn’t deny coitus. We are flesh in sensuality and there is divinity in it. The fleshly unity is the reality, the passage to experience divinity, and its expression means to glorify Him

in body. Biblically, the taste of the forbidden fruit in Eden is the awareness of physical attraction in man and woman just as the Tree of Knowledge is actually the knowledge of sex and love. Therefore, I consider sex as a positive presence in my poetry.

It is largely your insight into how you respond to it or how delightful to the senses or challenging to the mind you find it, or how you want to interpret my creative perception of meaning in the world. I touch many themes, individual passion, historic-mythical awareness, human relationship, social consciousness, and become my own veil and revelation.

In the subjective process of creation, it is normal for a poet to create out of himself: I am no exception. If whatever outside I see excites the inner vision, if I feel sex as truth and render the experience with beauty and power, then it is my poetic success.

In fact my social vision intersects the private and sexual. There is some sense in sexpression, in love of the self through exploration of the body, or naked physicality, leading to love of the divine, or man and woman as one.

As I said elsewhere, sex is a metaphor: the encounter of man and woman, man and man, woman and woman to express relationships, concerns, roles, to react against false ethical and cultural values, against stereotypes and prejudices, against hypocrisy. It is through the inner mindscape, the subjective experiences, the hidden sexual facts that one explores the profound truths. As a poet, if I use human passion, including the sexual, I try to transmute and transmit memories of experience, possibly more with a sense of irony than erotic sexuality.

So, in my concept of sex, the human body is a picture of the human soul, celebrated to understand the self and the world. If I seems to glorify nudity or use sex imagery, I do so to explore the consciousness, the inner landscape, lost in the muddle of external chaos.

RBS: Sir, aren’t you endorsing ‘sex to superconsciousness’?

RKS: No. I am not endorsing use of sex/sexuality as a means to attain to superconsciousness. I am rather saying that the readers, with a taste for imagery, symbolism, irony, and awareness of the present need to appreciate variation on sexuality in poetry since the 1960s-- nakedness, nudity, sensuality, obsession, imagined or real pleasure, woman’s body as the form, object and route to inner reality to mitigate spiritual dissatisfaction. It is ultimately positive as it helps to relate our existence to poetry’s existence as art, something that elevates as also protects us from violence without.

RBS: How do you regard women? Are they the ‘better half’?

RKS: Equal to men, or, naturally more endowed than men. As our ancient literatures, the Vedas and the Upanishads would vouchsafe, sex is the source of happiness in equality, in oneness of man and woman, in love. Then, you know there is the concept of ardhareeshwar also.

RBS: Matthew Arnold said: Poetry can replace religion. Does your poetry claim to teach religion?

RKS: I don’t trust the institution of religion in the conventional sense, nor do I write poetry to preach religion. To me, values like hope, faith and love are the better substitute.

In my poetry I am non-religious and non-moral. I stand for compassion and direct perception rather than religion.

RBS: What are the influences on your poetry? How does your family background contribute to your line of thinking?

RKS: I come from a humble family. My grandfather was a freedom fighter. My father is a self-made man with very liberal and progressive outlook. I have been brought up to think independently and take responsibility for all my action. The family has no prejudices of caste, creed, community, colour, relgion, region, or even nationality. So I grew up to be my own self in my own way. This has persisted throughout and has distinct influence on my poetry too.

As for the literary influences, I must acknowledge the impact of my American poetprofessor friend, late Lyle Glazier, whom I met in 1971-72 as a student and with whom I stayed in touch for about 25 years till his death. He was my best poet-critic friend. In fact I learnt from him how to edit a poem. He helped me edit My Silence (1985). Reading his poetry, I discovered my own poetic sensibilsity.

Then, the Psalms of the Bible has been another influence.

As I have been mostly reading new, less known/unknown poets from India and abroad, I can’t mention any names from the canon. Researchers will have to explore and find out similarities and differences.

RBS: You have been published copiously abroad. Are you satisfied with the recognition you have received?

RKS: If I am considered an Indian English poet, it is important to have recognition in India which gives me my identity and existence. However, it’s always gratifying to appear in a foreign magazine.

RBS: How do Haiku and Tanka interest you? How do they appeal to the general reader?

RKS: I have been practicing these difficult Japanese forms for over 25 years. Initially, I used these as stanzas of my regular poems, but it took me about 15 years to understand the essential spirit of haiku and tanka as independent poems.

Since most of my regular poems are brief, personal and lyrical, the haiku and taka forms happened naturally and I had good success with these in almost all the leading journals

abroad. I think now I have absorbed their spirit.

RBS: It is felt that you have departed from the standard syllabic form of haiku. Why so?

RKS: Initially, I followed the standard 5-7-5 lines of haiku and 5-7-5-7-7 lines of tanka, but over the years I could use 3-5-3, 4-6-4 and free-form haiku if these instantly happened following the experience (or perception) of a moment. Many poets writing haiku in English are now using free form to remain true to the haiku spirit or haiku moment.

RBS: Have your works been translated into other languages? How is the response outside India?

RKS: It is encouraging to find some readers of my poetry abroad. My haiku collection Peddling Dream (in the trilogy Pacem in Terris) appeared in English and Italian in 2003.

Sexless Solitude and Other Poems (2009) was translated into Greek and appeared on lulu.com (January 16, 2010). Bunches of my poems have been translated into Chinese, Albanian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene, Bulgarian, German, Portuguese, Esperanto, Hindi, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Bangla, and other languages. From time to time I google and find it out. So, the response kto my poetry has not been bad.

RBS: How do you account for the absence of punctuation marks in your poetry?

RKS: It helps me achieve a sort of ‘ambiguity’ in a poem and continuity from one poem to another. It also gives a sort of freedom to readers to choose their own pause(s) and recreate their meanings differently. I think it also provides a different style to my poems, like enjambment -- the running on of the thought from one line , couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break.

RBS: You are not in the habit of giving titles to your poems, but in your recent collection you have given titles. Why so?

RKS: It is simply for the convenience of identifying a poem in a volume of selected poems. I still believe that titles tell too much, and in the new collection, no title is integral to the design of the poem. In my volume of Collected Poems , there are no titles.

RBS: How do you perceive the future of Indian English poetry?

RKS: It is promising. There are several new voices that have emerged on the scene since 2000 and I am confident some of them will survive as major poets.

Yet, the academia and media need to turn to poets on the periphery, read them and encourage research on their works, instead of repeating the few names only and

endangering the survival of the very genre of Indian English Poetry.

RBS: One last question, Sir. Do you read your critics? How does unpleasant criticism affect you?

RKS: I read every comment on my poems that comes to my notice. Unless the comment is mischievous, motivated or deliberately written to degrade or defame me (or any other fellow poet I know), I do not react. It is important for me that they stopped by my poems (in print or electronic media) and shared their views. I feel obliged to readers who offer even unpleasant comments.

RBS: Thanks for sparing some time to me for an enlightening conversation.

RKS: I too am honoured to have a long talk with you about my poetry and myself…. All the best -----5.

THE POETICS OF R. K. SINGH Jindagi Kumari M. Phil (English) Dr. Rajni Singh Assistant Professor Indian School of Mines University Dhanbad-826004

The best poetry is a woman concrete, personal, delightful greater than all (My Silence, p.139)

R. K .Singh considers best poetry as a woman. ‘Woman’ is a metaphor that the poet has used for poetry. His concept of poetry and woman is so merged that poetry seems to be dissolved in woman, and woman appears as poetry personified, concrete, personal and delightful.

Both poetry and woman, for the poet, are most treasured entities because they are real. Both can be experienced by the senses; both incite passion, both are intimate; and, above all, both have the power to delight and elevate. Poetry and woman are, thus, conceived as accessories to the higher levels of consciousness. The greatness of poetry, therefore, lies in its power to transcend the physical through physical. For example: Woman is the flesh and spirit of poetry eternal love thirst growing younger as one grows older day by day perfecting the body (Flight of Phoenix, p.70)

Perfecting the body of poetry and woman is the crux of the argument of the poem.

The same idea is reiterated in the following lines: A woman in poet’s vision howsoever strange is ever new; pierce like diamond or thread like pearl to weld in her depth her nudity I love for all her mystery perfect poetry beyond the sky (Above the Earth’s Green, p.72)

Again, in poem number 57 of the same collection, the poet says that woman is “the measure/of all things: body, truth/love, spirit, God, society, peace /and man” (Above the Earth’s Green, p.69).

The poet’s basic ideology of art and poetry is expounded in his idea of woman who is all encompassing and constitutes the major content of his poetry. The other significant themes such as love and sex are but different facets of his core ideology with different manifestations. In one of his interviews given to Kanwar Dinesh Singh in New Indian English Poetry: An Alternative Voice, the poet says: “Woman in my poetry…is a universal woman, the invisible part of the primordial pairs we know as Purush – Prakriti, or Yin-Yang, unchanging over time and culture”.

In the above statement the poet relates ‘woman’ with the basic principle of life and creation. The following poem is an expression of the universal principle of creation:

The split in cypress is vulva I know the roots purush – prakriti call it Yin and Yang our basic sex, lingam and yoni harmonise like lotus rising from the depths of lake through mud crossing existence (My Silence, p.71)

When the poet mentions purush and prakriti in harmony or as one, he emphasizes the presence of maleness and femaleness in each individual. Each person is naturally endowed with both male and female energy or quality and this needs to be harmoniously nurtured to make unadulterated expression of life, celebration and delight, or to feel innocent joy, or to be perfect or whole. Creation is not possible in the absence of feminine principle or prakriti. Therefore, for creation masculine and feminine principles need to be harmonized into a single whole. The same idea is illustrated in the following lines:

The fig of life with roots above and branches below man and woman one (Flight of Phoenix, p.71)

The poet appreciates that with their pragmatism and ability to cope with reality, women are earth bound: man leans towards the sky and woman is rooted in the earth; the deeper the roots of a tree go the higher the branches rise. The poet stands for man and woman in deep synchronicity: woman provides the roots and man provides the flowers. The harmony between the two is basic to physical, emotional, sexual and social existence.

Here, the idea is akin to what one finds in verse 20 of the Brihadaranyank Upanisad: “Then he embraces her, (saying), ‘I am the vital breath and you are the speech; you are speech and I am the vital breath: I am the Saman and you are the Rg, I am heaven and you are the earth. Come let us strive together….”

This verse signifies the union of man and woman in the act of creation. For life and existence, the union of the two elements of feminine and masculine, prakriti- purush or yoni and lingam is essential: Love is my prison and freedom both in her presence my wish her wish to be everything her shiva and shakti a dual- single me and she, one

(Flight of Phoenix, p.54)

Similarly, the reference to Shiva and Shakti as ‘dual- single’ in the poem again links the poet’s inspiration to the Classical Hindu Mythology. Mitali De Sarkar, too, in her article, “Harmony in Duality: Indianess in R.K.Singh’s Poetry”, avers : “According to the Svetasvatara Upanisad, Iswar and Sakti are regarded as the parents of the universe: “only when united with Shakti has Siva power to manifest; but without her the god cannot stir”.

This principle of harmony of the two opposite elements in fact evinces the poet’s craving for union in all the spheres of life. Since most of the problems originate due to discordance of ideas, modern world is full of elements of disintegration and destruction threatening existence of humanity as well as of creativity.

Poetry, like a woman, conceals beauty in its form, which provides emotional pleasure and spiritual calm, leading to creativity. This creativity is the result of the amalgamation of the two poetic elements: the form and the content that unite to make an inseparable whole. This view is beautifully brought out by the poet in the following lines:

A poem is like life sound and silence movement and stillness fragment and wholeness Avibhiktam Vibhakteshu like Shiva and Shakti lotus and mud (Music Must Sound, p.100)

More importantly, the ideology of union as professed by R.K.Singh, is not something alien, rather it is essentially rooted in Indian tradition and culture, as clear from his use of ‘Shiva and Shakti’, ‘dual- single’ and ‘purush- prakriti’.

In addition, R.S. Tiwary in his scholarly article, ‘“Secret of the First Menstrual Flow”: R.K.Singh’s Commitment to Fleshly Reality’ in New Indian English Poetry: An Alternative Voice, opines that the poet frequently alludes to purush-prakriti -- the celebrated formulation of Sankhya Philosophy. Purusha is the counterpart of the Brahman of the Advaita darshana that remains inactive but when he comes in contact with prakriti,that is, the feminine principle, he gets agitated and their union eventually leads to

creation. To quote R.S. Tiwary: “This integration of twin principles of Masculinity and Femininity has its roots in the Vedic provision that the ‘Paramatman’ the Supreme being, divided himself into two, man and woman, to enjoy himself, becoming bored by solitariness.”

Reference to “Avibhiktam Vibhakteshu”, too, is made to present the philosophy of the Bhagvat Gita in a nutshell by the poet. The idea is interpreted in the Bhagvat Gita as “Even when it is fragment, even in that fragment the whole world resides.” Thus, it can be understood that the poet’s ideology is developed around some of the fundamentals of the Vedic philosophy.

Woman: The Source of Love Love is the guiding of emotion that leads to unity as well as harmony. This love springs from charm and beauty. R.K.Singh’s concept of love facilitates the exploration of various related aspects of his ideology. The poet advocates physical love and glorifies it without any reticence, as a reinforcer of emotional and spiritual bond. Physical love, for the poet, is in no way demeaning, because it is a fact of life. Inhibition or hideousness in the matter, therefore, underlies hypocrisy. It is in this form that sex becomes instrumental in exposing the pretensions imbued in all walks of modern life.

Elaborating the poet’s ideal of love one finds that it is connected with his ideal of beauty and pleasure. Since woman and poetry are considered as the chief sources possessing eternal beauty and eternal pleasure, intimacy with them leads to physical as well as spiritual comfort, as in the poem: She is the tree green and wide abundantly dressed overflowing spreading her sleeves blesses all in her cool shade…

I feel nearer God (My Silence, p.137)

Here, the tree imagery used for woman indicates her physical glories, as she is “abundantly dressed”. This bodily charm and all-encompassing love make her a source of enduring comfort and the speaker feels “nearer God” in her company. She is so overpowering that her presence cannot be resisted. In the following poem the speaker helplessly submits to her original charms and cherishes a dream to reach “the pavilion of eternity” with her assistance: Blind I see her beauty deaf I hear her melody ignorant I partake of her knowledge poor I share her wealth

in - drawn her vision reigns my heart (My Silence, p.139)

In another poem the speaker is found looking forward to his progress in the movement of woman: I seek new strides in each of your moves new dreams in your eyes and thighs nude lyrics in lips shape the night’s sway set my heart afire I seek the lingering fragrance the rhythm that frenzies the soul the timeless joy you conceal

I seek the hues that blaze being and shade the nest I rest in: your chains renew my freedom each time I look at you I see natural woman the fount of poetry.

(Some Recent Poems, p.33)

The poem represents an analogy between woman and poetry. Moreover, the idea suggested in the poem gets illustration when we examine the poet’s statement from an interview given to K.D.Singh: “I see woman (and her nudity) as the mainspring of our being (and art) as “ the major incident in man’s life,” shaping the psyche and constituting the sensory experience. She is eternal and there is no poetry possible without her.”

R.S.Tiwary’s remark also seems apt when he says; “Woman is the chief source of his (R.K.Singh’s) creative afflatus; woman not as an imaginary angel but woman in her all corporeal riches....” It is on this account that Tiwary studies the poet’s frequent references to sexual imagery and symbols like “eyes”, “thighs” and “breast”, as part of the influence of ancient Indian erotic poetry.

The poet himself admits this association when he says in an interview defending his interpretation of physical love in his poetry: “Our ancient erotic manuals, Kamsutra, Kokashastra, and Ratirahasya treat love as a matter of giving and receiving pleasure. The aesthetics of erotica, the sexual metaphor makes it possible to convey what it feels like to be filled with desire; such a state, in our classics, has been valued highly, as sexual love is seen as a means of access to the realm where human and divine meet.”

It is perceived that the poet’s treatment of love reinforces his fundamental idea related to unity. This unity, however, is not limited to bodily union but touches one’s consciousness. It results in the evolution of a harmonious society. The following poem hints at the poet’s effort to preserve the humanity within man by means of poetry:

I make myself man each time I create setting, character, tone in a poem create poetic sense disclose my natural being playing five senses my distortions and inversions evolve in history and society to save the man in me through poetry of self (Flight of Phoenix,p.53)

Here, poetry is conceived as a play with dramatic elements like setting, character, tone and poetic sense and may present a sensuous drama involving five senses but its purpose ultimately lies in safeguarding values and humanity. Thus, poetry is a platform for the poet to expose the distortions and deformities of self and society. The following poem also contains an identical thought, but the attention, here, can be transferred to the technical part of poetry: A poem is madness unique fascination liberating language re-creates, re-symbolises disfiguring the known secured norms inverting the safe existence (Flight of Phoenix, p.53)

A poem is, hence, a camouflage, because it means something different from what it appears to be suggesting. This multiplicity fascinates and is equated to madness. The logic behind the liberation of language is to “re-create”, “re-symbolise” and “disfigure” the conventional norms to refresh them and ensure safe existence.

Commenting on Singh’s manipulation of the medium, R.S.Tiwary opines: “Language is exceedingly malleable in his hands. Like Keats, he takes delight in coining phrases, such as, ‘fractured faith’, ‘drugged sleep’, ‘rituals of flesh’, ‘dark combats’, ‘that icy sun’ etc. Although there are few purple patches in his poetry, yet the similes and metaphors employed by him are always delightful, carrying a pregnancy of meanings.”

For the poet, poetry is not “…just functional/ like brief-case” (Memories Unmemoried), it is an extension of his self. R.K.Singh advocates subjectivity in poetry. He approves personal poetry because it can serve as an instrument of self- exploration. In the following statement he stresses the same idea:“I think, I often talk about myself, withdrawn into my personal world, to me, perhaps, it is a means of defying the disgusting socio-political world outside…By writing brief personal lyrics...I make my life a work of art or enlarge myself to the universal sameness of human feeling.” The following lines sum up the poet’s thought: Poetry is prayer in life’s vicissitude:

a saving grace against manipulated or unmanifested odds overwhelming without warrant or patterning (Above the Earth’s Green, p.13)

Some poems by the poet give clue to his sources of inspiration which lie mainly in his past experiences and memories, as the construct of the given poems suggests: “What I write shows/my past….” (Memories Unmemoried) and “Oasis in memories/of desert rhythm of wilderness/ sound is the poetry” (Memories Unmemoried).

The word ‘memory’ has been used as a metaphor, which stands for creative process, or imagination where past experiences get synthesized and work as awareness for the present. Also, the poet, names one of his poetic collection as Memories Unmemoried. Memory, therefore, is a vision device to collect a timeless frame to express the consciousness. It is free and can make illusion of a truth as well as truth of an illusion.

What is being unmemoried is the expression, which is the visible aspect of awareness.

Thus, by expressing the memories, the poet relives them and soothes the agitated mind undergoing the conflict of sweet bitter impressions. The poet’s consciousness guides him towards the realization and acceptance of differences and thus manifests his broad and unconventional outlook, as in the following poem: A poem elusive like a butterfly is the dynamics of a culture a process of exchange a cultural artifact fascinating stimulating reshaping reader and creator it incorporates multiplicity of modern man fluid, mobile multicultural manipulating matrix of tongues and patterns of languages into a stable whole of self awareness (My Silence, p.169)

The poet advocates brevity of expression. His belief in precision is proved by his own poems, which are mostly brief in structure. As he articulates in one of his poems: “moon is the poem in sky/silence sounds in brevity” (Above the Earth’s Green).He compares poetry to the moon, which occupies a small space in the vast sky, but its smallness

becomes significant with the effect it casts. The poet practices brevity by following the imagistic and symbolic patterns.

Irony is another remarkable feature of R.K.Singh’s poetic style. He employs subtle irony in his poems by means of symbols and images. For example: “A monkey turned the coat/to let off snakes/hidden in velvet lining” (Music Must Sound) Another important aspect of R.K.Singh’s poetics is that he does not give titles to his poems nor does he use punctuation marks; thereby he individualizes his style availing himself of poetic freedom. Moreover, the poet has not used a period in the first four collections, viz. My Silence (1985), Memories Unmemoried (1988), Music Must Sound (1990), Flight of Phoenix (1990), but one can find semicolon, colon and dashes in some of his poems. The same style appears in Above the Earth’s Green, Cover to Cover, and The River Returns. By not using punctuation, such as a comma at the end of the line or a period at the end of the sentence,the poet frequently ends up using enjambment. As a result, the meaning flows as the lines progress. The reader has the freedom to understand one or more meanings from the poem. The instances of this kind of verse can be found in e.e.cummings who created enjambment combined with the use of punctuation as an art form.

Regarding the poems without titles I.K.Sharma’s remark calls for one’s attention when he says “To a common reader a title is a big help that makes a poem accessible.”

