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Coaxing the verse
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The poetry reading session, courtesy Toto Funds the Arts, was engaging and entertaining
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PHOTO: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
EXPRESSIVE Aditi and K.V.K. Murthy (right) discussed the travails and anxieties of being a poet
Two poets, young and old, Aditi Machado and K.V.K. Murthy read their poems and discussed the art of poetry at the Toto Funds the Arts poetry-reading session at the Crossword Bookstore on Residency Road. Aditi Machado who is studying B.A. in English
Literature, Communication Studies and Psychology at Mount Carmel College, started writing at the age of 14, recalled that her grandmother would dig up her embarrassing poems. She read from “What if she came out into the sun?” published in “iota” from her collection “The People I knew” which opened with the well-known lines from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”.The poem had a free-flowing, light and clear feel. Her other poems – “Kabir” from “Umbrella”, “Ila”, “According to Prabhu” and “Dear Ragini” again, were lucid and artistic.
K.V.K. Murthy whose poems have been published in The Telegraph of Kolkata, Poetry Journal of Mumbai, Poetry India: Voices in the Making, published by the Poetry Society (India) in 1988 and The Guardian UK, explained that they were always triggered off by a reaction; historical event or personality. He read poems that dealt with a Tibet that is twice-removed from the Lhasa Central – a traveller’s Tibet of ancient history where the idea of a railway from China to Tibet is bizarre. For Aditi, “The song that I came to sing” which opens with lines from Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjai”, it was an attempt to move away from the bond between God and devotee and “Naina” was a poem to evoke the senses.
K.V.K. Murthy read from “Signature” and “Cleopatra” – ‘a poet’s take on history’ and an idea that he had been nursing for 40 years. “Judas” was inspired by the Gospel of Judas screened on Nat Geo two years ago about the ‘imaginary interlocutor’. The witty and feminine “Single again” which was an attempt to write from the woman’s mindset, developed after Murthy’s online weekly writing theme was to write from the point of view of the opposite sex.
In a lively discussion between the poets and the audience, the different travails and anxieties of being a poet and writing poetry and developing one’s own poetic style surfaced. Murthy’s initial honeymoon with Eliot, Aditi being a “compulsive editor”, to the rhythms of free verse as “colloquial, casual, conversational” in breaking lines, to emerging as a literary theorist and critiquing poetry forms at a mature stage, economy of expression, the questions and answers were engaging.
For K.V.K. Murthy the war poets appealed in the immediacy of writing and the obsessive reviser Philip Larkin was a strong presence in the art of polishing one’s language. If K.V.K. Murthy was “scared of free verse”, then Aditi was unabashed about her monolingual status as an English poet. The use of metaphors and similes for them, then, “do not complicate expression, but rather coaxes out something…”
AYESHA MATTHAN
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