“Corporeal: Adjective. Relating to a person’s body, especially as opposed to their spirit,” states the Oxford Dictionary. When poets wield the word though, ‘corporeal’ does more than just wallow in the physicality of the human body. It shakes away burdens of societal prejudice, expands to bridge the body and the soul, and even frees itself to include bodies entirely otherworldly. In A Strange Place Other Than Earlobes , an anthology of poems in English by five Kerala poets, imagination and word craft come together to redefine the corporeal.
In an age when poetry neither sells nor is welcomed by publishers, this anthology was born of the relatively young ‘Facebook poets’ movement, where writers self-publish their poetry as status messages or Facebook notes for fellow poets, fans and critics. One such doctor-poet, Sreelatha Chakravarthy, was browsing through her feed when a piece by academic Bini B.S. caught her eye. She noticed that many of Bini’s poems were unintentionally threaded together by the corporeal theme, as were others by translator Ravi Shanker (pseudonym Ra Sh), journalist Binu Karunakaran, and content writer Jeena Mary Chacko (pseudonym Mikim Bizii). In September 2013, Sreelatha rallied these poets into compiling an anthology of corporeal poetry culled from their existing bodies of work, and by December, they had a manuscript. The common link across these poets is their Kerala roots. But save for stray words in Malayalam or local imagery, this collection rarely harps on Malayali-ness. “In the sort of globalised Facebook world we live in, the ideas this anthology expresses are universal,” says Sreelatha.
Bini’s writing opens the 70-poem anthology. While researching “illness narratives”, Bini found that her academic preoccupations often lent itself to poetry too. “The hierarchical distinction between the mind and the body says the mind is superior and the body, stigmatised. But I find the body’s desires, pleasures and sensuality just as important,” she says. To subvert this, Bini’s poetry is a vivid “celebration of the flesh”, full of lush, intimate visuals that “make mysterious the mundane”. In a similar vein, Jeena’s poems overturn gender stereotypical perceptions of the body. “People often define the body by just its appearance,” she says, “I don’t see myself as male or female but as an ecosystem. I see the body as temporal and ephemeral.” Thus, her poems, such as ‘Womb Discourses’, and ‘A Brief Account of the Body’, look at the body in all its fallibility, examines the lenses that society sees it through and re-imagines them.
Corporeality, in this anthology, is also often expressed through language about the body, leading to poems about poetry and language itself. Binu’s ‘Amazing Feats’ about the body’s and language’s flexibility, and Ravi’s ‘The Butcher Girl II’, about deconstructing semantics, are two such. Besides language games Ravi’s poetry dwells deep on the feminine. “I’ve always believed that women should have the upper hand,” he says, and he expresses this dominance sometimes through fantastical incarnations of womanhood; the Greek god Nemesis, mermaids and yakshis make his subjects. Bini, too, fleshes the corporeal beyond the human, often writing of plants, animals and even the spiritual body of Christ (‘May the Kiss Kingdom Come’).
From newspaper articles to Youtube music, Sreelatha says her verse is “a basic reaction to happenings around me”. So her poems ‘Tigerclaws’ and ‘Transmittance’ speak of what makes headlines everyday: violence against women’s bodies. Single lines that come to Ravi’s mind are usually his starting point, while Binu begins with “snatches of memory” and Jeena, with the single solid image or sensory detail. Beyond momentary inspiration though, the poets say rigorous editing and re-writing has made their poetry. “I want just the bare bones to remain,” says Binu. “The editing process is never done,” adds Ravi, “The poem is just someday abandoned.”
Structurally, the anthology mostly features free verse, but occasionally includes rhythm and rhyme-scheme poetry, sonnets or ghazals. “Formal structures may appear restrictive, but I find that they give me an inner freedom,” says Binu. Ravi’s ‘Mermaid - An Amphibian Romance’ reads like a film script, a structure he takes from his familiarity with cinema. Whether free verse or structured, Jeena says it is the aesthetics of poetry that matter to her the most. “I’m moved most by visual grandeur, so I write poetry that appeals to beauty. Art doesn’t need to change the world or even exist for a purpose,” she says, “And I believe that poetry is the purest form of art.”
A Strange Place Other Than Earlobes is being released this month and is published by a collaboration between Brown Critique (Gayatri Majumdar) and Sampark (Sunandan Roy Chowdhury), with an introduction by Brooklyn-based performance poet Aimee Herman.