Obviously, a common reader cannot be assumed an expert of the nuances of poetic language. So, there remain chances of misinterpretation. This even increases when the content of poetry is as unconventional as sex. However, the poet believes that poems without titles and punctuation marks allow greater freedom to the reader to imagine and interpret the meaning. Even if “titles tell too much”, as R.K.Singh believes, they limit the meaning and lessen the effect of the poem.

The poet also evinces interest in alliterative device as a means to generate musical effect in his verses. For example: Love leads to beauty and vision with perfection pillar of dust or fleeting shadow can turn into light revelling pure songs wrought out of the clay blending joys in naked passion seek signs of self- discovery roving with delight and perfume of fellowship in valley of peace (Flight of Phoenix, p.55)

Formal Features R.K.Singh adopts Japanese form of three-line seventeen syllables haiku and uses it as stanza unit in many of his poems. Although he does not always conform to the

traditional pattern of haiku (5-7-5 syllable) and tanka (5-7-5-7-7), he has uses three- line stanza pattern that appear haiku-like and thus seems to nativize the foreign form in his style. In addition, one finds two- line, four- line, five- line stanza patterns but they have an occasional occurrence. Haiku in different beats, 3-5-3, 4-6-4, 5-7-5 or in free form, are individually composed by the poet in his haiku collections as well as in stanza form in his longer poems. His poems are without rhyme but there is always some or the other sort of rhythm that the poet creatively develops.

R.K.Singh does not believe in conforming to the conventional or the outmoded but wishes to ‘shatter’ them by creating, what he calls ‘rebel rays’ in plain unadorned language. He also discards the high sounding or philosophical issues and rejoices giving vent to the ordinary or personal impressions because these are true to one’s experiences: Philosophy frightens me confounds obscurity with profundity: …I don’t reflect time and space or probe metaphysics to construct Everest I love to climb the peak and search the best route without high minded debate that affronts simplicity symmetry, nudity a poet’s beauty (Above the Earth’s Green, p.89)

The poetics of R.K.Singh echoes what Wordsworth talks about a perfect woman: She was a phantom of delight A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light. (‘Perfect Woman’)

R.K.Singh’s poetics,thus, signifies the new momentum Indian English Poetry has now gained. He not only sings love lyrics and glorifies human body but also talks about existential issues and ecological and social environment. His verses with the use of enjambment add richness of meaning to the images and metaphors that he uses in typical Indian contexts. The chief aim of his poetry is to: ...discover essence of beauty spring a move toward self harmony perfection and peace, prelude to nude enlightenment to carve life in full

(Above the Earth’s Green, p.14)

To sum up, R.K. Singh’s poetic belief is oriented towards Beauty, Self- Harmony, and Peace, with its base in Indian thought and culture which considers search for beauty or truth as the chief aim of life.

References: 1. Singh, R.K. My silence and Other Selected Poems. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1994.

2. Singh, R.K. Above the Earth’s Green. Calcutta: Writer’s workshop, 1997.

3. Sharma, I.K. ed. New Indian English Poetry: An Alternative voice. Jaipur: Book enclave, 2004, p.277.

4. Radhakrishnan, S.ed. The Principal Upanisads, New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1953.

5. Hayden, John O.ed. William Wordsworth: The Poems, Vol.I, Penguin Books,1990.

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FORM AND FLOW OF R.K.SINGH’S TANKA AND HAIKU IN THE RIVER RETURNS By :ASHA VISWAS R. K. Singh’s first collection of poems My Silence was published in 1985. Since then he has published eleven more books of poems. His latest is Sexless Solitude and Other Poems published from Bareilly in 2009. This means one collection every two years. The River Returns (Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2009) is a collection of Tanka and Haiku. It would be relevant here to write briefly about these two forms in which Singh usually writes.

The Art of Tanka Composition Born in Japan, Tanka is as old as 1300 years. From Japan it traveled to the West and has many lovers in English speaking countries. Tanka is much older than Haiku but younger to Waka. It was first practised in feudal Japan (Heian period) where it was a prerequisite for every courtier to write and appreciate aesthetically beautiful poems. Thus classical tanka reflected the refined tone of Japan’s courts and its courtesans. The traditional classical tanka was used to exchange love notes between the lovers. The courtly lover, after spending a night with his lady love, sent a “thank you” note to her in the form of a tanka. The

feeling and experience of the previous night was artistically written on a fan or on a stem of a blossom. A messenger delivered these love messages. While this “go between” waited, a tanka, in reply to the love note received, was composed and sent back. The tanka, sent as a relply, was not easy to be composed but the Japanese courtesans had learnt this art to please their lovers. The messages were written in a language which could be understood and appreciated only by the lover.

These morning love note became so famous that contests were held for reading and writing of the tanka, and Japanese emperors ordered the collection of these short love notes.

This traditional expression of passion has undergone great change in the present times. What has not changed is its number of syllables. In Japan it is still written in 31 syllabic units, 5-7-5-7-7. Tanka written in English does not follow this syllabic pattern and often uses less than 31 syllables. As far as the subject matter of modern tanka, specially the tanka written in English, is concerned, it can now be any human emotion expressed in simple language. Images are used to express human emotion. In his article “ From Haiku to Tanka : Reversing Poetical History” Gerald St. Maur writes : In going beyond the experience of the moment, the tanka takes us from delight to fulfillment, from insight to comprehension, and psycho-organism to love; in general, from the spontaneous to the measured. To achieve this requires a fundamental shift in emphasis : from glimpse to gaze , from first sight to exploration, … from awareness to perspective… to compose a tanka is to articulate reflectively… it takes us from the simple to the complex. More pointedly, it moves us from the poetry of the noun to the poetry of the verb; in weaving terms, from the thread to the tapestry; in botanical terms, from seed to plant, in chemical terms, from element to compound ; in painting terms, from sketch to picture; and in musical terms from chord to melody.1 Tanka, as a lyrical form, uses figurative language and is autobiographical in tone. It creates a balance between the self and the outside world. The outward phenomenon is used as a backdrop to express the inner world. Tanka is not rhymed, its one is elevated and it never becomes vulgar in themes.

Contents and Structure of Haiku Haiku, in its present form, is only 300 years old but Hokku, the original form, is as old as the Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhism accepts the limitations of language owing to its human origin. Nagarjuna believed that language can refer

only to those objects that are mortal. It fails to reach the truth of things. This conviction that metaphysical assertions cannot be made through ordinary language is accepted by Ch‘an Buddhism. It was for this reason that Ch’an tradition invented new ways to use language that could help the seeker in his search for liberation.

One of the Ch’an masters Yun-men wen-yen(862-949) was known for his one word answers to questions. These short answers revealed his spontaneous reactions to questions, rather than well thought out, premeditated answers. In spite of their limitations, words are not completely useless. Language becomes transmuted by the attainment of realization. Dogen calls such enlightened words “dotoku”. Yet another important thing in Ch’an Buddhism was the way they looked at nature. Dogen believed that mountains and rivers are ’sutras’ or texts. 2 The entire world is a sacred text and nonsentient objects of nature can act as preachers of these sacred texts. This wordless preaching of nature cannot be heard with one’s ears but with one’s eyes.

Hokku retains both there features – the spirituality and deep understanding of nature. It focuses on the essence of an object or an event in nature without the intrusion of the poet that would distort the reality. The perception in hokku is an intuitive one and not an ‘I’/‘other’, subject/object kind of process. Being rooted in Zen, Hokku is nonintellectual, has no faith in reason and words. It emphasizes all that is natural and concrete, It is also a pure experience of enlightenment (Satori).

From Hokku to Haiku has been a long journey. The early translators of haiku into English were R.H. Blyth and Harold G. Henderson. Blyth’s four volumes of haiku were published in 1949 and Henderson’s in 1959. Both these translators differ in their views about haiku. While Blyth believed that Zen is at the center of haiku, Henderson stated : Primarily, it (haiku) is a poem; and being a poem it is intended to express and to evoke emotion … it may be noted in passing that the use of ‘ki’(season) is probably at the base of a charge that has been advanced that haiku are more concerned with nature than with human affairs. Such a statement is ridiculous.

Haiku are more concerned with human emotions than with human acts, and natural phenomena are used to reflect human emotions… 3 While Henderson believes that subjective human emotions are the most important part of a haiku, Blyth rules out subjectivity. In contemporary haiku even technology is accepted as a form of nature. Thus the meaning of nature is completely changed. While Blyth believes in the spiritual effect of nature,

Pizzarelli plays with the word ‘nature’ and completely disassociates it from the outward phenomenon : To say that nature is all and all is nature, that the substance of this planet, the universe is of one nature is also to conclude that nothing is unnatural or artificial.4

Apart from their contradictory views about the content of a haiku, the modern practitioners of this form differ in their use of punctuation also. While some use minimal punctuation, others, imitating Ezra Pound and Company, use no punctuation at all. Thus each practitioner of haiku has become the arbiter of content and structure of his verse. There is no prescriptive critic now who can say this is/not a haiku because it does not use/uses spirituality, has / has not nature, does not use/ uses punctuation.

R. K. Singh’s Sensuous Tanka In the light of this discussion of traditional and contemporary tanka and haiku, we can study R. K. Singh’s collection of poems The River Returns. The title of the collection is taken from his haiku No. 347 – “Dancing/ a few muddied crocs:/the river returns”. In his preface Singh confesses that he seeks to be “visual or sensuous” and has tried to express : natural concrete action or object or experiences from one’s whole being , and does not’fake’ poetic feelings or render fictitious or imaginative experience …

I have tried to evoke the essence of the moment in its sensory details as selflessly as possible. Even as I appear to speak directly, the subjective and the objective tend to mix up.5 The first section of the collection consists of 144 tanka. This section begins with spring season and ends with summer and dust storms. The poet is left “awaiting the wave/that will wash away empty hours/and endless longing.” With spring comes love. Love (kama) is predominantly associated with the renewal of the world, the spring. The voluptuous spring time brings in the biological rite of the amorous play. Love is presented in its dual aspect – separation and union.

The anonymous woman of the first few pages is seen waiting for the love tryst.

Each of these early tanka is a visual of her different emotions. Her yearning for the lover is augmented by the song of the Koel (the basic emotion of love is aroused in tanka 1) . The promise of a love tryst makes her face glow with

passion. ( The basic emotion changes into passion in tanka 2 ). Tanka 3 presents her as a teasing wanton waxing and waning like the moon ( the pleasure of feeling). From tanka 4 to tanka 10 her loneliness and sadness ( the basic emotion of grief in separation) is depicted. The season of spring is simultaneously a source of misery and delight. Separated from her lover, the woman is presented as a conventional “Virahini” . She is delpressed, she weeps, she is afraid of going to bed alone and wants to die. In tanka 10 her loneliness is presented through an apt visual : At the river she folds her arms and legs resting her head upon the knees and sits as an island This love in separation ends by the 12 th tanka. From tanka 15 love in union is presented in all its boldness. Singh revisits his favourite trope.

In tanka 13 we move from separation to union, “after three decades love waves/tense the flesh and rock the night”. Singh surpasses others in the description of fragmented female anatomy. The reader is brought to the key hole to peep at the “erect nipples” (tanka 15 ), “foamy water… sting her vulva/a jelly fish passed/ through the crotch making her shy”, ( tanka 16 ), “nude dance…/ to match upstanding/ nipples under the blouse” ( tanka 18 ).

As in conventional love-in-union, Singh’s woman, too, is bashful : When I wanted to change seats my friend said she can only if the door is locked the light out and her mom in another city

( tanka 20 )

She is also presented as a wanton who takes delight in the love play and the amatory art. In tanka 102 she “loves the etching on skin/to enhance nudity”.

The traditional tanka expressed the emotions of the lovers, specially their grief resulting from their separation, their desire for reunion, sadness caused by old age, unhappy present and absence of the lover. Singh’s collection of tanka too presents this basic contrariety between pleasure and grief. Intense love fills the lover with fear. First, there is fear of rejection: Roses await sun and wind to clear the baleful fog : I fear she’ll say no to my love again

( tanka 72 )

A number of tanka depict night and nightmare. Darkness and light are archetypal symbols and denote the duality of flesh and spirit, female and male, unconscious and conscious, evil and good, tamas and rajas etc. In Singh there is only one tanka ( No. 15 ) which shows the lovers together at night- “You and I alive/in cold winter night feeling/ warmth of your body…” In the rest of these short poems, night is the backdrop of fear, grief, loneliness, physical pain etc. In tanka 39 it is night that turns his dreams “to nightmare/again fear grips my soul/ I sense her presence around”. In tanka 49 the lover’s loneliness during night is vividly described. Thus : My hand held out in the dark remained empty: no one reached it to give joy of the meeting hands In the absence of the loved one, the lover is haunted by her memories.

Each object of nature, specially the flowers and their fragrance, brings back her memories. In tanka 69 it is the “little petals to the ground/ echoing our first embrace”. In tanka 138 “ her letter smells/ the lotus she wore each time/meeting in the dark”. The lotus image here is brought from Indian erotics where it was a representative of the force and energy inherent in the waters. Water was also regarded as a female substance and the lotus was associated with similar creative female principle. The lotus image in Singh does not have a tensive quality. It suggests only the erotic and sensuous and hence the smell of lotus causes the separated lover to grieve. Memories of the past (happy days ) rise like ghosts and turn the heart into stone : Ghosts rise to mate in moonlight tear the tombs frighten with fingers rhino horns rock the center granite sensation ( tanka 39 ) This reminds us of Shelley’s lines : Forget the dead, the past Oh yet there are ghosts, the memories that make the heart a tomb.

Besides this grief and pain that result from separation, we also find sadness in Singh on account of old age, asthma and insomnia. Tanka 58 shows him as “ an insomniac/ weak with desires” while in No. 89 “wrinkles on the skin” remind him “ of time’s passage”. In No 108 “ asthmatic bouts haunt” him. In 119

he is again “ down with stroke”. Tanka 120 presents him as an old man thinking of death Aging he thinks of the ashes and the long trip ahead in spirit feels the earth he would become celebrating life “Allergic asthma” recurs in No. 134. In No. 142 “dust storm and rain shatter/all hopes hanging by snapped wire”.

Amid this scenario of separation and union of lovers hyphenated by hope for reunion and depression at separation, a few visuals of conjugal love come as a jarring note. The lover, who was heard singing the “body’s song”(54), finds his voice “brown like autumn/crushed in noisesI can’t /understand…” (95 ). There is no love between them and they sleep with their “backs to each other” (87). In spite of being together, there is no understanding between them : One thousand miles travelling together in tense silence he and she contemplate the next round of duel (tanka 111 ) To escape the boredom of these scenes, one can come to such intense sensuous visuals as : A cloud - eagle curves to the haze in the west skimming the sail on soundless sea

(tanka 45 )

Singh is capable of creating pure poetry where nature is left to itself but observed from a close angle. It is not a glance but a gaze.

R. K. Singh’s Haiku for All seasons The second section of The River Returns consists of 372 haiku. The collection begins with a dash of bright colours -- hibiscus, oleanders, rose, chrysanthemum, and ends with three visuals of rainbow. Here Singh gives us sequences and each sequence is related to a season. It is reminiscent of Bhojpuri cycles of seasons called “ Barahmasa”, the traditional folk poetry from eastern India that celebrates seasonal changes and diverse moods of nature. In Singh’s haiku too this cycle begins with spring. In the vernal symbol there is a translucence of primary principles. Hibiscus, in the very first haiku, becomes a

description of the male element : “ Love tickles/with erect pistil/hibiscus,” while oleander stands for the female element. This vernal union of male and female elements at the natural level reconciles union at human level. This depiction of flora also gives life to an interior landscape – there is a whole gamut of human emotions.

Even the winter season is not presented in its negative shade. We have a crystal pure visual of the snow covered hill : Veiling her breasts with the seasons first snows the hill blushes Singh tries to strike a balance between the personal and social concerns yet most of the times it is the personal that is privileged over the public. In this section also there is recurrence of old motifs – monotony of married life (49, 180, 181), shadow of old age (61), his loneliness and asthma ( 74, 90, 97, 114, 207, 208, 209). From haiku 150 to 200 there is love play and female body, sometimes covered : Her shapely figure in orange blouse and blue jeans strained at the hips (22 ) and sometimes bare : Rain-soaked sun sheds its sultry light : her bare back In his Preface Singh clearly says that he does not make any difference between haiku and senryu, so we cannot criticize his miniature poems for the absence of the ‘satori’ state of consciousness.

As an old practitioner of haiku, Singh no longer adheres to the 5-7-5 syllabic structure and makes minimal use of punctuation.

All lovers of tanka and haiku would love to read this collection.

References 1.

Maur. Gerald St. “From Haiku to Tanka : Reversing Poetical

History” , (TSA Newsletter, II : I , Spring 2001. ) 2.

Dogen Zenji, Shobagenzo (The Eye and Treasury of the True Law) 4 Vols. Trans. Kosen Nishiyama (Tokyo: Nakayama Shobo,1986), Vol. I, p. 105.

3.

Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku (New York : Doubleday, 1958), pp. 2, 5.

4.

Pizzarelli, Alan. A Haiku Path (New York : Haiku Society of America, 1994), p. 116.

5.

Singh, R.K. The River Returns (Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2006), pp. 1 –2.

--Dr Asha Viswas, (Retd) Professor of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221005, India

7.

“I seek freedom from myself”: Existential Restlessness In R.K. Singh’s Sexless Solitude and Other Poems (2008) By Dr Yana Atanasova Rowland Senior Lecturer in English Literature

English Department, Plovdiv University in Bulgaria Email: yanarowland1977@abv.bg

Abstract A poignant appeal towards ontological partiality, R. K. Singh’s collection Sexless Solitude and Other Poems seeks to awaken our sensitivity towards a wide variety of issues of ethical validity, such as: a world falling apart amidst global technocratic nonchalance; postmodern unconcern towards the organic role of religious dialogue; the notion of the futility of academic humanitarian aspirations of one of a “hanging generation” paralysed by inner spiritual angst and troubled by physiological inconsistencies; the universality of the condition of alienation which transgresses the conceptual boundaries of gender and of national identity; the devaluation of the human potential and society’s overall neglect towards artistic creativity. In melancholically meditative yet vehemently self-critical overtones, R.K. Singh’s lyrical speaker questions the integrity of his own identity and that of his Time, claiming the necessity of acknowledging existence in historical perspective. The poet gives us an individuality tending to close up for lack of external spiritual resource. Also prioritised are: ageing and dying; the failing sense of tradition; the difficulty of one’s political self-evaluation; the meticulous, almost medically precise examination of the sense of internal disease; the secret hope of reaching a realm impervious to the need of self-definition. Those stem from the author’s perceptiveness towards the hyper-ordinate problems of Time, Memory and the Past, and could be seen to demonstrate his hermeneutic vigilance within a literary space prepared to examine personal worth against observable acts of communal experiential cultural awareness – in actuality and in historical research.

What unites the melancholic yet vehemently argumentative lyrical speakers of all the poems in R. K. Singh’s collection Sexless Solitude and Other Poems (2008) is a common confession as to man’s generic inability to relate to Time and Space other than through negation of complacency, of self-content and of any possible feeling of superiority over those who are no more. A typically alienated post-modern researcher, the poet here seems ambiguously composed of a variety of manifested concerns for history, physical integrity, mental well-being, social nonchalance and humanitarian reticence. The fate of such a meditative scholar could be defined as outliving and memorialising. He tends to codify the meaningful excerpts of a multi-cultural global consciousness, being analytically active and partial to the ethically formative value of the notion of existing for the sake of posterity, in the name of an Other in respect of whom man holds the obligation of sharing: sharing knowledge by remembering. From the point of view of linguistic coherence, striking is the intensity of: the continuous flow of words (some of which very much ingrained in local Hindu culture and therefore challenging for the eyes of an external examiner); the subverted patterns of traditional English syntax; the

abandoned traditional regulated iambic rhyme-pattern; the tendency for resorting to enjambment; the episodicity of narration. The poet’s endeavours to verify his own Poetic Self are seemingly dramatically monologic yet the quantity of particularized memories of actual events (communal or strictly private) hint at an overtly confessed need to dialogise, to share, to be heard and responded to, to live in heteronomy 1. Reciprocally, the poet wants to impart knowledge to an Other and to thus protect that Other from the self’s general proclivity to privatise, subjugate and deform Life. In Sexless Solitude and Other Poems we are gradually taught that Life ought to be at all times regarded as Cathartic continuous interaction between mutually related meaningful parts of existence of individual contributions of temporal validity. And also, that, ironically enough, Survivor and Dead, Author and Interpreter, Including and Included, or at last Present and Past, alternate all the time. Such hermeneutically fruitful alternation could be called the Eucharistic Eventness of Co-Being2.

The prevalent self-reflective tone of voice in R. K. Singh’s collection whereby author and hero merge seems to give evidence of one variety of what Bakhtin, in his fundamental contribution to literary anthropology and ontology called “Author and hero in Aesthetic Activity”, defines as “crisis of authorship”3. That is, when the poet’s rescuing transgredience (aesthetically mirroring the attitude between the “I” and the Other in reality where the “I” is in the capacity of externalising, objectifying and completing the Other by virtue of the extra knowledge its possesses over what is “Not-I”) is weak and he finds himself unable to control the lyrical persona’s domination who is himself thus left on his own – to toil over the riddle of the purpose of his being in this world and gradually turns into a non-finalizable hero. The author’s reflex concerning the hero is thus internalised within the hero’s own intentionality. If the lyrical speaker’s representations here could be argued to be numberless and discontinuous, so appears to be the ambience of whole named Sexless Solitude and Other Poems (2008). Yet at the core there seems to lie the argument that the Self, taken in isolation, proves to be insufficient a tool for understanding and conceptualising the whole of Life since every concrete Self’s 1 Cf Levinas 2000: 298, 301.

2 Cf Derrida 1998: 93-4.

3 Cf Bakhtin 2003: 240.

existence is an entity temporarily accommodating the existence of a range of Other individuals whose centre the Self could never actually be (Cf Bakhtin 2003: 180).

When the speaker “[seeks] freedom from [himself],”4 as in Valley of Self, he could be said to search for a communally trustworthy milieu of sharing his lifetime knowledge in a way which maintains, rather than severs, the sense of tradition and social belonging.

He is looking for an appropriate technique of preserving and expressing, or externalising in contributions to Life as an organic whole, rather than denying, the many cultural variables that foster his rather contemporary perception of “sensory overload” (Overload). In Aloof we read that “unlinked to the trees/ he doesn’t know his family/ stands aloof, questions// ancestors don’t change/ the mood of the weather:/ the leaf reads his name/ nature’s wonder on the edge/…/ thousands of lights/ twinkle in colours like stars--/seat belt fastened”. There stands out the image of a crestfallen rootless traveller in space and time – at odds with its surrounding natural environment which cares not for his particular internal anguish. The selected excerpt also suggests that one could not possibly change one’s origin, one’s past, one’s predecessors; but also that one’s previous history of human trace, meaningful and dear as it may be to the individual, matters not within the multitudinous cadences of Nature which healthily passes by, rather than takes notice of, this solitary pilgrim. This orphaned despair is, to rephrase Terry Eagleton, “both infinite merit and absolute ruin, a sickness which it is the greatest ill-fortune never to have contracted. For we can arrive at the truth, tragically, only by way of negativity (…)”5 It is by way of acknowledging one’s orphanhood, of one’s involuntary untraceability, of one’s “I can’t” that the poet proposed the idea that the I is but the condition of the possibility of the I’s life but never its valued hero (Cf Bakhtin 2003: 180). It seems that the poet takes an attitude of hermeneutic vigilance when he writes: “I may create space/ for you to stand but I can’t/ become the legs/…/” (On Her Birthday). He declares that he may be taken as the condition of (very possibly) his child’s life, but that the active ingredient lies outside his strong intention to explore the purpose of Being. If in the poem just referred to it is a child whom the speaker addresses, it is intriguing to note that this heir is also 4 All excerpts from, and references to, R. K. Singh’s poetry have been supported by the author’s kind permission to quote from the original Prakash 2008 edition.

5 Eagleton 2003: 51-2.

described as an amalgam of the symbolic marriage between two celestial bodies (the planets Mars and Moon, written with lower-case initials – a sign of the generic repetition of their internal characteristics of, respectively, heat/ activity and cold/ tranquillity).

Would we be right in concluding that the poet here is carrying out his ontological research over the meaning of Being in Time? And if so, he quite probably hints that temporality (alluded to by the reference to the limited capacities/ lifetime of a parent/ predecessor) is the actual condition of the existence of historicity. We may be able to perceive R. K. Singh’s idiosyncratic engagement with the phenomenology of Presence which is also hermeneutics per se: it implies interpretation by way of recognizing the mutually enriching dependence between part & whole, or Self & Other, or Heir & Predecessor, or Present & Past.6 In “Ignite Minds With Flickers” man is again condemned for his “smallness of mind”: his existence is likened to that of a short-last piece of news which flickers and then dies in the media, echoless. Pettiness and spiritual starvation appear to be constant characteristics of man’s life which is but a repeated “surfing channels with coffee.” Yet the symbolic oblivion of a piece of news (or a lifetime forgotten), quite in reverse formation, yet again builds to the effect of proposing some organic, or communal, milieu amidst which meaning soars up and is then quieted by the doldrums of the steady technocratic mundane. Tennyson sighs: “Death is the end of life; ah, why/ Should life all labour be? /…/ all hath suffer’d change/ …/ Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange: / And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. /…/ We have had enough of action, and of motion me. /…/ Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore/ Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, /…/” (The Lotos-Eaters, 1832). “Standing still/ among the ungodly”, R. K. Singh hopes for rest, but where – “in dust? Or in the light/ of living?” Or maybe he ought to “bear without regret/ the burdens of the world/ loss of love, or even hope/ to live like a lotus leaf…” To expose oneself to the outside and be made doubly vulnerable, or to curl and protect oneself like a leaf rolled up and let one’s potential die in? In any case, the vegetable imagery in both poets in effect produces a sense of continuity and growth, a sense of dependence, and social relation, of a thwarted attempt to get lost, rather than a sense of starved and irredeemable alienation. Similarly, in “Portraits We Fear To See,” 6 Cf Heidegger 1997: 19, 21, 37, 197.

we have an emphasized image of accumulation, of growth and generational amelioration: “culture is not repression/ but sublimation through expression.” The movement is always in the direction of externalised verification, in the presence of more than one participants, to the outside, even though in essence mostly of man’s inside is chanted. Temporality and merciless indiscriminate chance variability are essential components of existence: “there’s no forever/ in the cocoon life that bursts/ in the thin air in moments/ most unexpected” (An Unfinished Psalm). Reciprocal appears to be an Almighty’s benign intervention (ibid.), yet since unceasing motion is implied at all times, sense is maintained as a lasting ingredient. So that in Holi, difference is finally revealed to mean “freedom”: difference in the sense of comparability of, or dialogic interaction between, a number of “I-s” and “Not-I-s” that, taken together as a whole, make sense and so claim spatial definition. Or, to remind ourselves of Heidegger yet again, the world of presence (i.e. of interactive dutifulness) is a world of compatibility, of exchange: between own and other which both co-constitute Space and make Time matter (Cf Heidegger 1997: 113, 118). The poet warns us: “living in isolation/ builds islands” (A New Life). Or, “nonsuffering is no key to nirvana:” since “island existence” is “degeneration” and “life only freezes” (Nirvana – II). Or, do we perhaps hear Donne preach: “No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”7 R. K. Singh’s collection reads, too, like a subtly constructed elegy on the death of humanitarianism traditionally embedded in literature- and language-teaching – on an academic level. Once again, the speaker in Abusing Is Sleep suffocates amidst pervasive mediocrity which washes away his aspirations towards bringing salvation to the modern technocrat’s mind. His head is “an abyss,” indented by “the drugged/ wholes of the mind.” The very self-conscious image of the “poet-professor/ unable to redress/ his inner balances” rises, victimized by “academia that care/ a tuppence for native/ geniuses” that 7 John Donne, MEDITATION XVII (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624). The text of the poem is quoted from: http://isu.indstate.edu/ilnprof/ENG451/ISLAND/text.html. Date of access: 26th April 2010.

he apparently perceives to be the core of a particular national range of talents from which he himself is but a solitary outcast. The consciousness of national identity, which stands behind self-definition for the speaker, could be argued to be one expression of the poetprofessor’s interest and care for a multitude of youthful minds (those of his students?).

Such care, viewed form the point of view of Emmanuel Levinas’ existential ethics, also manifests that limitless responsibility for an Other: that defines as apostolic apprenticeship in service of protecting Life.8 That is, when the subject’s subjectivity is directed at negating the Self as entirely independent and therefore admitting its uniqueness when achieved as one of, and thanks to, the many. Intentionality is preceded by answerability. We are then able to detect R. K. Singh’s overall hermeneutic orientation in yet another dichotomic unity of his poetic identity: death & creativity. As in Creation: To create is to die: die to love, to time to memory, to god to everything we know do or experience The excerpt cited clearly implies motion, activity (even though the second stanza maintains “stillness […] within and without”). And it also suggests that creativity and death (which extends, for example, to one’s ability to create) are interchangeable: both phenomena leave a trail behind – if only in the memory of those who survive, or inherit a lifetime baggage now completed. In addition, it underlines the terminus each occasion of birth automatically issues: by being born one is guaranteed death. Yet Death – as the expected boundary of one’s self-conscious Being, creates a perspective, a horizon for man to spread one’s potential within. For, in Death, which deprives the living of everything which could be said to last, is still inscribed the possibility of every Dasein.

One’s loss, or the loss of that One – those are the two opposites side of the same phenomenon – man, once born, is automatically guaranteed some limits and relations, and those make one open to the meaning of Being, which is exactly how one becomes 8 Cf Levinas 1997 (b): 91. See also: Levinas, Emmanuel 1997 (a): 79.

unique (Cf Derrida 1998: 79, 103). When R. K. Singh writes “to create is to die” we may also read that aesthetic, or poetic, creativity and existential vigilance, go always hand in hand: for, the life of a poet cannot be cut loose from that of the real man who has suffered those pains (social adjustment, personal love, memory, cognition). There is one life: a poet is a man and vice versa, one could not be freed from the other and this syncretism nourishes the imagination of a true humanitarian: I write in order to be & to give, and I am & am given to this world in order to write.9 “To create is to die” suggests man gradually growing awareness of his delimited capacity to know because of his restricted time the earth. As opposed, for instance, to an animal which, deprived of the semiotics of human languages which memorialise and breathe eternally by rendering existence in written accounts available to posterity, is blessed with lack of conscientious awaiting its own end. We are tempted to recall Yeats on this matter: “Nor dread nor hope attend/ A dying animal; / A man awaits his end/ Dreading and hoping all; / Many times he died, / Many times rose again./ …/ He knows death to the bone – / Man has created death” (Death, from The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933, William Butler Yeats).10 Man indeed dies all the time whilst living because he knows there is an end coming up.

Ironically, that certainty is also one’s ultimate opportunity to reach self-identity – in relation to Time, which means in effect to others – before and after one (Cf Heidegger 1997: 251-2).

The lyrical speaker of Leeches is burdened with accumulated knowledge, wisdom and insight. There is a general sense of resting unused, unwanted, unclaimed and therefore unrelated to the outside world he is supposed to enlighten with this amassed wisdom which is bound to thaw amidst his own ageing generation. He is “rusting with ageing colleagues.” Making empty sounds “in the hollow/ of a hallowed pond /…/” is his symbolic regret over the futility of his humanitarian aspirations. This hollowness, or vacuity of existence could alternatively be discerned in the expression “the bees won’t return / to naked trees” (The Bees Won’t Return). There the naked trees could be 9 Cf Bakhtin: Toward a Philosophy of the Act. In: Bakhtin 2003: 120.

10 The poem is quoted from: Yeats, W. B. The Major Works. Poems, Palsy and Critical Prose. Edited by Edward Larrissy. OUP, 2001, pp. 121-122. In R. K. Singh’s God we, peculiarly enough, read: “The word is not God/ but the mind creates it/ after its own image/…/” The word “word” appears italicised in the original.

perceived to signify the emptiness of human imagination, confessed by a professor of poetry famished by the spiritless mechanics of calculated living that today’s global technocratic nonchalance has created. Ideas won’t, from now on, be perching all that often on the tree of human knowledge: it offers them no steady abode because it has become a polished skeleton of quick-thinking ignorance. Gone are the times when a poet like Emily Dickinson might have said that “to make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, /…// And revery. / The revery alone will do, / If bees are few” (Poem No 1755, “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee”).11 There simply are no reveries left for the poet…

R. K. Singh demonstrates a conviction that the process of self-definition inevitably requires certain theological awareness of one’s native environment. And again, that is so because the knowledge of religion(s) constituting a self indicates our knowledge of Time. To know Time, as Paul Ricoeur argues, is phenomenologically inevitable. The memory of one’s native religious background is one element underlying one’s definability in the Present. And that confirms Memory to be a cognitive factor which enhances the individual’s behavioural unfolding (Cf Ricoeur 2004 /a/: 41, 86, 136-7). I Am No Moses and I Am No Jesus quite apparently form what may be called a poetic diptych. In both poems the speaker dismantles a hierarchical understanding of canonized saints ethically superior to the common mortal by the sheer fact of comparing himself to both Moses and Jesus, using the negative construction “I am no…”. He admits he possesses no unique supernatural talent of being universally well-known, or of perceiving the truth without light (I Am No Moses). Yet he is capable of experiencing the agony of mere existence, and that is by simply being a man: “I am no Jesus/ but I can feel the pains/ of crucifixion// …/ sins I didn’t author// I am no Jesus/ but I can smell the poison/ and smoke in the air// feel for humankind/ like him carry the cross/ and relive my dreams/ …/” (I Am No Jesus). The two works are a smarting concoction of admitted namelessness, impersonality and defencelessness plus an enviable, if openly erotic, skill of physical self-perception. “For sins I didn’t author”: the Self is a weak, cheap and temporary cowardly copy of the everlasting original, and as such it has so far shown no 11 The poem is quoted from: Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson.

London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987, p. 710.

readiness to act, to be for the sake of the whole lot, or maybe to teach truthfully the humanitarian ideals of poetic art. This self has not really been tempted: today’s life is one of lukewarm stillness where no cultural heroes are required to lead the congregation forward. This cultural quasi-hero reminds us so much of T. S. Eliot’s self-abnegating speaker of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “/…/ I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, / I am no prophet – /…/ I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord /…/ deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; /…/”12 In both poems the speakers admit to growing old. Eliot’s decides “to wear the bottoms of [his] trousers rolled:” he has shrunk back child-size and needs to fold up his trousers, which prove too large, or perhaps his memory which is now failing him. R. K. Singh’s speaker views with disgust and dismay “the whitening chest and pubic hair” which speak of “the death of [his] potential” (I Am No Moses). Mortality is implied in both cases and in the latter poem that is dressed in the repellent metaphor of “the cyst on my neck” – a sign of malformed genius and bodily ugliness. This ugliness comes seems to be related to the self’s inability to risk living, to risk testing one’s creed and thus strengthening it in real experience. He will never be a prophet, because he lacks readiness to put his faith through a test. He is too introverted to trust an outside resource of help. And in any case, it is unclear whether there is any one definite God implied throughout. For in Hey Ram we understand that “Ram has ceased to be my God.” In this poem the speaker finds it impossible to separate the ideal of true faith and forgiveness, which a God emblematises, from letting bloodshed and ignorance spread which, too, abound in facts of the history of humankind, in holiness begotten though it may be.

Shiva, or Jesus, or some other God – in any case R. K. Singh’s poetry gives certain indications that modern man’s epistemological apparatus has been muddled up and that man’s cognitive capacity has reached an overall state of globalized polytheistic gloom and capable of phallic deliverance only: “gods sin against God/ betray creation/ break covenant//…/ worship lingam/ forget Shiva” (Shiva’s Third Eye). Hence the grief over seeing man as a piece of “shit” for which, quite like for an animal, the wheels of an automobile “don’t care” (Man or Animal). We have invented an insensitive monstrous 12 The poem is quoted from: /ed./ Larkin, Philip. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 228-232.

ogre which would serve right modern man’s tendency to abuse the many forms of life around anyway. The lyrical speaker dwells in a condition of hellish unintelligibility because he cannot escape his inclination to research meaning on his own, in solitude, through reflection, rather than through action – even though he confesses to seeking freedom from himself (Valley of Self). And meaning as such could never be in principle one’s solitary possession (Cf Eagleton 2003: 64). Just as the physicality of our Life as coexperience suggests, meaning always stands out to be seen, touched, expressed: it is round and has many sides, it is convex and yet covert, mysterious. Just as the protuberant formation round the woman’s waist could tell of her “hubby’s love,” as in Sleeping Light.

Or meaning could be oval: meandering in feminine nudity and nestling in the woman’s “dark womb,” as in Wit and Soul. Yet both poems contain references to emptiness, vacancy, “nudity” of existence if that be existence for the sake of mere physical wellbeing. In both poems is sensed the anxiety of unshared desire, of unachieved companionship of spirit and therefore of incomplete meaning – always hoped for but never truly discussed. In Wit and Soul an object of unrivalled impressionist art – a Matisse or a Picasso – comes as something much over the top. It thwarts the interpretability of a shared kiss. It could “only complicate,” rather than alleviate, the search for a reliable common terrain of understanding the purpose of Being as Co-Being.

There seems to never be true dialogue, true exchange of confessions, of memories, and therefore of personalities. Nonetheless both poems urge us think that meaning is yet to be born, because it is hidden and preserved – until requested. The trouble is that here, man seems to be afraid of afraid of boundaries, and seeks freedom from any externally applied act of definition which could form, or help him understand himself better in true communion where he would be expected to give, before he asks for, something. All the same, the very fact that the lyrical speaker manifests hyper-sensitivity to the fact of the coexistence of always two centres of vision (e.g. that of the pregnant wife and of her husband, or of the lover and his mistress), indicates that the poet insists that an act of thinking (artistic thinking), or description, is already an act of ontological partiality. For, rephrase Bakhtin, active thinking always has in mind the architectonics of Being as CoBeing (Cf Bakhtin 2003: 16, 258). By grieving about the psychological, gender, cultural, generational or religious inconsistencies of our age, the poet reveals his predisposition to

forgive all those ills. And forgiveness is a gesture of conforming and inscribing Meaning into Being – it is a-historic, it interrupts the sequence of cause and effect (temporally definable) and it incites action: dutiful and responsible action (Cf Kristeva 1999: 213, 219).

R. K. Singh’s poetry, with its many cultural references, is poetry where the Self is made to recognize the fact of eternal, indeed a-temporal, mutual obligation amongst the members of a society (Cf Ricoeur 2004 /b/: 319). If a poem of R. K. Singh’s rejects singularity of experience and of one-dimensional inter-textual reference, then perhaps we should consider the impossibility of the singularity of authoring experience as such – on the level of ethics. And the poet proves he is at any one moment aware that Being as Cobeing has no gate though which one could exit it (Levinas 2000: 39). Similarly, one could not possibly shed off the amassed racial, religious and cultural determinants in a Self’s temporal definability. By now, however, those have grown to be seen as: “sins of races” flowing into one’s blood (Don’t Condemn Me), or “the beasts within nurtured for years” (The Dead Too Are Restless). The Self is a “self-same cocoon,” where “fungus of illusions grow/ toadstools of damned tract” (Is This All?). Those excerpts create the image of ritualised imprisonment for which the human mind, burdened with memory, is largely responsible. It is not that we do not remember, but that we tend to remember carelessly: we tend to heap our remembrances and clatter out ability of sharingexistence-in-aiding. Instead, we let ourselves fall into a perception of “age-wrapped youth,” of repeated and misinterpreted customs and blindly followed traditions where many Gods flow together into one “mumbo-jumbo.” Our psyche has become an abyss of non-differentiated delusional hopes for the future and a variety of vignettes about personalities long gone and by now nonchalantly thrown about as chunks of info about the Past (especially in: The Dead Too Are Restless). We have forgotten the ethical merit of our situation in Time: our being in Time is our being amidst others; our historicity is an inter-subjective connection (Cf Levinas 1998: 81).

That existence is motion and interchange from one mode of being into another is something which two especial poems, Awareness Matters and Nude Origin, suggest. In the latter, the transition from one state to the other is visible in the interplay in colour symbolism: darkness signifies pre-natal gloom whereas light represents our conscientious

life on the earth. Awareness is given full colour: or state of embryonic mindlessness is like a silent black-and-white cinematographic film. And it is awareness that matters: “each death has a passage/ to surprise the dead/ awareness matters” (Awareness Matters). “/…/ get back to what God gave us/ in love let life shape anew/ from the nude origin” – these lines imply not only the innocence and helplessness of our naked body at birth, they could also be argued to mean that creativity and novelty depend on loss, on mortality, on extinction. For the dead passing away may be equal to total and final sensory oblivion which could never be fully predicted (i.e. death is always a surprise), but for those who survive it is every time yet another occasion to build knowledge anew, to grow cognitively richer whilst remembering; it indeed is life at its most intense.13 Death is at any one given moment both pre-ordained and contingent. To make matters even more complicated, we ought to say that even though death clearly implies transition from one state to another, i.e. it is motion and it may therefore mean that the dying crosses a certain threshold, no dead person has yet returned from that state of ultimate finality to report back about its happening so that no exact “topography” could be verified.14 In Awareness Matters, the sentence “each death has a passage / to surprise the dead” is apparently plagued by the same doubt: that dying, just as well as discussing Death – both of those happen on the borderline between truth and non-truth. And that is most certainly valid especially because doer (i.e. the dying one) and analyser (i.e. surviving) constantly interchange places.15 In that sense, the metaphor “hanging generations” (Hanging Generations) refers not simply restrictively to one particular generation that the lyrical speaker may claim to belong to. It is the universal state of historic definability, of inbetween-ness, of temporal dependence that we grow to be part of and which grows into our consciousness too. Respectively, the “hanging generations that may never be” may be taken to suggest the interminability of our lifetime (and posthumous) definition – 13 Cf Derrida 2004: 10.

14 In that relation, it would be interesting to note the apocalyptic imagery in I Am Promised A New Sun, where the “enormous yacht” drifting towards a royal mansion over the sea water could be perceived to suggest a rewarding finale and liberation from the curse of historicity which dictates that even after death we still “move,” i.e. we still continue to be, but in the memory of survivors only – we are, in other words, never at peace.

15 Cf Derrida 1998: 40, 95, 110.

always in relation to other people and other times. Similar is the collective and organic perception of “the long trip/ ahead in spirit” for the lyrical speaker in Long Trip. The ashes, or the earth, he would become are elements not of finality, of freedom from dependence, but rather of recuperative fertilization of Life as such. For the dying individual it may be an occasion of “celebrating life,” good or bad as that life might have been, but for the living that loss intensifies the sense of limit and meaning of their own lives. The latter poem confirms a belief deeply held by Paul Ricoeur. Namely, that above the biological principle of a finality of an organism philosophy teaches that the skill of dying and leaving behind ought to turn – within each single lifetime – into a conscientious conviction that one ought to die and thus prolong Life as a chain of unique interrelated opportunities (Cf Ricoeur 2004 /a/: 499-500). Such attitude may be able to help us understand the androgynous format of the body and its death hinted at in Bliss Through Death. Male of female, menstruation or phallus, it still feeds life. The lyrical speaker – probably male – is “fleshed as my daughter,” himself derived from his mother’s womb. The moment of one’s conception, just as the moment of one’s death, are genderless phenomena. The two sexes merge in creation as well as at expiration.

Meaning, too, transcends gender definability: it is sexless in its continuity. Death, which fosters meaning through memory, brings alien and intimate together and dismantles the opposition between fate and freedom (Cf Eagleton 2003: 121).

The care with which the poet examines Man’s bodily functions often verges on medically precise description of an internally deceased, rotten, challenged physicality amidst a general feeling of Life’s incognizability. The lyrical speaker is prone to selfchastisement and admits to his inability to express himself to the external world (“I can’t turn my inside out”), to disentangle his “knotted self.” He is drifting “between earth and sky” – in some kind of interlude named “life” (Shrinking Into Itself). His hands reflect his genealogical complicatedness, burdensome past, incurable pain and suppressed memories of broken happiness: “the lines on the palms// spiders’ network/ gleaming with corpses/ that have no face” (Dying Light). He has been unable to achieve harmonious being in life: he therefore awaits “the coffin/ to reconcile the truths/ [he] could not conceive” (Stripped and Naked). But whilst he rues his own imperfect apparatus of cognition, he sensitively notes that the state of impersonality and delusiveness is a general feature of all humanity,

that life is a myriad of copies of an ideal original, or an array of lost “shadows/ that seek identity” (Shadows). We could hear the confession that the idealism of self-perception in isolation is wrong, is deceit and that true phenomenology of being is the naturalist recognition that an Other completes Me. Moreover, it turns out that in order to be one ought to remain incomplete, open-for-oneself – at all times, in all the crucial moments of one’s life – one ought to always be imminent to one’s own self, one ought to not fully coincide with oneself to contain the hope of dialogic co-existence (Cf Bakhtin 2003: 95, 184). What the author may be taken to argue is that self-appropriation cannot get by without the participation of an interlocutor. And in that sense, it seems natural that the I is always that which one for oneself cannot see and confirm. Self-consciousness is possible only as experience in contrast (Clark & Holquist 2002: 43, 46, 68).

In view of the above reflections, the lyrical speaker’s sickness of “living among the sick,” of being tormented by “germs and allergens” (I Want to Sleep), of being “diseased/ in soul before the devil/ reappears/…/,” of his body being “loaded with emptiness” (I Can’t Remedy), of inherited “fears and uncertainties” (Plastic Flowers Couldn’t Keep Time) – those are all variations of this whetted sense of incompletion, of the need for dialogue, for organic, all-inclusive experience which binds fates together and purges solitude and self-conceit. In I Hang Nobody’s Picture we meet a “shipwreck in a void” whose imagination has been emptied through unattended-to appeals to be heard, to co-exist, to hold on to something steadfast and trustworthy. He is a man who has reached his “andropausal day” (I Can’t Remedy –genderless ageing is implied) and oscillates in a state of perverse mental emptiness. He is “wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (See Arnold, Matthew, Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse, 1855).16 Poetic talent seems a malady, a curse, rather than a blessing – in a world where humanitarian ideals (including teaching poetry) seem a futile strain of mind.

Transitoriness seems to be the only unarguable truth worth recognizing in a world colourless and dull, a world of “beige and indigo shades” (Rainbow – ageing and unimaginativeness is suggested). Writing is an ache, a bodily malfunction: “I secrete 16 The edition of Arnold’s works referred to is: Arnold, Matthew, The Works of ~. With an introduction by Martin Corner. The Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1995.

poetry like semen/ in consummation leave smuts/…/” (I’m Different). Can the poet cope with his troubled past: “I was/ dependent on my father// a self-made man against/ the currents/…/”? His many complexes of self-perception make him victim to his own physical disabilities: “caries, cavities/ cyst and myopia haunt/ and sexual anxieties/ disturb sleep.” To the point where he declares that he “[resents his] identity” (When I Stopped…). He finally summarizes that living involves a great dose of incidental coming together of people and of discourses which voice out their inclinations, desires and weaknesses – all that happens simultaneously which is why direct learning from one another is virtually impossible. That, it would appear, poses obstacles for teaching as a sphere of human-mediated activity (compare It Hardly Helps to Teach). A teacher, or a university professor, like every man, remains but a speck amidst life’s variability. *** One is always incomplete and in order to uncover one’s origin and purpose, one must look carefully back and also into one’s relationship with other individuals – all constituents of interminable Co-Existence. And Co-Existence faces both ways: it is turned to the Past and to the Future. It remembers, or retains, and at the same time it anticipates. Quite like R. K. Singh’s 99 poems – an odd number: incomplete and therefore suggestive of existential incompletion as the most truthful and most humanizing characteristic of Being. R. K. Singh’s poetry professes self-derision as the basis for selfevaluation which is penitential. Doubting the possibility of self-completion and selfperfection is a sure mark of a desire to exist in heteronomy, or to Co-Exist. The poet obviously cares for Life in the humanitarian sense of the word: by wishing to escape the narrow frets of self-insight. R. K. Singh’s poetry confirms Heidegger’s belief that the meaning of being present is care, and that the ontological sense of care is temporality.17 By seeking freedom from himself, the poet may be seen to actually argue non-definability of personality: or to be more precise, he believes that person-formation is a lifetime process, a rich blend of various spatial, temporal, cultural and ideological oftentimes contraries, which, marrying one another, produce an entity yet refillable. So that, in an intriguing manner, the polymorphous and poly-genealogical grounds of R. K. Singh’s authorial activity cherish an ethical need to write in order to exist & make existence 17 Consult: Goricheva, Tatiana in: Clark & Holquist 2002: 307; Levinas 2000: 301; Heidegger 1997: 364.

possible – by facilitating amassment of meaning – rather than challenge the validity of literary authority, or of feasibility of meaning, in the post-modern world.18

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin 2003: In the original: М. М. Бахтин. Собрание сочинений. Том 1 – Философскоя эстетика 1920х годов. Москва: РАН. “Русские словари”, 2003.

Clark & Holquist 2002: Катарина Кларк, Майкл Холквист. Pro еt Contra. Творчество и наследие М. М. Бахтина в контексте мировой культуры. Антология. Том II. СанктПетербург: Издательство Российского Християнского Гуманитарного Института, 2002.

Derrida 1998: Derrida, Jacques. Apories. In Bulgarian: Дерида Жак. Апории. София: ИК “Критика и хуманизъм”, 1998.

Derrida 2004: Derrida, Jacques. Interview with Jacques Derrida. In: Le Monde on 19/08/2004. In Bulgarian: “Аз съм във война със себе си” – разговор на Жан Бирнбом с Жак Дерида. Превод от френски на Любен Каравелов. В: в. Култура, бр. 35, 24.09.2004.

Eagleton 2003: Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic. Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Heidegger 1997: Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. In Russian: Мартин Хайдегер, Бытие и Время. Москва: Ad Marginem, 1997.

Kolarov 2004: Коларов, Радосвет. “За автора – Post-Mortem. Изпитанията на теорията.” В: Литературоведски диалози. София: Издателска къща “Александър Панов”, 2004.

Kristeva 1999: Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. Depression and Melancholy. In Bulgarian: Юлия Кръстева. Черно Слънце. Депресия и Меланхолия. София: ГАЛ-ИКО, 1999.

Levinas 1997 (a): Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. In Bulgarian: Еманюел Левинас. Хуманизъм към Другия човек. СОНМ, 1997.

Levinas 1997 (b): Levinas, Emmanuel. Noms Propres: In Bulgarian: Еманюел Левинас. Собствени имена. СОНМ, 1997.

Levinas 1998: Левинас, Эммануэль. Le Temps Et L’Autre. In Russian: Левинас, Эммануэль. Время и Другой. Гуманизм Другого человека. Санкт-Петербург: Высшая РелигиозноФилософская Школа, 1998.

Levinas 2000: Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini. In Russian: Еманюэль Левинас, Тотальность и бесконечное. Москва & Санкт-Петербург: Университетская книга, 2000.

18 Cf Kolarov 2004: 219.

Ricoeur 2004 /a/: Ricoeur, Paul. La Memoire, L’Histoire, L’Oubli. In Russian: Поль Рикер. Память, История, Забвение. Москва: Издательство гуманитарной литературы, 2004.

Ricoeur 2004 /b/: Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-Même Comme Un Autre. In Bulgarian: Пол Рикьор. Себе си като някой Друг. Плевен: “ЕА” АД, 2004.

8.

R.K.SINGH'S COMMITMENT TO FLESHLY REALITY --R.S. Tiwary R. K. Singh is one of the leading luminaries in the firmament of contemporary Indian English Poetry. Sober and sedate, he articulates his feelings and thoughts in measured syllables, eschewing unnecessary flamboyance of language or flights of fancy. Woman is the chief source of his creative afflatus; woman not as an imaginary angel but woman in her all corporeal riches, eyes, thighs, globular breasts. He honestly makes a clean breast of his ungovernable attraction for the feminine body in the following lines: "I seek new strides in each of your moves/new dreams in your eyes and thighs/…each time I look at you/ I see natural woman/the fount of poetry."

(I Do Not Question, p.41) This "natural woman" is not the product of airy imagination, but one with moorings in fleshly reality. The following lines further illumine his psychic commitment to down-toearth reality in this regard: "I want to rest in your lap/and drink from your golden breasts/hide me in the curtain of your hair/shield me in the grove of your flesh."

(Music Must Sound, Poem No.4) Singh is bothered by no inhibitions in regard to sex thirsting with whatever Eve he comes into contact. He is thirsting for "female smell in bed" as "aloneness" is agonizing to him : "Let's kiss/each other in our/strangeness" (Music Must Sound, Poem, 5). One fact, however, remains inexplicable as to whether he succeeds in achieving the desired response. "If life vibrates, music must sound"-this is like an article of faith with him. The stirrings of life must needs generate the music of sex which, in his wise, becomes a synonym of life. Thighs, regarded as the repository of warmth in Indian Erotics, occupy a major place in his sexual imagination. "Hidden between thighs/is the spring music/beyond birth."

(Music Must Sound, Poem 7).

The poet's vibration of life impels him to forge rapport with woman, not already familiar to him. His yearning after physical commerce melts his soul : " I want to rest in your lap and drink from your golden breasts hide me in the curtain of your hair shield me in the grove of your flesh.

(Music Must Sound, Poem 4) I cannot but comment that this stanza provides a refreshing contrast to the ones extolling the corporeal glories of Nayikas (beloveds) in a direct manner. The Indian Erotics sets special store by description of female beauty of form, institutionalizing the system of Nakha-shikha which follows a pattern of describing the bodily components from toes to head. The thrust of the passage is the desire of the poet to enjoy the pleasures of his beloved's flesh. But while articulating his desire, he is eulogizing some of the components of her physical attraction : her soft laps, her luminous spherical breasts, her glossy luxuriant hair, and above all, "the grove of your flesh". The image the poet nourishes of the richly developed members of the female body finds exquisite expression in this compact phrase. A faint shadow of the traditional pattern of Nakha-shikha is discernible here.

It is, however, a little intriguing that the poet feels no hesitation in inviting and cajoling strange women to share his bed : "Won't you share/my aloneness/tonight?" Will it be uncharitable to comment that sex constitutes a major drive of his psyche? Borrowing support from the examples of the artists and painters, the poet assumes, as it were, the liberty to portray "all/that animals do and men conceal in the night."

Let us state that this assertion to emulate animals seems born of a reaction against social or familial unspoken restrictions in matters of sex. Sex, essentially a creative force, distinguishes man from the animals only in the matter of private or demonstrative indulgence. That can be attributed to the fact of his being over-sexy. "A flying horse parched/on the island of her flesh"---perhaps affords a key to the poet's response of glorying in witnessing sexual combats, exposing him to the charge of being a voyeur.

The sex drive is so strong in the poet that he does not take congnisance of his wife being in the family way in his thirst for gratification. The stanza, beginning "Stooping over his gravid love", depicts the spoiling of the consummation of the "coital bliss" by the waking up of the child. Frankly speaking, "realism" of this variety is not supportable. The wife's putting the child to her breasts is perfectly natural, but the mingling of the erotic and the maternal offends taste. "Directness", sometimes extolled as a virtue of expression in such contexts in appreciation of the modern Indian poets writing in English, needs a second look. Let me be not misunderstood. Kamala Das, a major poetess of the PostIndependence era adopting English for self-expression, is often forthright and evinces an

immediacy perhaps unparalleled, and makes herself concede that she is genuinely sincere in her protests against social restrictions and her disenchantment with her unfeeling husband in regard to his sexual bouts with her, without the accompanying "Passion", evoking a sympathetic chord in the reader's mind. The urgency of sex being made 'felt' takes away the odour usually unflattering from it and renders the Indian "Sahridaya" of the Classical School sympathetic to the "Ashrayalambana" of the emotion of "Rati". (1) We have failed to recognise any such urgency in the sexual cravings of R.K.Singh.

"A stray sperm/ grows in the ovum/blooms as a puffball" (Music Must Sound, Poem 16) on the face of it, looks an uncalled-for observation. The poem, beginning "How hard we try to empty", seems, apologetic in tone which is an unconscious effect of the Family Welfare Programme currently under way. The following stanza presents a picture of "Samyoga Shringara" in terms of Indian Erotics.(2) "under a bloody roof my tattered trousers remind the bed sheets love stained before light shone in a sulphurous pond I display my naked person to ghosts and witches" (Music Must Sound, Poem 17) This is an instance of "Rati" in union. The "Anubhavas"(3) to wit, the manifestations of the enjoyment of "Rati", are here transparently obvious, needing no special mention or iteration. Let us observe that our Classical Erotic Poetry affords no such pictures of sexunion, whatever be the reasons. Devotional Poetry of the Krishna School contains images of "Vipareet Rati", reversion of the normal postures as between man and woman in sexual unions, but there, too, the devotional poets like Suradasa become so deeply lyrical in the portrayal that the "Sahridaya", if not excessively squeamish, loses himself in the emotional overflow of the poet and relishes the "Shrinagara Rasa". In the instant case, it is difficult for us to identify ourselves with the poet in his experience of sexual delight because of taste being impinged upon in some way or other. We have, no doubt, portrayals in Suradasa's poetry of Radha cherishing and protecting the 'love-stained' 'Saree', a constant reminder of her enjoyment of 'Rati' with Shrikrishana which has been noticed by the latter's emissary, Uddhava, when he visits Gokula, armed with Krishna's message of 'Yoga' and 'Jnana' for the erstwhile beloveds. Radha does not get the Saree washed as she is resolved to nurture the sweet memory.

Let us again remark that even there the "Sahridyaya" is not obstructed by any mental let or hindrance in the matter of enjoying and feeling for Radha's disillusioned psyche.

Singh's depiction of sex, deliberately oriented to so-called Realism, offends taste. It may be affirmed that our remarks are not grounded in old die-hard morality. On the contrary, we hold, as I.A. Richards has stated, canons of propriety should flow out of the general

atmosphere, woven and promoted by the poet in his created world. And we shall immediately observe that the world created by R.K. Singh in his sexual portrayals lacks the depth and aroma of sincerity which might have induced us to identify ourselves with his frame of mind governing such depictions. His bathing naked in "a sulphurous pond" (a la vakrokti) puts us in mind of the "Jalavihara" (aquatic sports), resorted to by Krishna and his beloveds during the night after the celebrated Dance of the "Rasa".

The stanza, beginning "Every stain on the bed speaks", (Music Must Sound, Poem 19) sounds like expiating the wrongs done to the 'spirit' of love. This is all very good and desirable. But, Indian Erotics has no accommodation for such expiations and apologies.

Our outlook on sex, albeit mainly creative, provides ample room for fleshly delights which is attested by the singular phenomenon of the composition of the reputed KamaSutra, (Science of Erotics), by Vatsyayana, who has been hailed as a "Rishi" or Sage.

Coming to poetry, the atmosphere created and nurtured by the poet, should be convincing and supportive of the desired import. Let us incidentally remark that apology in amatory contexts is usually offered by the lover to the beloved with whom he has failed to keep his tryst.(4) As a rule, Singh's poetry here depicts the unions in a low key. It appears as though he deliberately subdues the palpable emergence of the sexual passion on the surface. In his intercourse, especially with his own wife, he remains grossly matter of fact, rather business-like. But when it comes to extramarital relationships, the element of emotion does make itself register its presence, howsoever weakly. Sample the following lines : "Giggling behind the hill/is the woman I know/If you touch my finger/you shall know/what winter is."

(MMS, Poem 22) We can deny emotion in these two lines? The following stanza, too, calls for inclusion in this context: "Danger board shifts my gaze to veiled beauties moving like thoughts with the best of motives manoeuvre to kill a poet learning the secret of the first menstrual flow."

(MMS, Poem 25) The picture is typically Indian. Veiled beauties arrest the young poet's attentive look. Art lies in concealing art, they say. Let us remark that beauty lies in concealing beauty, not in open outrageous demonstration. "Moving like thoughts" is an apposite simile, signifying unostentatious, unobtrusive passage of the ladies. Then the charm of the following two lines, "with the best of motives" et cetera, begs description. "Killing the poet" runs

counter to the accepted classical Indian canons of Erotics, but the charm here overrides the classical taboo (of alluding to death) and the modern "Sahridaya" comes to sympathise with the poet in that the spontaneous rise of "Rati", embedded in the human soul in the form of "Vasana" (a technical expression),(5) is immediately stifled, nipped in the bud, as it were, for obvious reasons, which cuts the poet to the quick.

"Manoeuvering" again is an artistic expression which has spontaneously sprung in the poet's mind. It suggests an amount or a kind of dexterous managing, rather a stratagem, to achieve some designed end. Here the women, passing noiselessly, with their countenances veiled, have clearly forged no stratagem to harm or injure the sensibilities of any one. But the poet, in his unsophisticated simplicity, feels that they have all combined to "kill" his emotional upsurge by not taking any cognizance of his amazed look at them. Here "Kill" conveys an import associated with the Word-power "Lakhana" enshrined in the Indian verbal science.(6) Then again the beauty of the phrase, "with the best of motives", enraptures the "Sahridaya". As a matter of fact, the veiled Eves have no motive at all vis-Ă -vis the lookers-on. Yet, the poet ascribes the best of motives to them which do not correspond with the practical blow they have dealt to his nascent emotion of "Rati". Let me repeat that R.K.Singh's Muse, though usually unostentatious, is not essentially insensitive to the charm of telling phrases.

"The first menstrual flow", however, acts as a fly in the ointment in the instant context.

Having has intimate connections with Varanasi, it is but natural that the poet's imagination should have been thrilled at times by the congregation of the fair sex at the holy Ganga ghats. It is a common sight to find women, comprising a fair proportion of charming blondes, bathing nude or half-nude in the cold waters of the Ganga, attracting the delighted lecherous looks of even those, having declined far into the vale of years.

The poet takes notice of this phenomenon, and lets us hazard the belief, joins the ranks of the "old gods", leering "at their bare backs". Allusion to "Two white moons" is charmingly meaningful.

The poet conjures up images familiar in the family orbit, in a new, refreshing vein. Look at the following stanza. "in mind his eyes fire his images nightmare the poor soul in scorpion cage cannot brave the dark combats" (MMS, Poem 37) Manifestly, these lines enshrine the picture of a newly married girl, not yet fully sensitive

to the pronounced stirrings of Cupid, having her first encounter with her love-thirsty husband. This depictures a situation of "Samyoga Shringara" (love in union). The husband is the "Ashrayalambana" of "Rati", the "Vishayalambana" being the girl wife.(7) The darkness of the situation and the unhampered access to her constitute "Uddepana vibhava"(8), that is, the immediate stimulants. The "Vyabhicharis" or Transitories of "Mada" (intoxication), "Harsha" (joy), 'Avega" (agitation), "Ugrata" (vehemence), "Mati" (rationality), and even "Shanka" (incertitude as to the ultimate success) come into play: "His eyes fire"-here is clear "Uttejana" coupled with his resolve to have his wish fulfilled.

The beauty of the vignette consists in the bipolarity of the reactions, the poet being not oblivious of the feelings of "Trasa" (fear), "Dainya" (depression), "Vreeda" (bashfulness), and other kindred feelings associated with a situation of amorous confrontation on the part of the girl-wife, totally uninitiated in the marital experiences. "Poor soul" is a telling phrase. The different postures adopted during the encounter by the husband prove nightmarish to her. "Scorpion cage", however, is a phrase a little over-conceived, overdone. But it does pinpoint the psychic trepidation of the young wife in the unaccustomed situation. "Cannot brave the dark combats"-this beautifully sums up the situation. Let us observe without mincing words that the stanza furnishes a lovely vignette of 'love in Union', that is, "Samyoga shringara". Again to borrow a technical phrase from the "Nayika-bheda" (Division of Heroines), this enshrines an image of "Mugdha"(9).

An impression has, willy-nilly, formed in our mind that Singh's Muse is more delightful and playful in regard to "Parakeeyas" as compared with the "Swakeeya"(10). Here, however, R. K. Singh falls in line with the generality of a cross-section of Indian poets. In classical tradition, love is usually sweeter and more engaging outside the marital orbit, imaginably because of the fact that it remains largely untinctured with the drawbacks of close unchequered intimacy. In certain devotional cults, Radha, the celebrated beloved of Lord Krishna, is a "Parakeeya". The following stanza enshrines extramarital love : "I thought I knew her before and my heart bowed to her native virtues each touch she offered stirred and drew me near before entering her depths I felt how dark was the dance I never liked to part with her but the tears in her eyes were saying: "no no" (MMS, Poem 2) To me it is one of the most lovely images available in R.K. Singh's amatory poetry. It is a case of love springing, apparently not from physical attractions, but from a perception of native virtues in the woman. The poet had the good fortune of being offered "touch after touch" by her which contributed to drawing him nearer her. A woman is primarily the cynosure of eyes because of her physical glories. In the instant case, the attraction is not visual, but internal. But, the poet would have made himself liable to attack on ground of

basing his heterosexual love purely on imaginary attributes, ignoring the fundamentals of human nature. That is why, cautious as he is, he alludes to the efficacy of feminine physical touch. The incorporation of this tactile element more than makes up for the absence of any allusion to the woman's corporeal charms. He enters into her innermost being through these touches, an exquisite accomplishment by a single tool of perception.

Reference to "how dark was the dance" is pregnant with a wealth of suggestions. This darkness imaginably alludes to the welter of feelings and emotions which agitated the woman's soul in giving her heart to the poet. It might have pendulated between responses, positive and negative, for a thousand and one reasons. We have reasons to believe that the two had enjoyed physical commerce for a stretch of time. And, lo and behold, the finale was distressing to the poet, also to her, when she tearfully rejects his enteratics to stay with him. "No, no" might have come to him as a dagger-thrust.

This is a touching picture of "Samayoga Shringara", culminating in separation, which enhances its poignancy. Here is love fulfilled in ultimate non-fulfilment. Pure frustration would have been less painful. Uravshi in 'Vikramorvashiyam" of Kalidasa made Pururava frantic with grief when she disappeared after having lived with him for a sufficient while.

(11) R.K. Singh is not Pururava, neither is this lady Urvashi. But the Sahridaya is bound to feel for the lover in his unexpected deprival of his sweetheart's company.

Another beautiful poem involving extramarital love: "I leave my memories in prayerful trance float above my body till rapping her fingers at my soul she breaks the silence: 'I have come with my dreams promised years ago. Won't you once kiss and melt in me?

(Memories Unmemoried, p.11) Frankly, this piece enshrines a dream experience of the poet-lover. While in a sort of trance, he is visited by his old sweetheart who breaks his psychic vacuum, as it were. And it is she who craves for a kiss from him who wishes he melted in her being-the two becoming one-the eventual consummation of love. Let us remind the readers that in the Yogic "Sadhana", "Sayujya", Complete Communion with the Divine, constitutes the 'summum bonum' of the Yogis(12). Earthly love will undergo an ethereal transubstantiation, should the lovers merge and melt into one. In such cases, the nature and completion of the "Rati" suffers a sea-change. We doubt whether such a melting of souls is considered possible of accomplishment in cases of marital love by the poet.

'Love is Efflux' is another lovely poem which glorifies love as an effluent from the corporeal charms of the beloved which illuminates his soul and silently leads him to merge his "being" in "her glowing presence". We cannot but observe, not disparagingly but with a sense of appreciation, that even when love assumes a non-fleshly complexion as the end product, the poet, with his psychic moorings in realism, accords due prominence to the glories of the flesh: "My being I merge/ in her glowing presence" (MU, p.12).

Never taking to the classical "Nakha-Shikha" description, the poet, nevertheless, recognizes the spirit of beauty as the elusive "Charm", not "seen, but felt". He proclaims: Charm is the/spirit of beauty/divine/mysterious/ honest/expression of the self/not seen/but felt. (MU, p. 15) This "charm" is consanguineous with the "Lavanya" which, in the classical formulations, transcends the beauty of the different members of the female body and pervades her entire appearances, baffling all verbal enunciations. It is a sort of shimmer which does not forsake a beautiful young damsel even when she has emaciated to a mere skeleton.

Classical Indian poetry sets much store by this "Lavanya", (13) the indefinable "Charm".

Poems like the above breathe the spirit of love, immune from fleshly associations. But it will be simplistic to believe that Singh's Muse is ever indifferent to the attractions of the feminine form as that would be much too unrealistic. He will seek his sweetheart 'in the grammar of silence, in the accent of love" and will "kiss death out of flesh" (I do not question, p. 22). That is to say, flesh is of the essence of love in the eventual analysis and the sincerity of his kiss of her hand carries the potency to exorcise Death out of her.

Allusion to death is forbidden in Indian Erotics, but the heartfelt sincerity and transparent honesty of the lover as to the efficacy of his kisses washes away all vestiges of any impropriety. The point being hammered home is that flesh is an indispensable component of heterosexual love. The poet makes no bones about his belief that the value of the physical facet of love cannot be ruled out: "when the sun is erotic/and the moon lyrical/the winds turn tempestuous/in the orbit of love/legs slide by calls of pleasure/for life to continue" (I do not question, p.23).

Though the poet's experiences are mostly sex dominated, at times they breathe forth a different odour such as in the following stanza: I feel her hyaline influx In my deep love leaps from the soul with subtle glows her breath runs through my veins this vassal of the flesh blushes as I drink the infinite in her.

(My Silence, Poem 3)

As he is in physical union with his sweetheart, he feels the transparent inflow from her contact of mysterious influence into his inner being which invests his love with subtle glows : her breath runs through his veins and resultantly, he feels her shorn of material limitations, becoming a part and parcel of the infinite, and himself suffering a sea-change in essence, drinking "the infinite in her". And, concomitantly, "this vassal of the flesh blushes". This is a unique experience in matters of love, suggesting the spiritual force of the beloved. The poet's honesty is also worthy of appreciation in calling himself "vassal of the flesh", the slave of physical passion. Such pictures of "Samyoga Shringara" are a rarity in Classical Letters.

Yet another example of Love in Union, to wit, 'Samyoga Shringara' not breathing the mysterious air, is available in the following lines: "Is it the perfume of your body that makes the night drunken?

Your lush lips ripple fire in beautiful silence your fragrance radiates flowers and water.

Can I seek my voice in your breasts?

(My Silence, Poem 5) The perfume of her body makes the beloved belong to the class of "Padminis" of Classical Indian tradition whose breath exhales fragrance.(14) The night becoming "drunken' is charged with a pregnancy of meaning. The atmosphere being intoxicated "breathes there the man with soul so dead" as to escape its influence, far less a person endowed with a psyche already love oriented? The second stanza conjures up the image of the sweetheart lying silently supine in the cosy bed with the lover drinking her richly juicy rubicund lips. Paradoxically on the face of it, the juicy lips emit forth ripples of fire in the lover's soul. These ripples are the palpable stirrings of "libido".

Incidentally, let us observe that the touchstone of feminine beauty in Indian classical tradition is its potentiality to sexually agitate the beholder. Singh's Muse ultimately belongs to this family. Even if no allusion to her fragrance radiating flowers and water had been made, the charm of the picture would not have suffered any diminution inasmuch as the night is already "drunken". The concluding lines suggest that the whole enjoyment is buried in studied silence in the familial atmosphere, but the spherical breasts impel the poet-lover to articulate his yearnings for the fleshly pleasures: "Can I seek my voice in your breasts"? Let us again observe that such portrayals of love are not to be

easily met with in the Indian classical "realms of gold".

The poet's experiences extend beyond the bournes of privacy. We have already noticed how his eyes take note of the old gods leering at the naked backs of the bathing women at the Ganga ghats. Here again his eyes catch the phenomenon of "rape and adultery in the crowd' on the occasion of the Durga Puja. How sarcastically he remarks:"To express sex/a crowd is convenient in the bus"! However, his comment, "while the cowards fear the coming closer of boys and girls", in this context seems misplaced.

The lascivious seems to exercise an unconscious influence on the poet's psyche inasmuch as he is intensely human, made of flesh, blood and bones. He seems to take unconscious delight in the spectacle of a sex-greedy person handing over coins to a beggar woman "just to look at/ the tanned fronts/ behind the little holes/ of her only saree". The stanza beginning 'while I was petting and necking" (My Silence, poem 14) leave us in no doubt as to his being sex-greedy albeit he feels for the poor woman who was calculating whether the proceeds of the sale of her body that night would enable her to purchase a new Saree.

The following stanza etches the picture of 'Love in Actual Union", that is, cohabitation in a symbolical vein, pressing into service analogies from the cycle of seasons: Spring's full youth he unbuttons her printed skirt on red cushion feels autumn dropping down the leaves of year (My Silence, Poem 15) All that pinpoints the poet's (My Silence, poem 15) intercourse. With advancing age, it seems the poet cannot successfully respond to his "burning within" and cannot "enjoy the flames of passion". He rightly remarks: "love is a high explosive/not charged/by induced sexuality" (Flight of Phoenix p.12). In her physical vigour and verve is a 'sine qua non' for attaining consummation of "coital bliss". Waning of physical vigour and waning of the poetic afflatus seem curiously intertwined. "In bed I keep with her/wondering what I'd haul in our/burning, sleek, empty sex/now mind's dried with dry hive/ I cannot create with bald head:/sky showers ashes of rose" (Flight of Phoenix, Poem 58). "Bald Head" reminds us of the persona in Eliot's 'Love Song of Prufrok'. Having a couple of children and crossing the age of forty seems a damper for the fire of sex.

The poet is generally not happy with his life nor with the notional postures and attitudes.

Personal unhappiness, tell-talely, springs mainly from his frustrations in the matter of love and sex. Like Shelley, who was nurtured on "bright silver dreams", Dr. Singh feels restive at the social and familial restrictions impliedly in sex contexts. "Can't you drop your saree/and all that conspire to conceal/passion in/my eye seeking freedom/to unite

and transform/the night through body's dark alleys/don't you love your freedom?" (Flight of Phoenix, Poem 41).This desperate utterance aimed at smashing to smithereens the tradition-bound unspoken trammels, imposed on freedom of sex the familial orbit, to confess honestly, does make the "Sahridaya", not a woman-hater, but feel for the poetlover as he is deeply struck by the sincerity of his anguish. When he complains about the general prosaic tenor of his life, "unloving life day by day", and yearns for "a release" from ennui, then, too, imaginably, sex will afford him the much-desired relief. One wonders at the magnitude of his frustrations in that "Coal city" in his personal life, or maybe, his official life also, respecting love : "Everything is falling apart every wall is cracking I too am breaking to be someone and to belong drink in love like many secured sure happy I too want to live and be loved not piece by piece friends, but, will they let me?"

(Flight of Phoenix, Poem 65) Accordingly, in that his emotional starvation, the sensitive reader cannot but accord him his need of sympathy and commiseration. Nonetheless, when his frustrations get coloured by anger, though veiled, he breaks forth: "We are nation/of cowards worshipping dumb/images can't stand/a full fleshed person speaking/nude in god's home like in bed/performing love with/ wife or self in dark alone/ever ignorant/moralizing/hell of fear/with legs tucked up/posing brave."

(Flight of Phoenix, Poem 39) and one fails to carry one's sympathy with him the whole hog. Juxtaposition of worshipping dumb images and denial of absolute freedom in matter of sex can scarcely enlist our approval. The one militates against reason, but the other is pregnant with possibilities of engendering moral chaos. When he smells "my boneless semen", taste is violently outraged.

We conclude by alluding to R.K. Singh's philosophical conception of "Rati', the root of love. Old concepts of sexual morality do receive a shock when the poet lavishes encomium on "An undressed woman" and the "venerable in myriad colours" as a tool of "ever-growing consciousness". But, the poet himself is internally immune to any qualms and in an easy, natural frame of mind, he alludes to "the split in cypress" being "vulva", having its "roots" in "Purush-Prakriti"-the celebrated formulation of the "Sankhya" Philosophy in which Purusha, the counterpart of the Brahmana of the Advaita, remains inert of Himself and feels agitated only by coming into contact with Prakriti, the

Feminine Principle-this union ultimately leading to Creation.

In another poem, the poet speaks of "Shiva' and "Shakti", a dual single, suggesting the insupportability of "me and she", i.e., man and woman, the essential principle of creation.

In the same vein, he alludes to the Chinese "Yin and Yang" principles and emphasises the harmonization of "lingam' and "yoni". This integration of the twin principles of Masculinity and Feminity has its roots in the Vedic provision that the "Paramatman", the Supreme Being, divided himself into two, man and woman, to enjoy himself, becoming bored by solitariness.(15) All that points to the cardinal truth that "Rati" or sex is a welcome possession of the human consciousness on which the universe has evolved. The poet's sense of profound joy and gratitude finds uninhibited articulation the following 'Psalm': Blessed is the bedroom the bathroom the kitchen the drawingroom the terrace the lawn and every little place and spot where we prayed or sexed together we glorified our house and declared His mysteries.

(Memories Unmemoried, p.11) R.K. Singh's Erotic Muse strikes us with its openness, its seriousness, its candour and its eventual exaltation of Rati to a plan where the apparent glamour of the flesh merges into a Universal Principle of Creation.

Notes References made to R. K. Singh's poetry are from his following collections: My Silence (1985), Madras, Poets Press India.

Memories Unmemoried (1988). Berhampur, Poetry Time Publications.

Music must Sound (1990), Dhanbad, author.

Flight of Phoenix (1990) Berhampur, Poetry time Publications.

Two Poets: R. K. Singh (/Ujjal I do not question Singh Bahri (The Grammar of My life), (1994), New Delhi, Bahri Publications.

References 1. The Rasa-Sutra, that is, the Rasa Formula, of the generally acknowledgedly original Acharya Bharat Muni runs as follows: (Vibhavanubhav vyabhicharisanyogadasnishpattih"). According to this formulation, the "Sthayi Bhava", to wit, the Dominant Emotion, becomes Rasa from a combination of "Vibhavas", the "Anubhavas", and the "Vyabhicharis" (also known alternatively as "Sancharis").The "Vibhavas" are the Causes or Determinants; the "Anubhavas" are the Consequents or Ensuants and "the Vibhicharis" or "Sancharis" are the Transitory emotions, usually accompanying the rise of the Dominant Emotion, the sthayis, "Rati" (love between man and woman), "Hasa" (laughter), "Krodha" (anger), "Shoka" (grief) et cetera are recognized as the sthayis or the Dominant Emotions while "Nirveda" (detachment from worldly concerns), "Glani" (internal weakness), "Shanka" (apprehension), "Vreeda" (bashfulness), "Harsha" (pleasure) et cetera are identified as the Vyabhicharis since they do not last long, but appear and vanish in the wake of the rise of the Sthayis, the Dominant Emotions. It is out of the combination of these elements that Rasa is produced, the original seed being the Sthayi which itself attains the status of Rasa, becoming palpably felt and experienced. "Vibhavas" or the Causes are divided into two categories, "Alambana" and "Uddipana". The Alambanas are the Supporting Causes and the Uddipanas are the Stimulating Causes. For example, "Rati" is aroused, involving a man and a woman. They are the Alambanas. These "Alambanas" are again divided into two classes: "Ashrayalambana" and "Vishayalambana". If "Rati" is awakened in the heart of Dushyanta at the sight of Shakuntala, the former will be called the "Ashrayalambana", one who "shelters" the emotion; and the latter will be called the "Vishayalambana", one who is the object of the rise of the emotion of Rati. The "Uddipanas" are the circumstances which stimulate the awakening of the emotion, including the natural surroundings, the actual situation, the beauty of the persons concerned et cetera.

"Anubhavas" indicate the rise of a Sthayi, being the external manifestations. The Sancharis are the assistants, accompanying and helping the rise of the Sthayi. For example, Dushyant, attracted by the sight of Shakuntala, feels the kindling of Rati for her, but is also internally visited by Transitories, such as, anxiety, apprehension, agitation, incertitude, et cetera. He casts greedy looks, sighs, paces to and fore-all these are the Consequents which follow as a consequence of the rise of the dominant emotion. These are the Anubhavas. Let it be noted that different Sthayis give rise to different Rasas which justify their appellation because of their becoming tasted or relished by the sensitive readers or beholders of a dramatic performance on the stage.

2. "Rati" produces the "Shringara Rasa", the Erotic Rrelish. This Shringara is divided into two categories: "Samyoga or "Sambhoga" which suggests 'Love in Union', that is, love when the two lovers are together and 'Viyoga' or 'Vipralambha', Love in Separation, that is, love when the two are separated from each other.

3. "Anubhavas" already explained in 1.

4. Apologies, in Indian Erotics, are tendered by the lover to the beloved when he fails to keep up his appointment with her to visit her. Such beloveds or "Nayikas" are called "Maninis" who usually adopt adverse postures in relation to the lover.

5. "Vasanas" denote the instincts or impulses, better when he visits then known as the "Sthayis", are transmitted from generation to generation of mankind in the natural way.

As such, they are naturally embedded in the soul or psyche needing no teaching or training. These "Vasanas" should not be confounded with the popular notions of "Vasanas" as instincts or impulses smacking of the libidinous or lecherous.

6. Indian Science of Words recognizes three powers of a word, called. "Abhidha", "Lakshna" and "Vyanjana" . "Abhidha" denotes common usual meaning conveyed by a word which is called "Abhidheyartha" or "Vachyartha". "Lakshana" denotes a meaning derived from the Vachyartha which is called "Lakhyartha and Vyanjana denotes a meaning really intended by the speaker which transcends the earlier two meanings. This is called "Vyangyaratha", the suggested meaning..

7 and 8 are already explained in 1.

9. "Nayikas" are variously classified in Indian Erotics. When they are classified according to age, they fall into three categories: "Mugdhas" between the ages of 14 to 16, "Madhyas" between the ages of 17 to 30, and those above 30 or thereabout are known as "Praudhas". Interestingly, this classification is linked with the psychic capacities or alacrities of the Nayikas concerned to respond to the emotion of Rati. "Mugdhas" are usually apprehensive as to their first encounter with their lovers or husbands.

10 Nayikas are again divided into three categories : "Swakeeyas", "Parakeeyas", and "Samanayas". "Swakeeyes are duly married wives. "Parakeeyas" are those who contract relations of love outside marital orbit, that is, with those, not their husbands. "Samanyas" are whores or prostitutes who welcome each and every person for consideration of monetary gains.

11. Urvashi is the Nayika and Pururava the Nayaka, King Pururava who in special circumstances, liberates her from the clutches of a demon. After giving birth to a son, she leaves Pururava in accordance with an "Abhishapa', or Curse, which makes Pururava frantic with grief. She has, however, reunited with him in the play.

12. "Sayujya" denotes merging of the "Atman" with the "Paramantman" in the Yogic "Sadhana".

13. "Lavanaya" is defined by Acharyas thus: "Muktafaleshuchchhayaswaralattvamintaraf./Pratibhati yadgameshu lavanya tadihochyate." ---That which shimmers in the limbs of the damsels like the liquid shimmers of the pearls is called "Lavanya".

14. "Padminis" in Indian Erotics are those Nayikas whose breath emits forth fragrance.

Interestingly, in classical poetry Padmini Nayikas are sometimes pictured as attracting a host of bees around them due to their fragrance.

15. It is significant to note that Bharata speaks of the 'Shringara', the product of "Rati", in glowing terms, calling it "sacred, holy and immaculate".

--R.S.TIWARY _______________________________________________________________________ _ R.S.Tiwary: A veteran tri-lingual writer, poet and critic in Sanskrit, Hindi and English with more than three dozen books, scores of critical articles, and several translations, from Skanda Purana to The Eve of St. Agnes, besides prestigious awards and honours to his credit, Professor Tiwary retired as Principal of K.S. Saket Postgraduate College, Ayodhya in June 1976. He published one of his significant books Current Indian Creativity in English (Jaipur: Book Enclave) in 2003 (from where this article has been reproduced) before leaving his mortal frame on September 9, 2003 at the ripe age of 90. _________________ First published in: Language Forum, Vol. XXIII, No.1-2, January-December 1997, pp.

33-52. _______________________________________________________________________ _ 9.

"Sanjaya" and "Dhrutrashtra" Reconstructed In The Capsule Poems of R. K. Singh - Dr. G. D. Barche After going through R.K.Singh's new collection Sexless Solitude And Other Poems (2009) Gwilym Williams says : What's really behind R.K.Singh's unceasing output of verse? Is a question I have asked myself more than once. Why does he strive so long and hard? Or is it simply anger at the way the world, or India is ?

Now the questions that arise are: Does a poet carry something at the back of his mind, while writing poetry? Does he deliberately strive so long and hard, while writing? Does he Try to give Vent to his hidden anger, hatred, etc., through his poetry? And surely the answer to any of these and similar questions won't be straight this or that.

As a matter of fact 'to think this way' is misreading a poet and his poetry. The fact is that broadly a poet, like all others, lives a two tier life, viz., private & personal & social and

scriptural. Now the common people simply live and keep living, but a poet being gifted with more lively sensibility, wider knowledge and esemplastic imagination, he sees and feels more and even reconstructs what he sees and feels. So when a creative artist writes, may be a novel, a drama or a poem, he creates a mini world with very many characters representing different facts of life. Therefore, it is not just to associate protagonist or characters of a poem with the poet. As a matter of fact a genuine creative artist transmutes his personal and private agonies into something impersonal and universal.

When we go through the poetry of R.K.Singh, we see this very fact executed.

While going through the capsule poems, i.e. short poems with cognitive content in his recent collection Sexless Solitude And Other Poems, it is noticed that he has tried to project two categories of people in two sets of poems, viz., (i) Sanjaya type people in setI, i.e., those who remain detached and can see things as they are. Sanjaya is a well known character in the great epic The Mahabharata written by Maharshi Vedvyasa. He was blessed with special vision by Lord Krishna. As a result of that he could see what was what on the Kurukshetra, the battle field, the place of the great Mahabharata war; (ii) Dhrutrashtra type people in set-II, i.e., those who get attached to the things and fail to see their real nature. Consequently they suffer. Dhrutrashtra, in the epic, suffers and makes people also suffer simply because he fails to see truth as truth. Here the protagonists of two sets of poems can be looked upon as two different persons or the same person with twin facets.

Now first we take up those poems which have Sanjaya type characters : the first poem to be taken up in this context is : "Awareness Matters". The poem runs as follows : Each death has a passage to surprise the dead awareness matters

no solace the cow's tail in the river's midst heaven, far, too far

Here the pointed eye of the protagonists in the poem is quite evident. He sees two types of persons, viz., one dying and the other dead who receives the news of the former's death. That is, a man dies. The news of this man's death fills another man, living dead, with surprise. The point is that here everybody is dead in the sense that every moment he is in the fear of death. Therefore, Shakespeare has already said, "Cowards die many a time before their death ‌", (Julius Caesar). The very idea of death fills dread & depression in every body. He is surprised and shocked by the deaths like 'untimely death', 'unnatural death', 'unkind death', and so on. But then the protagonist could see, the cause of this dread and surprise to be 'the ignorance' or 'the absence of knowledge' about death.

The Cycle of life and death is eternal as it is said in The Bhagvad Geeta "Jatasya hidhruvo mrityu, druvam janma mritsyacha", i.e., if birth is there, then death definitely follows it. So according to him instead of surprise and fear, one should develop 'awareness', 'awakening' regarding the incident of death. He also refers to the orthodox religious faith according to which after death one goes to hell, then there he comes across a river which he has to cross to go to heaven. And for crossing this river cow's tail can help that person. But then the protagonist pooh-poohs this idea. He is sure about the idea of heaven to be an illusion and hence 'far, too far' and that 'awakening' alone matters.

In another poem 'Death' the protagonist traces out another tendency rampant among people in our country or rather everywhere, viz.,, 'Without living/life lost in existing'.

That is, people do not know 'how to live life'. They simply continue existing by 'evading the fact/of living in fear/and manipulations'. Their all endeavours 'for thoughtless peace' are directed 'to fight off death'. Again instead of 'living life' properly, they waste their time and energy in rationalizing their follies and failures and resting faith in 're information or resurrection' of some noble soul to right the wrongs. On the contrary, the truth is that man is the architect of his fate which is rooted in 'living life' properly with well planned things and rightly directed actions. The main idea of the poem 'without living life' can be explained thus : when our country got freedom, its population was roughly thirty six crores. Then in succeeding years more efforts were made in promoting hospitals and doctors to fight off death, but nothing was done to check the growth of the population. Then the growth of the population was allowed, but the relevant resources and moral values were not taken care of. And now people are resting their hope in the faith of 're-incarnation or resurrection' of someone to face and find out solution for the present explosive situation pertaining to peace and population.

The way T.S. Eliot has projected modern man's life in a long poem like 'The Waste Land', the protagonist of "Is This All?" has done that here in a short space of two triplets. In the first triplet he unveils the life style of modern man which is characterized by three acts, viz., (i) propitiating gods through the cocktail of prayers; (ii) living animal life, i.e. confined to food, sleep, fear and sex; and (iii) boasting and advertising the worldly achievements. And hence he raises the question whether this three tier life is all. Then he very vividly highlights the mind of the modern man in the second triplet. That is, his mind is dominated by negative and narrow thinking, 'fungus of illusions' and 'toad-stools of damned tracts'. The answer to the yes/no question - Is this all? seems to be that such a negative and narrow thought based life is not worth. Perhaps he wants to point to Vivekanand's message that each soul is potentially divine and the goal of life should be to manifest that divine as against to simply 'live animal existence'.

The protagonist in the poem "Journey" is equally very minute and mature observer of the usual phenomenon of 'journey' very often undertaken by the people. He is of the view that a meaningful journey should have proper direction, definite destination and duly discerned destiny. But then the fact is that most of the people don't bother about any of

these corporate considerations. And that whosoever sets out on journey, they have either flickers or flashes, i.e., ever changing scales of brightness on their faces. And the protagonist firmly states that he doesn't give any credit to such shifting shades of joys. To him the joy that oozes from proper understanding of the goal is steady and non shifting.

He also observes the fact that the journeying people inside the train and distantly drifting hills, houses, trees, etc., outside 'bear the same indifference'. That is, he sees no life, no sense of sharing, relating or love among the people inside and the natural phenomena outside the train.

Then, a very common but crucial observation is noticed in the poem "Arriving Early".

The scene is of 'a Waiting Hall', may be at the Railway station or Cinema theatre. It is full of men and women. The protagonist here observes that men are happily engrossed in chatting and commenting on the topics ranging from love affairs to Shariat (marriage contract) without any fear or care, while women and particularly wives find themselves uneasy and chained as their range in all respects is bound and binding. And hence a man's wife 'murmurs about arriving early", while the hubby of that wife 'looks for some poetically active faces' in the waiting hall. This, in a very poignant way, points to the position of women in our society. All taboos and defined tracks are for women and none for men. This inequality and partiality have vitiated men-women relationships and created distance and distaste in social life.

The protagonist's subtle eye also notices the newly growing tendency of arrogance and unashamedness of the new generation in the "Barbed Wire Fence". Here he has tried to show how the garage guards make water in the open and even show 'their dick' to the maid in the adjoining house. Similarly, boys and girls 'make love in the bush' unmindful of the children's park, on one side, and the residential house, on the other. The protagonist is concerned about this fast growing phenomenon of young boys and girls chatting for hours together and even at times resorting to the forbidden acts least brothering about the time, the place and the public opinion.

The protagonist who is so perceptive like Sanjaya about the world around is blind like Dhrutrshtra with regard to his personal inner world. For instance just see his pain and suffering in the poem "Overload". Here we see that he doesn't get normal sleep. So he drinks to have sleep. In that drugged state 'the electric circuit in the brain' goes awry and he starts muttering unwanted things in unparliamentary language unmindful of the concerned victims. His mind is so much overloaded with deep discontent that its unloading alone seems the way out. He finds himself helpless regarding this process of loading-unloading that has set in and continued unchecked. Now the point is that the protagonist considers this problem to be chronic and incurable, but the fact is quite the opposite. There are ways out, only one needs the eye and the will which he doesn't have.

For instance, here is a way suggested by Maharshi Vashistha to calm down the mind : "Manah Prashamanopayah Yogah", i.e., the yogic practices calm down the mind.

Protagonist's pitiable condition is seen in the poem- "Again And Again". He cannot relax, meditate or even dream on his so called sacred bed. Further, now he fails to have the unusual 'naked company' of his beloved 'with tingling laugh' and 'slurred with passion'.

Above all he fails to have successful love making. Now here we easily see his ignorance about the basic facts, e.g., one cannot have the same experience again and again ad infinitum; change is the law of nature, and that one can have meditation, relaxation, happy company of any one and successful sex, only if 'mind' is in proper order. Milton has rightly said "The mind is its own place and in itself can make / A heaven of hell and a hell of heaven" (P.L. 254-55). So what is needed is to explore the right way to set the mind right.

We see the protagonist in a slough of despair in "The Dead too Are Restless". He is of the opinion that his one time 'misplaced dreams' have now "turned nightmares' causing havoc in him. Those 'nightmares' have become highly chronic and gone beyond cure. To him even the paths of meditation, gods, yoga or any other' Psychic mumbo-jumbo' do not seem to be of any help. They are like beasts, the outcome of years' nourishment, and can now die only with his own death. But then he doesn't see peace and panacea even in death as 'the dead too are restless'. This fact has to be understood in two ways : (i) there are dead bodies that don't burn easily on the funeral pyre, in the sense that either their tongues came out or certain organs fall apart, etc., while getting burnt. And this fact can be seen as their restlessness; (ii) there are people who leave their houses and retire into the forest as sanyasis. Now such people are as good as dead for the society. And the fact remains that even these so called sanyasis no longer remain at ease within and without.

But again the truth is that the protagonist is wrong. He doesn't have the 'Vision Proper'.

The channels like meditation, prayers, yogic practices, etc., are competent enough to restore any chaotic person to his sole self, to his blissful self provided he practices them under proper care and training.

Intense miserable condition of the protagonist is evident in "I Want To Sleep". Now the sleep is the Nature's gift to the human as well as non-human creatures. The sleep comes to anyone in the same way as light enters the house the moment the windows and doors are opened. But here we see the protagonist complaining for not getting sleep. His argument for not getting the sleep is 'the sick and the sickening' people around him from whom he has carried 'germs and allergens' which keep him 'tossing and turning' the whole night. He also believes that right from the time of his birth he has 'never slept well'. He now wishes to sleep without the help of 'pills, drinks, magazines or sex'. And the type of sleep, that he wishes to have, should be' thoughtless prayerless in peace'. This whole account simply shows the protagonist's blindness to the natural phenomenon of sleep.

The sleep snatching factors highlightened by him are groundless. I have seen people sleeping in the hospitals beside the serious patients and even beside the dead. When the body and mind are free from all sort of traffic jams, then the sleep comes to the person the same way as the beloved goes to the lover of her choice. Huxley has rightly said "rolling in the muck is not the way of getting clean". Instead of lamenting over the loss of

the sleep, one should explore and expel the sleep breaking basic factors.

The protagonist is seen in the inferno in the poem "Passion". He suffers from the worldly worries and anxieties, on the one hand, and from the strong sexual urges, on the other.

Then the growing age comes in the way of the sexual gratification. So he turns to the drugs which 'hardly help reach climax any more' and his quest for 'ecstasy' remains 'a far cry '. During the day he keeps working the whole day without any rest and respite as he says : I smell hell all day suffer shrinking passions in the hollow of my mind

Here again we see his blindness to the fact that senses can never be gratified. Maharshi Vedvyas has very firmly put it as "na jatu Kaam Kaamanam upbhoge na samyate', that is, the sensual desires can never be satisfied. Even Bhagvan Buddha has said "trushna doospur hai", i.e., desires can never be gratified.

The short sightedness or even the blindness of the protagonist is quite visible in the poem "Conclusion". Here he wishes to "Clean the cobwebs of legends' because they 'veil the vision' and offer moral lessons for the future generation 'with doubtful glories' and they, instead of pushing people forward, make them 'move backward'. Now the fact is that everything of the past or present cannot be held out for 'forward' or 'backward' movement. The stream of life goes on flowing with its own built-in mechanism. Further he sees the whole country and particularly the mega cities like Delhi and Bombay in the jaws of 'empty slogans', cheating and lust. Particularly he is more concerned there about the ceremony of 'midnight lust' concluding like 'a tragic poem'. In brief, the hero of the poem feels hurt to see the present tragic state of things. He wishes to do something, but being weak and confused, he simply gets excited and poetic, like Bahadur Shah Zaffar, the last emperor of our country.

The protagonist is seen devoid of any hope of salvation in "Nirvan-I'. The word 'nirvana' is made of two units : 'nir-vana' of which 'nir' means without , and 'Vana' means burning, i.e. without burning or suffering, Unfortunately he sees no chances of 'nirvana' in the present set up of life. Generally 'lightning' and 'rain' are life givers but to him 'lightning' 'frightens' and raises no fire, and 'rain' doesn't quench 'the earth'. He sees no creativity in his daily work and no joy in 'a kiss' of the parting partner. Finally, at night he is 'sulking with a glass' in the dark and the idea of 'nirvan' seems 'stupid' to him. Now this can be called a defective, flawed or mono-directional thinking of the person. There is solution, salvation, nirvana, the only needed requirement is the proper training and growth of the

mind.

Thus , here over a dozen poems have been discussed concerning two opposite aspects of human mind. The attempt is here made to show as to how the poet has very pointedly projected two visions, viz., that of Sanjay and Dhrutrashtra through very short but well knit poems. Very novel and creative use of language which is the poet's forte has not been here even touched upon. The present article helps us mark the eagle eye that the poet has regarding sweet-sour aspects of the human behavior, human life as a whole. Before closing this talk, a humble suggestion is that the poet should show a ray of light, a way out, even while projecting the darker or negative aspects of life through the protagonist of his capsule poems. For instance, instead of saying 'I smell hell all day', cannot the protagonist say, 'Hell I smell', though heaven is not far to seek"?

--Dr G.D. Barche, 1, Atharv Aptt., Satsang Colony, Deopur, DHULE 424005, Maharastra, India _________________________________________________________________

The article is published in Poetcrit, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, January 2011, pp. 35-40. __________________________________________________________

10.

R K Singh and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets --Gwylim Williams Here's the Bloodaxe catalogue blurb for this Jeet Thayil edited anthology launched in September 2008. For reasons which will soon become obvious it comes complete with Poet-in-Residence bold italic type.

- Jeet Thayil's definitive selection covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. It is the first anthology to represent not just the major poets of the last half-century - the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s - but also different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets living in many different countries as well as India. It is a ground-breaking global anthology of over 70 poets writing in a common language responding to shared traditions, different cultures and contrasting lives in the changing modern world.

One Indian poet not included in this ground-breaking global anthology is an Indian poet

actually living and breathing in India. He is Professor Ram Krishna Singh. So what are Singh's credentials? And why does Poet-in-Residence bemoan the fact that R K Singh is not included in this definitive collection of Indian poetry?

Singh is a university professor who has authored over 150 academic articles and written 36 books including 11 books of poems. His poems, written in English, have appeared in some 140 publications and have been translated into nearly 20 languages. Dr Singh's recent works include English Language Teaching: Some Aspects Recollected, Teaching English for Specific Purposes: An Evolving Experience, and English: Grammar and Composition. In addition he has been actively involved with national and international journals. He is Professor of English & Head of the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad.

This man is clearly a candidate for inclusion in any book claiming to represent the major poets of India one would have thought. So what's the reason that R K Singh is conspicuously absent from Jeet Thayil's Bloodaxe book? Perhaps Singh's poetry is not good enough? Well, let's take a look at it. His latest book is Sexless Solitude and Other Poems.

What do the critics and reviewers say about R K Singh's Sexless Solitude and Other Poems? Here's a small selection of their quotable quotes: An essential work speaking out for love, sensuality and the meaning of life (Patricia Prime) A daring experimenter (Dr Y S Rajan) Attacks worn-out traditions and corruption (Dr Stephen Gill) I almost drool in anticpation of reading his work (Lena Reppert) A collection written with honest intentions and insight that would sit well amongst one's favoured treasures (Francisco Toscano) The poet uses the technique of the internal monologue and other sensational devices to arouse the jaded consciousness of contemporary man (Rajni Singh) The poet lifts the so-called unclean words of the street and gives them a new dignity. In the history of Indian English poetry, I guess, it has been attempted for the first time on such a scale (I K Sharma) Perhaps Poet-in-Residence is wrong. It could be. Perhaps these critics and reviewers are wrong. It could be. Perhaps Bloodaxe and Jeet Thayil are right. It could be. Or they could be wrong.

Here you may now read a couple of R K Singh's 99 poems from his new book and judge for yourselves. First up, there's the title poem SEXLESS SOLITUDE. It's followed here by the poem CONCLUSION which in R K Singh's book is on the facing page. With R K Singh we needn't bother to hunt through the book for a good or passable poem. We can open at any page and we'll find the gems there SEXLESS SOLITUDE

I don't seek the stone bowl Buddha used while here: she dwells on moonbeams I can see her smiling with wind-chiselled breast in sexless solitude her light is not priced but gifted to enlighten the silver-linings CONCLUSION I wish I could clean the cobwebs of legends that veil the vision, moralizing future with doubtful glories urge us to move backward: echoes of the dead reverberate; no use setting the alarm to go off 2010 stashed away in empty slogans life's seconds periodically exhumed is a travesty of obsolescence of the sun ever clouded Gateway of India or Delhi's Circus suffer midnight lust with rites of consummation like the conclusion of a tragic poem ________________________________ c) R K Singh Sexless Solitude and Other Poems Prakash Book Depot Karmchari Nagar Road Surkha Chhawni Bareilly 243 122 India From: http://poet-in-residence.blogspot.in/2009/03/r-k-singh-and-bloodaxe-book-of.html 11.

EROTIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE POETRY OF SHIV K. KUMAR AND R.K.SINGH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY --Jindagi Kumari & Rajni Singh Erotic consciousness in the context of art means an artist’s understanding of sexuality and his representations of arguments, circumstances, feelings and pictures that are sexually arousing. Sex and sexuality is very much a part of human life and human thoughts. The representation of erotic is thus a natural phenomenon of art and literature since eons.

Erotic consciousness has been worked out by artists of all periods and all genres and naturally reflects itself in the works of Indian English poets.

Both Shiv K. Kumar and R. K. Singh, the contemporary Indian English poets, provide sufficient scope to the representation of erotic in their poetry. They touch upon various related aspects such as womanly charm, marriage, divorce, betrayal, promiscuity and prostitution in order to depict attraction between sexes, arousal of sexual desire and sexual union. Nevertheless, their depiction of erotic situations, scenes, images and ideas show their intention to reach the higher objective of understanding human nature: the self and society.

Shiv K. Kumar reflects the idea as he shows his awareness to a new language that is “the language of body” and employs it for “a full exposure of body and mind”1. R. K. Singh, too, finds in the representation of sex or “play of body”, a means to draw upon the “the beauty in darkness”2.

So far as the aspect of erotic is concerned there is a remarkable resemblance between the two poets. For instance, both the poets draw upon the beauty of woman as a source of charm and attraction. Woman has been a central theme of erotica since ages. This fact is due to the natural tendency of man to be attracted to the opposite sex and is closely associated with his desire to enjoy the beauty and charm.3 It is with the similar tendency that Kumar and Singh portray the pictures of women highlighting their carnal beauty.

Shiv K. Kumar extensively employs the technique of expressing the woman’s beauty in a number of poems; an instance is the sketch of the archetype of woman “Eve” in the poem “Birth of Eve.” Here Eve is depicted as a highly sensuous figure: . . . a bosom with the two shoulders like mute doves lips like two petals peeled off a gold cup eyes that spellbind a pansy and in her gait the swing of dancing peacock.4 (Trapfalls in the Sky 71) The verse outlines the voluptuous charm of Eve who seems to be the personification of the Adam’s vision of beauty, and has been created to relieve him from his “aching

loneliness”. Through the description of Eve’s beauty the poet acknowledges the physical excellence of woman and accepts that it is this carnal perfection that enacts as a “stimulus”: “. . . crescent of your lips / tempts even muezzin to break up his / fast before moonrise5 (Woolgathering 48). The lines celebrate the sensuous charm of a woman.

Here, the reference to “even muezzin” breaking up “his fast” is suggestive of the stirring influence of woman’s charm. But it also underlies the idea of woman as a symbol of physicality. She is deemed as physically tempting, sensitizing, distracting object. This idea is evinced in the poets generalization of woman as someone who is “preordained” to generate “only” little cyclone in “iris”. The word “only” indicates that the appeal of woman is limited only to the senses.

R. K. Singh also portrays woman’s beauty and depicts her intoxicating charm in a number of poems; an instance is the following verse: Is it the perfume or your body… that makes the night drunken?

Your lush lips ripple fire… your fragrance radiates flowers and water can I seek my voice in your breasts? (My Silence and Other Selected Poems 138) Here, one finds the nude charm of the beloved tantalizing the speaker who helplessly seeks a communion with the beautiful lady. However, Singh also perceives woman as “a tree,” “green and wide,” “abundantly dressed,” “overflowing,” as one, who “blesses all,” in her cool shade (My Silence and Other Selected Poems 35). It is here that R. K. Singh seems to opt for a distinguished track. He adds another dimension to the beauty and nudity of woman as he finds it capable of leading one to the attainment of spirituality.

This is why in the company of woman the poet feels “nearer God” and “blessed.”

This spiritual dimension of beauty and nudity is absent in Kumar’s women. Kumar, instead, stresses upon the physical, bodily and worldly woman and doesn’t show any inclination for woman as a means to upward movement. Women in his poems may be epitome of beauty but only in physical terms. They never seem to reflect any divinity and godly traits: they are calculative, wanton slaves to passion and as prone to weaknesses and fall as men are.

Further, Kumar seems to invert the conventional role of woman and depicts them as aggressive, violent and dominant personality. In other words, she is represented as

possessing all the qualities conventionally attributed to males. Sex to her seems to be a weapon to attack the males; the idea is very much illustrated in the view of the speaker in the poem “Voices at Night”6 where he remembers a woman who once “ambushed “him with her “red throat”. The poet shows his awareness to the new awakening among women of their sexuality. The poet also seems to laugh at this development when he presents sea as woman and questions her potency: “. . . does she know / that her thrust into the sand / could never impregnate it? (Thus Spake the Buddha 35). The lines are deeply ironical.

Here, sea is symbolic of woman and sand signifies male (as sterile).However the poet seems to indicate that merely adopting the other’s (men) form will not lead to creativity.

The poet highlights the utter limitation of female sexuality, creativity or femininity in the absence of male sexuality, and masculinity. Kumar in his anti-feminist mood seems to present male as the victim of female lust. The poet thus exposes us to a radical erotic perspective. Also the poet reduces women as mere “. . . a pair of thighs / pirouetting into any bed” and: . . . a pair of feet churning red grapes into wine . . .

Vial Capo!

Kali! 7 (Cobwebs in the Sun 37) Thus woman is depicted as a mere sexual object involving violent instincts. In Kumar, woman may be “concrete,” “personal,” and even “delightful,” but she is never “greater than all” (My Silence and Other Selected Poems 139). The poet evinced a very critical, negative, and skeptic attitude towards women: the same iconoclastic and unconventional attitude dominates the poet’s representation of marriage: Kumar finds marriage to be based essentially on female sexuality. The idea is presented in the poem “Gynous Truth”: “The nuptial truth is gynous . . .” (Cobwebs in the Sun 7). The poet here seems to invert the feminist projection of the idea where they find marriage contract as founded upon . . . physical appropriation of men.8 The poet illustrates the idea in the background of the sultry description: “. . . besides a muffled lampshade / the taut nipples / bend the vanquished muscles” (Cobwebs in the Sun 7).

Here “the taut nipples” is symbolic of female sexuality which is shown as causing dissipation to the male sexuality as represented by the symbol “vanquished muscles.” A similar image is available in R. K. Singh’s poem illustrating somewhat similar idea: “dance on a taut rope / with fragile legs . . .” (My Silence and Other Poems 57).

However, depiction of inability in sexual terms is counterbalanced in R. K. Singh by the equal illustration of fulfilling and satisfying sexual union between married couples as in the verse: When I inhale in your mouth and exhale stroking hairs or caressing

I ride you into joy and make you hail the morning like earth (My Silence and Other Poems 57) The explicit description of physical communion in the lines conveys the idea of “Sexuality” in “mutuality” as the lovers seem to identify their joy and pain with each other. Unlike Kumar, R. K. Singh, therefore, seems to celebrate woman; sex; marriage as integrated to the principles of beauty and creation. Also, in contrast to Kumar, the poet intersperses philosophical references in his erotic poems. This he does to substantiate his own views of Eros, according to which the harmony of the “basic sex”, “lingam and yoni” is aimed to take us to the higher level of awareness. To R. K. Singh sex act holds supreme beauty; it is similar to the rising of “lotus” “through mud”.

R. K. Singh, however, is not satisfied with the induction of the principle of harmony on ideological level. He also stresses at its applicability in practical life when he says: Love is my prison and freedom both in her presence my wish her wish . . . (My Silence and Other Poems 57) Such depiction of complete harmony in married life is a far cry from Kumar’s treatment of sexual responses within marriage. R. K. Singh however is not blind to the unavoidable disputes between the partners resulting into sexual indifference and refers to the “narrow discussions” causing to end “without consummation”. This idea is also evinced in husband’s insistence followed by wife’s rejection in the lines: “She put him off each time / he caressed her or / tried to kiss or crossleg (My Silence and Other Selected, Poems 69) The poet also seems to hint at the various ways one involves in sex: one of which is talking sex as the speaker in the following verse shares lewd joke with his partner: . . . man’s love and hatred concentrates on the crevice though he watches face she laughs when I say love and beauty is nothing but sabre and sheath. (My Silence and Other Selected Poems69) In addition, the poet acknowledges that phase of sexual life where one starts losing vigour and consequently feels detached with sex as the speaker in the poem 19 (My Silence and Other Poems 144) finds himself as an “octopus” who “squeeze(s)” his beloved with “all fingers” and “set”(s) “sail”. However, he is “shipwrecked”. Here, setting of sail is indicative of the attempt to sexual union whereas shipwrecked signifies the eventual failure of the act. This realization of decreasing sexuality is also indicated in the poem where the persona “smell” (s) his “boneless semen” (My Silence and Other Poems 73). The failure in sex act caused by old age leads to dissatisfaction and disgust.

Such disgust in the intimacy with opposite sex may lead one to “self sex”. The poet, quite radically indicates the convenience and harmlessness of “Masturbation” in the verse: “when it’s not a girl or wife / sexploitation is no sin . . .” (My Silence and Other Poems 106).

R. K. Singh thus acknowledges issues related to sex that are eternal as well as existential.

The poet highlights both the positive and negative aspects of sex including various sexual concerns of modern individuals. However, in spite of the realization of the darker side of it the poet asserts his trust in sex as an object of beauty and freedom: this concept is signified in the following verse where the speaker visualizes the image of mother in the image of his beloved wife and desires: “to rest in . . . lap / and drink from . . . golden breasts / hide . . . in the curtain of . . . hair / shield . . . in the grove of . . . flesh” (My Silence and Other Poems 101). Here, images such as “lap” and “golden breasts,” “curtain of your flesh” are highly evocative and reflect the idea of union of erotic with spiritual.

On the contrary, in Shiv K. Kumar sex inside marriage gets a purely worldly treatment.

Moreover, it is largely projected in association with pain and suffering. Kumar does not view sex in black or white, or, negative or positive, rather employs portrayal of Eros as a means to examine the validity of human values concerning personal, familial, and social obligations.

Kumar tries to portray the agony arising from the realities of life and depicts sex too, as integrated to this pain of existence. This aspect has been slightly touched upon in R.K. Singh whereas in Shiv K. Kumar it has been explored in depth. In Kumar “Love in Separation” seems to be modified as “love in betrayal”. This fact justifies the dominance of negative attitude and bitter tone in his representation of Eros.

Kumar often speaks through the mouthpiece of a betrayed husband or lover and conveys various phases of suffering arising from the realization of separation. His persona often lapses into the memories of the pleasure of sex, anticipates the lost love; feels jealous; and reflects on physical diffidence. An illustration to this idea can be found in the poem “Separation” where the poet anticipates his life after undergoing separation from his wife.

However, he also anticipates the pitiable condition of his sexual urge that will remain unreciprocated; “on the periphery of fire zone”. The poet conveys the idea of dormancy of his physical desires as he refers to the ‘cool, hollow cone of the candle’s flame”. He also is reminded of his thriving sex life in the past when he experienced: “. . . pulsating shadows on the walls / always chimed in with our heart throbs.” 9 (Articulate Silences 12) Further, another betrayed husband assumes the “fifth dimension” of his beloved who could not be satisfied with his masculinity and leaves him for somebody else. Here, the expression is highly symbolic and aims at conveying the magnitude of female sexuality that seem to him unusual and unfathomable. However, this stage of betrayal was followed by the game of seduction in which the lady had been involved since marriage. The Speaker in the poem reflects how he remained mesmerized by the charm of his wife who had “already started eye catching a stranger.” Such presentation, where husband depicts

love game of his wife with somebody else, is normally unusual.

Women in Kumar are the primary sex seekers and are presented as more promiscuous than men. This promiscuity leads them to a state where they seem to be least concerned of their relationship; their sexual urges overpower their sense of commitment not only to their husband but also to their children. This idea is observed in the verse where a child narrates his mother’s affair. The child finds the mother rising “in freshets of rose bloom at a stranger’s knock/ when father is away.” (Cobwebs in the Sun 27) The child also anticipates the reckless behaviour of his mother as he assumes “fireballs at her bedside window.” Lately he finds his mother standing: . . . at the doorstep with that man tucked away in her bra-pouch halcyoned. (Cobwebs in the Sun 27) The poet seems to use more explicit sexual expression when he is more critical.

Shiv K. Kumar’s presentation of erotic context is quite novel as in the verse where the husband speaker acknowledges the lover of his wife as his co-sharer in sexual terms. The poet refers to the woman as a meeting point between two men when he uses the expression “your saliva is on my lips” addressing the lover of his wife. However, there is remarkable difference in the sexual experience of each of them; the lover is allowed to be the “prime mover” so he “rose like some Giraffe whereas the husband, the neglected one, felt as if slouched “over worms.”

This negligence on the part of the wife leads the husband to think of break up. He decides to pass “through the turnstile” or the bondage of marriage and enjoy freedom in the manner of ‘a rider less horse”. The detached husband now fails to find any charm in his wife’s body which appears to be dead like: “The primeval rocks / corpulent as frozen whales” (Cobwebs in the Sun 17). Eros in Shiv K. Kumar, thus, seems to undergo considerable permutation and is brought down from the pedestal of its sensuous form providing aesthetic pleasure to the level where it gets integrated to disgust and ugliness.

This representation of Eros in Kumar can be viewed in the light of Alcibiades speech on physical love in Plato’s Symposium. He interprets love as: “. . . a hang up, a trap, a fixation and not at all ethereal not aimed at the good or any god or virtue.”10 Besides reflecting upon the core erotic issues Kumar also “eroticizes” social contexts and thus relates his erotic consciousness to his social consciousness: depiction of plight of prostitutes; call girls and sex-workers are aspects that appear in both the poets. R. K. Singh in some poems refers to the sexual disease and how sex workers become victims of the surfeit of sex.

Kumar also depicts quite revealingly how hunger for sex and hunger for food are corelated and act as an instrument for the thriving business of prostitution. The fire of the belly forces young girls to learn the art of seduction: “In the market place / little girl rehearse / catching wild falcons with hairpins . . .” ( “Trapped”, Cobwebs in the Sun).

The same issue is handled by R. K. Singh where he talks about the plight of women

working as call girls and prostitutes in a number of poems, for instance, the poet depicts a prostitute suffering with sex contagious disease: “. . . white and yellow germs/ festering her womb . . .” (My Silence and Other Selected Poems 143). Singh, moreover, uses sex imagery in a number of poems for criticizing disintegration of social and political values when he refers to “….Delhi’ Circus/ suffer midnight lust with rites of consummation . . . ”11 In Kumar there is an exclusive example of this kind: Vasectomies of all genital urges for love and beauty he often crosses floors as his wife leaped across the bed.

(Articulate Silences 25) The poet here exposes the politician’s lack of sensibility of love and beauty as he reveals his inability at sexual front.

Another remarkable aspect of Kumar’s representation of erotic is his way of putting erotic feelings in contrast to ascetic/religious ideas. An example is the poem” Baptism of fire” where the speaker is constantly involved in erotic thought as he is sitting for his sacred thread ceremony that is ironically aimed to “control/ all the tigers in your blood stream and steer it to the cosmic sea.” The poet seems to laugh at the idea as he present the speaker who thinks: I touch Sheila’s nascent breast under the mango tree I burn when my mouth holds her scarlet throat, till she goes limp in my arms like soufflé and the earth spins on a bull’s horn for a new gyre.” (Trapfalls in the Sky 21) So far as the style is concerned R. K. Singh’s erotic poems lack symbolic representation and are more explicit in terms of expressions and images.

Kumar’s erotic poetry is quite evocative as he develops an impressive style of presentation by mixing suggestiveness and explicitness. R. K. Singh, however, seems more direct, bold and more candid than Kumar in the use of erotic words, images, the employment of themes, situations and settings. Kumar freely employs words such as “nipples,” “orgasm,” “navel,” “thighs,” “breast,” “breasts,” “lips,” “kisses,” “cheeks,” “tongue,” “legs,” “vulva,” etc. Singh goes a step further by including in this existing sex vocabulary a number of candid expressions such as “ejection,” “ejaculation,” “copulation,” “consummation,” “busts,” dick,” “fuck,” etc. Interestingly, these words appropriately fit into the context without generating any baser or pornographic sense.

There is a remarkable similarity in the use of certain expressions, settings and ideas in the

two poets: R. K. Singh says “Best poetry is a woman.” Kumar also expresses a desire to read the face of a woman like poem.

Again, in one of the poems, Singh seems to suggest women “not” to “complicate” but “compliment” “wanting love ” Kumar seems to present a contrastive situation: “A man should come to his woman whole— / not when the mind / in a perverted sunflower. . .” (Cobwebs in the Sun 43). Both the poets in their treatment of woman and sex seem to be partial: they reflect the male sensibility: their pain and suffering without any effort to understand the female psyche in terms of sexual relationship. Kumar largely exposes the disharmony by criticizing, mocking and laughing at it.

Thus to conclude Shiv K. Kumar is more akin to the western thoughts and ideologies in his depiction of Eros. His poetry showcases disharmony between the sexes and the lack of mutuality in the sexual act whereas Singh’s poetry attempts a celebration of the Indian principle of harmony in sex.

References 1. Kumar, Shiv K. Losing My Way: Poems. Delhi: Peacock Books, 2008. p.17 2. Singh, R. K. My Silence and Other Selected Poems. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1994. p.102 3. Tiwary, R S. Sur Ki Sringar Bhavna. Delhi: Parimal Publication, 1999. p.6 4. Kumar, Shiv K. Trapfalls in the Sky. Madras: Macmillan India Limited, 1986. p.71 5. Kumar, Shiv K. Woolgathering. Mumbai: Disha Books, 1998. p.48 6. Kumar, Shiv K. Thus Spake the Buddha. Delhi: UBS Publishers’Distributors, 2002 7. Kumar, Shiv K. Cobwebs in the Sun. New Delhi: Tata Macgraw-Hill, 1974. p.37 8. Mottier, Veronique. Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction .Oxford :Oxford University Press, 2008 9. Kumar, Shiv K. Articulate Silences. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1970. p.12 10. Solomon, Robert C. True to our Feelings. Oxford University Press, 2007. p.60 11. Singh, R K. Sexless Solitude and Other Poems. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2009. p.22.

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REFLECTION OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN THE POETRY OF R.K.SINGH AND P. RAJA _______________________________________________________________________ _

Jayshree Goswami * and Md. Mojibur Rehman ** The paper aims to make a comparative study of the depiction of culture, both societal and personal by R.K Singh and P.Raja, one belonging to eastern India and the other to southern. It focuses on personal/ individual identity; depiction of Indian culture; Indian rituals and myths, family, man/ woman relationship, and treatment of love and sex; and reflection of modern societal system-- political, academic, cultural, economic, and social.

Poetry is both personal and social criticism. The contemporary poets are dissatisfied with the present state of unrest, corruption, ignorance, misery, and identity. For them poetry serves as a medium through which while denouncing the societal blemishes they reveal their ideology, attitude, prejudices and vision, highlighting their personal culture. Apart from this, a writer also confronts the problem and challenges to one’s identity in a multicultural nation; where one feels alienated, rejected and rootless. Sometimes they even suffer the politics of rejection at the national level. R.K Singh and P.Raja highlight the agony and disillusionment arising out of rejection in one’s own land. R.K Singh, in spite of being an insider feels an outsider. He expresses his disgust, saying: I do not question the sun adding wings to wounded giants or depressing them to crouch down the memory’s lanes or erect new walls with odours of hate and love cagily crumpling the shades between earth and sky.1 The persona expresses his grudge against the superior authority, as denoted through the image of the “sun”, who either privileges the fragile and the marginalized men or deprives them of their individuality and freedom. There is repetition of the expression “I do not question”, which implies the annoyance of the character and at the same time, it reveals his agony at being alienated and distanced. He is forced to “crouch down with odours of hate”. In spite of being an insider, worthy of identity, the persona shrinks into himself, unnoticed and unrecognized. This is hinted through the words “cagily” and “crumpling”.

A similar condition is also expressed by P.Raja when he writes : Hailed by fans from all corners the writer is a non- entity at home. 2

The speaker, by providing the background of a ‘home’, connotes to his homeland, India.

He adopts the image of “unsympathetic eyes/ of a practical housewife.”3 for the unsympathetic readers and critics who are professional enough in rejecting and ignoring the “cerebral excitement”4 that refers to the creative composition of the writer. He presents the anguish and trauma of a native writer who, in spite of receiving acclamations from abroad, is treated as a non-entity at home. In other words, he is subjected to rejection. When we compare these poems, we find R. K. Singh’s images to be more complex and ambiguous than P.Raja’s. Raja is more direct in his expressions.

Singh also depicts rootlessness, existential crisis and alienation in poems like ‘Sweet Savours’, ‘I Seek the Roots’, ‘Wordless Plaints’, and ‘Aloof’. The poet expresses his crises of identity in the lines The colour of night is the same everywhere what if my identity is not known. lets’ fuck the moment and forget the place 5 The directness in tone generated through the expression “what if” clearly states the grudge of the narrator. The trauma and anxiety for being unknown, and lacking an identity is implicitly expressed through the image of “night”: a similar darkness, like that of the night, prevails in the heart of the poet. He expresses his loneliness resulting out of his identity crisis in “I feel alone/ like a wandering bird/ without a nest:”6 Singh carefully chooses the images of a “wandering bird” and “an island” to express the present state of rootlessness, seclusion, and isolation. The persona encounters this state because of his being away from roots, the cultural ties and people. He is like a forsaken island, deserted, unable to adjust in an alien culture and land. However, we do not find instances of alienation and rootlesness in Raja’s poems, for the writer is rooted in his native place unlike Singh, though the former, too, is in search of establishing his identity through the medium of poetry. He even projects the commercialization of prose writings and the marginalization of poetry in: Poems don’t bring money.

Sometimes they fail even to fetch a complimentary copy. …Perhaps that’s why wife -the inspirer of my worksadvises me not to write poems, but concentrate on remunerative prose-pieces.7 Identity created through poetry is at stake and/or suffers marginalization. While Singh is reflective in presenting the questions and challenge, P.Raja’s poems are humorous, generating pathos at the same time.

INDIAN RITUALS AND MYTHS Apart from expressing their individuality, both the poets project the culture of the Indian society. Being rational and visionary, they sound critical of certain rituals that retard progress, but advocate those which are cultural icons. In Singh’s poetry, one comes across the depiction as well as the criticism of many Hindu rituals. He questions: Is it the love for ritual or the ritual waste: every year they steal light to illumine puja pandals 8 The narrator projects the hypocrisy of the practitioners of rituals. Moreover, most rituals have lost their sanctity; rather they advocate corruption. It is demeaning to glimpse such cultural degeneracy in a country like India, which boasts about its cultural multiplicity.

Singh unveils cultural corruption through his contemplative question: “Is it the love for ritual/ or the ritual waste?” stealing of lights and blaring of non-stop nasty songs enhances the irony when “but the goddess keeps mum/ perhaps self-loathingly/ sleeps for demons to write histories”9. The words “mum”, “self-loathing” and “sleeps” hint at the helplessness of the goddess. The line “sleeps for demons to write histories” projects the hegemony of corrupt and shrewd men in creating histories since ages.

Similarly, P.Raja, too, comments on certain superstitions and religious practices.

However, his comment reflects the religious hypocrisy and not the political one. He through a religious and cultural satire presents the condition of Indian gods and the Hindu believers: India speaks through its temples.

Its hindu pantheon boasts humbly of just two million gods.10 The poet depicts religious tolerance through the expression “Hindu pantheon”, but at the same time, he mocks at their pantheism with the reference to “just two million gods”.

Moreover, the poet deepens the satire by contrasting India with other nations: All other countries are paupers.

They can’t afford to spend on their god.

For them charity begins at home.11 The poet also reveals the hypocrisy and irrationality of these rituals: While babes whimper for a cup of milk cauldrons are poured on sacred stones.

Tonnes of pure ghee drench our gods

to their very stones.

But hotels here display the broad: “The sweetmeats sold here are not made of pure ghee.12 The poet highlights the mere superstitious beliefs of the Hindu rituals; the use of “while” and “but” presents the stark reality. Besides, these rituals also project the ignorance of the societies promoting these rituals.

Apart from these pretensions, P.Raja also reflects his concern for the disappearance of certain traditions, which fail to serve any purpose of the materialistic world. He evinces the cultural decline, resulting from the present generation’s disregard for the traditional values. In ‘My Grandpa’s Desk’ he ponders over a similar situation where a “desk” is considered an inheritance of loss, due to its non-utilization. The persona expresses his agony and concern in the lines: My son, I do not know, what he would do with the desk! Kep it as a momento!

Or simply reduce it to splinters to feed his empty oven!13 However, Raja is not critical of all the rituals, superstitions, beliefs and cultural practices; he in certain cases even highlights typical south Indian cultures that are revered. For example, drawing of kolam, a traditional art form. He also presents the mindset of a Hindu wife as shaped by the religious texts: she believes that “…God sleep/ in that lump of sod?”14 However, it is to be noticed that P.Raja presents a common Indian male ideology where a woman is considered to be irrational, emotional, and gullible. This is evident fromBelieving is feeling.

She believes. …Isn’t God omnipresent?

Oh, yours may not be.

But hers is.15 The title ‘The Hindu Wife’ indicates the perception of the poet, guided by the preconceived notion of a female psyche.

On the other hand, R.K Singh is critical of most of the cultural practices and rituals. It is because they have undergone a transition in both their purpose and practice. In poems like ‘Orgasm’, ‘Fresh Future’, ‘God’, and ‘They Call God Loudly’, the poet presents the retarding nature of the myths and rituals, therefore, he wishes to “…recoup/ the elements’ balance/ and create new suns/ and moons that could light the cave”16 Apart from the social criticism, both the poets also highlight the concept of family in their

poetry. Indian family system is known for its togetherness and unity. However, both Singh and Raja trace urban family life, where there is segregation of the family after marriage. Singh deals with the discordances and distancing of couples in his poems. In the poem ‘Bulli’, the poet presents an Indian situation where, in spite of discordance, disregard, hatred, and dissatisfaction, the wife does not leave her husband. The persona expresses: She sees many faults in me points out all I shouldn’t do …yet life rolls on mocking compromise of living to keep home she conceals within our angst.17 In spite of all complaints, an Indian wife adheres to the cultural values, and goes on compromising. The persona, through the expression “to keep home”, presents the Indian concept of home. Further, the agony and helplessness of an Indian wife is suggested through “she conceals within / our angst”. This statement reflects the ironic situation of an Indian wife which she accepts as her destiny. The poet presents bitterness and strangeness in relationship in the poem ‘Sleeping Light’ where the persona conveys“The anxiety/ on her face tells of/ the gap in relationship”18. Singh tries to present the bitter relationship of a husband and wife, reflecting only one aspect of the relationship.

P.Raja, on the other hand, highlights that aspect of family where a daughter-in–law is seen to be the cause of distancing and enfeebling of familial ties. In poems like ‘Fool and God’ and ‘Curtain Lecture’, he presents the relationship shared by a daughter-in-law with her in-laws. The persona in latter poem speaks: “My brother is now an acquaintance. / My parents are only occasional guests.”19. The reference to “an acquaintance” and “only occasional guests” highlights the intense bitterness of the relationship, which is a condition that is encountered in many Indian families. However, the poet fails to portray a holistic picture; in fact, he reflects his chauvinistic attitude in presenting only that picture of the Indian society where women are responsible for misfortunes and discordance. He writes: Forget, you stars! to twinkle.

O, moon! Drive the nights.

Worry no more, O, Sun! about the day.

Stop, O Stop, till the dead God resurrects and creates a new Adam who never in his life

will ask for an Eve. 20 The persona in this poem presents an unacceptable and discrepant perception, as we find the poet fails to depict those situations where women lack the power to decide, feel, think, and act. The true picture is that majority of women are still harassed by the male dominance. They still have the status of subalterns.

Nevertheless, it is true that there is discrepancy in the treatment of woman in P.Raja’s verses. Both the poets have a different attitude, perception, and ideology with regard to man-woman relationship. Singh believes the soul to be androgynous, where woman is considered the feminine principle; the initiator or Shakti in the Indian context. “her shiva and/ shakti a dual-single/ me and she, one”.21 Shiva is the male power and Shakti the female. He believes that both of them are incomplete without each other just as Purush cannot exist without the assistance of Prakrati. Creation is possible only when “lingam and yoni harmonise”22. Here, the union is divine, generating harmony. In this instance, we find Singh to present a contrary code to that of the Indian society; where male and female are binary oppositions. Similarly, P.Raja too, addresses woman as Shakti. The persona in the poem ‘A Opportunity Missed’ speaks: In vain did I wander in the temple of Shiva while my Shakti prayed for me 23 The narrator considers himself to be Shiva, the male principle and woman as the embodiment of Shakti. He realizes that love and peace resides in the presence of Shakti and not in the temple of Shiva. The persona considers his quest for himself, Shiva, to be “vain” because union and harmony is possible only when man and woman become one.

This concept of the poet is devoid of all the societal values and prejudices. It is the poet’s perception of man-woman relationship. Moreover, not only the relationship between man and woman but the concept of love and physical union, too, highlights the culture of a nation. In Singh’s poetry we find the concept of sex playing at various connotative levels, most of them adhere to the Indian philosophies that have permeated into its culture.

It’s part of prayer to have the lingam kissed or kiss it to feel the creator’s pulse 24 Sex is a ritual, “the climax of creation”25 just as the lingam of Shiva is divine and one can feel the divine pulse of Shiva by its sacred touch. Similarly, through the union of bodies, one can realize God. The poet writes: “thank the body too/ that houses the spirit”26 The poet considers the body to be a temple; bliss, for the spirit too, requires the body to realize the divine. He wishes “to recreate / the body, a temple/ and a prayer” 27

INFLUENCE OF SANGAM LITERATURE P.Raja also presents his concept of freedom of love. Moreover, P.Raja’s love poems exhibit traces of influence of ancient Tamil poetics, as embodied in Sangam poetry and expounded in ‘Porul Athikaram’ (The Book of Meaning). Tolkappiyam part III is unique in its combination of ecology and aesthetics, for it codifies literary themes and forms based on categories of space and time. The basis of Sangam poetics is the division of life and literature into ‘akam’ and ‘puram’. ‘Akam’, as Thaninayakam puts it, is supposed to be “the most internal, personal, and directly incommunicable human experience, and that is love and all its emotional phases.”28 In addition, puram is “all that does not come under this internal and interior experience”29 while, love poetry is akam, all the other poetry, elegiac, panegyric and heroic, is puram. The aspect of love is called ‘uripporul’, or the subject matter of the ‘tinai’, the region, the season and the hour are called the ‘mutalporum’ or the material, the objects of environment are denoted as ‘karupporul’.

However, Tolkappiyam clarifies the relative importance of the three components of tinai.

According to him “karupporul’ is more important than the other ‘mutalporul’, and ‘uripporul’ is more important than the other two”.30 That is, the aspect of love is the most important part, the objects of environment come next and the region, the season and the hour are less important.

Considering this notion, we find in P.Raja an adherence to ‘uripporul’ only, as also found in some of the poems of akam poetry. In akam poetry, the poems on the theme of love are all in the form of dramatic monologue and name of the hero and the heroine is never mentioned. Similarly, in P.Raja’s collection To Live in love we find his characters expressing their feelings and thought, without reference to any particular person/ name.

His characters are intended to be universal and common to all times. However, he deviates from the strict pattern of form and writes in free verse. The persona speaks to her ladylove: You are an oasis my dear!

In my life’s vast desert. … When we came face to face, thank Heavens, we had no attack of lock- jaw.

Warm embracing crazy, fervent kisses, -our very existence now.31 The lover’s life of desolation in separation is suggested through the image of ‘desert’, indicating aridness, and hope in love is suggested through the image of an ‘oasis’, which would quench his desires. The excitement of the lovers union and the consummation of love is hinted through the words like “warm embracing”, “crazy”, and “fervent kisses”.

Here, the poet presents that aspect of love when a lover separates and re-unites with the beloved subsequently followed by the expression of their feelings and thoughts. Next, in

the poem ‘Burden of love’, the poet presents the trauma of a lover who earlier shared a loving relationship but now is separated.

DEPICTION OF MODERN SOCIETY Both the poets portray, discuss and criticize all the proponents of contemporary Indian society-- the political, academic, cultural, economic, and social. Singh in his poetry raises basic issues like corruption, poverty, perversion, prejudices and pollution.

Singh’s social consciousness is reflected through the issues raised and the scenario presented by him. He criticizes the political system and their leaders. He considers politics to be a profession of convenience where the leaders: blinded by politics of convenience …as leaders create a new elitism a new tyranny of mid-term poll 32 The poet presents an Indian picture where there is no democracy. The expressions “a new elitism”, “a new tyranny”, “mid term poll” suggest the fascist regime that is tyrannous and favourable to only one class, the leaders. The expression “mid term poll” also indicates the dystopian system. The words “create” and “new” have a negative implication, these hint at the creation of a society inhabited only by dictatorial and tyrannous rulers. The poet uses animal images to describe their shrewdness, treachery, and deceit in My Silence poem no- 36 and Music Must Sound poem no – 75. He also unveils political perversions by referring to the different scams and scandals in poem no 29 and 47 of Above the Earth’s Green.

On the other hand, P.Raja does not explicitly communicate political depravity. However, he borrows the image of mosquito for the political leaders and in a humorous way and criticizes their misdeeds thus: How well with your charming song you mesmerize mankind!

Oh! Scrounger of man’s fuel.

We toil and sweat.

We pray and eat.

Yet our bread is not a full loaf.33 This is an apt comment and image which describes the situation of an Indian, and the political leaders. The “charming song” suggests the gullible promises of the leaders before elections. The condition of an Indian citizen is accurately portrayed through the

statement “Yet our bread is not a full loaf”. Being in academics, Raja authentically presents academic corruption in poems like ‘After the Interview’ and ‘Ragging’. In poems like ‘Refresher Course’ and ‘Seminar’ he humorously narrates the reasons behind the falling standards of academics. R. K Singh, on the other hand, depicts the administrative loopholes and politics in higher academic system in the poem ‘Why Should I Suffer’. Apart from this, the poet exposes, discusses and criticizes the contemporary problems of terrorism, population, communal conflicts, and poverty that the nation is encountering. Corruption is a major theme in his poetry, and he exposes corruption of all kinds: Sexual, religious, social, academic, and political.

Both the poets seem to be dissatisfied and unhappy with the present societal condition, as reflected through their attitude, and perception of the society. It is to be noted that both R.K Singh and P. Raja do not provide any resolution, whether implicitly, or explicitly, to the problems they discuss. They do not seek to direct men, to judge events, to reform morals, or to present a philosophy. Poetry is their only object, an art that exists for itself.

REFERENCES: 1. Singh, R. K. My Silence And Other Selected Poems; Some Recent Poems: 19901994. Prakash Book Depot, 1994, p. 2.

2. Raja, P. To The Lonely Grey Hair. Pondicherry: Busy Bee Books, 1997, p.19.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Singh, R. K. My Silence And Other Selected Poems; Flight of Phoenix: 19871989. Prakash Book Depot, 1994, poem no. 26.

6. Ibid., poem no. 17.

7. Raja, P. To The Lonely Grey Hair. Pondicherry: Busy Bee Books, 1997, p.59.

8. Singh, R. K. My Silence And Other Selected Poems; Some Recent Poems: 19901994. Prakash Book Depot, 1994, p. 41.

9. Ibid.

10. Raja, P. To The Lonely Grey Hair. Pondicherry: Busy Bee Books, 1997, p.34.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Raja, P. From Zero to Infinity. Pondicherry: All India Books, 1987, p. 67.

14. Raja, P. To The Lonely Grey Hair. Pondicherry: Busy Bee Books, 1997, p.21.

15. Ibid.

16. Singh, R. K. Sexless Solitude And Other Poems. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2009, p.52.

17. Singh, R. K. My Silence And Other Selected Poems; Some Recent Poems: 19901994. Prakash Book Depot, 1994, p. 26.

18. Singh, R. K. Sexless Solitude And Other Poems. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2009, p.28.

19. Raja, P. From Zero to Infinity. Pondicherry: All India Books, 1987, p. 32.

20. Ibid., p.38.

21. Singh, R. K. My Silence And Other Selected Poems; Flight of Phoenix: 1987-

1989. Prakash Book Depot, 1994, poem no. 6.

22. Ibid., poem no.52.

23. Raja, P. To Live in Love. Pondicherry: Busy Bee Books, 2003, p.23.

24. Singh, R. K. Sexless Solitude And Other Poems. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2009, p. 64.

25. Singh, R. K. My Silence And Other Selected Poems; My Silence: 1974-1984.

Prakash Book Depot, 1994, poem no. 63.

26. Singh, R. K. Sexless Solitude And Other Poems. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2009, p. 64.

27. Ibid., p. 33.

28. http://www.tamilnation.org/literature/ancientliterature.htm 29. Ibid.

30. http://www.tamilnation.org/literature/anthologies.htm.

31. Raja, P. To Live in Love. Pondicherry: Busy Bee Books, 2003, p. 2.

32. Singh, R. K. My Silence And Other Selected Poems; Some Recent Poems: 19901994. Prakash Book Depot, 1994, p. 42.

33. Raja, P. From Zero to Infinity. Pondicherry: All India Books, 1987, p. 48. _______________________________________________________________________ _ * Jayshree Goswami- Research Scholar, Dept of HSS, ISM, Dhanbad. ** Md. Mojibur Rehman - Assistant Professor, Dept of HSS, ISM, Dhanbad

13.

From: http://majestic.lit.org/wordpress/?p=1128 R.K.Singh, An Indian English Poet Explores The Senses Creatively…

Sunday, May 30, 2010

By Sandra Yuen MacKay (Editor’s Note: We welcome R.K. Singh as our guest blogger of the month. Here he shares his views and philosophy about his poetry.)

At times it is refreshing to reflect on one’s own creativity and answer questions like what motivates you to write, what type of writing you have been doing, what has helped your writing, and how satisfied you feel with all that you have achieved so far.

Let me begin by sketching a typical day in my life. A deadly monotony of existence in the maze of routine is what characterizes a typical day in my life: while mentally it is a journey from loneliness to frustration to depression; physically it crisscrosses the routine of living in the same house; working in the same place; meeting the same people; teaching batch after batch the same unwilling-to-learn students; the same time of getting up, eating and sleeping; the same worries and complaints; the same diseases; the same unfulfilled desires; the same uninspiring atmosphere; the same prayers; the same narrowing dimensions and captivation; the same insecurity and marginalization; and the same search for freedom; the same sense perception probing sex, city or people; and yet, I’m unable to know myself or forget the growing depression.

Living life in a boring environment, it is a challenge to sustain poetic creativity.

Yet I have survived the inner and outer sterility. It has been great fun to use some small, negligible aspect of one’s behavior, or some insignificant event, or something read or heard in the past that stays unconsciously in the memory and gets connected some other time while something incites me into a poem, or I get my own thoughts as I read somebody else’s poem, or I recollect some complex dream experiences into the garb of a poem. I see to it that the emotion thus expressed makes sense to me as an ordinary reader, and is not mere claptrap in the form of a poem. I also check there is some sort of rhythm or pattern in the expression and no waste of words. Since the poetic mood is short-lived, my poems are almost always short, and there is hardly a poem composed with a title integral to it. I prefer not to give titles to my poems.

What is my poetry about? Much depends on the insight into how one responds to my poetry or how delightful to the senses or challenging to the mind one finds it, or how one wants to interpret my creative perception of meaning in the world.

There are many themes, individual passion, historic-mythical awareness, human relationship, social consciousness. I am my own veil and revelation; I am both the subject and the object and reveal others as much as I reveal myself.

I utilize the world in which I live in order to create an authentic voice, which begets empathy and brings the reader in close contact with the poem. In addition, it demonstrates my choice of the subject matter I am exploring. In the subjective process of creation, it is normal for a poet to create out of himself whatever outside he sees excites the inner vision. If he feels sex as truth and, as Sri Aurobindo says, renders the experience with beauty or power, there is nothing objectionable.

The fact is my social vision intersects the private and sexual. There is some sense in a poet’s frenetic eroticism or sexuality—love of the self through exploration of the body, or naked physicality, leading to love of the divine, or man and woman as one.

I believe the effect of poetry lies in the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with its reading. The appeal of erotic poetry lies in the activation of the sense, mind and the emotions that appear in some way interpretative of life, or subject experiences that have depth. It is perhaps in the area of sex—a fact of life—that one must search for the most secret and profound truths about the individual or his/her social consciousness. The problem is not sex/sexuality but social attitude, morality, hypocrisy, the socio-sexual standards that determine moral or civilized norms, which discriminate, enchain, and debase honest aspiration as lust or vulgarity.

To me, sex is a metaphor: the encounter man and woman, woman and woman, man and man to express relationships, concerns, roles, to react against false ethical and cultural values, against stereotypes and prejudices, against hypocrisy. (But beware of gimmicks, imitations, romantic overtures, and even plain silliness that I have often noticed in a number of Indian English poets). It is through the inner mindscape that the outer awareness is interpreted.

Further, I think expression of passionate love and sex in my poetry is the internalized substitute, nay antidote, to the fast dehumanizing existence without, and ever in conflict with my search for life, search for meaning in a boring existence.

“Woman” in my poetry is a universal woman, the invisible part of the primordial pairs we know as Purush-Prakriti, or Yin-Yang, unchanging over time and culture: “The best poetry/ is a woman/concrete, personal, delightful/ greater than all” (22 October 1972). I see woman and her nudity as the mainspring of our being (and art), as “the major incident in man’s life,” shaping the psyche and constituting the sensory experience. She is eternal and there is no poetry possible without her. I sing of woman who is both my passion and interest, who is the balance point of various beings, the very cause and end of life, perhaps the means to rediscover the original magic of life.

To me, the human body is a picture of the human soul I celebrate to understand the world and the self. I glorify nudity to explore the consciousness, the inner landscape, lost in muddle of the external chaos.

By writing brief, personal lyrics, or confining myself to the privacy of love-making, I enlarge myself to the universal sameness of human feelings. We are flesh in sensuality and there is divinity in it. The fleshly unity is the reality, the passage to experience divinity. As a poet I try to transmute and transmit memories of experience, possibly more with a sense of irony than eroticism: “While I was petting and necking/lying over her body/she was calculating whether/she could afford a new saree/from what I would pay her/tonight” (14 April, 1973); and She remains indifferent to my fingers moving to stir her cool nakedness my hungry touch causes eructation at intervals I caress her back wobble about the torso or rest on the thighs hoping she will be turned on but warily I persist in half-sleep she lets me enter for convenience let it end the sooner the better

Before I end, a line or two about my haiku, too. It suits my temperament. In fact in most of my regular poems, the haiku rhythm should be easily discernible. It seems to have become the basic unit of my poetical expression. I developed serious interest in its art and craft from about early 1990s and now, whatever I feel or observe, or whatever my inner experiences at a given moment of time, I try to image them in my poetry.

Lit.org has been a great forum for me to reach out to a larger audience. It is here that I discovered a number of non-academic but very good poets who are neither trite nor dull but refreshing and delightful. –R.K.Singh Blogs: http://www.lit.org/blog/R.K.Singh http://rksingh.blogspot.com