“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
I write this week’s article with some trepidation. On two accounts. One, is that I have gotten to know Linda Ashok over a series of messages and emails. It’s tough to write about someone you know. Secondly, I am not sure what to focus on. That she’s a poet is obvious enough. She’s also a banker, organiser, facilitator and the creator of what could be the only poetry repository of its kind and the creator of much-documented work of verse.
When I asked her to tell me about herself, she said : “above my skin, there is the layer/of a city, where the stars wash/their mouths and spit out the seeds/i am only an apple and half of that reprise!”(Who am I)
I am no expert on the haiku, but her work is the kind I mostly get. “an arc of light/harvests old memories/the whistles of winter,” she writes. Here’s another- “in one cry/a mountain pheasant tears/the valley apart.” The imagery these sparse words create is not an off-chance thing.
Linda’s writing teems with vivid imagery. In The Final Hours, she describes her nervous grandmother who, “drops a ship from her coral eyes/The ship sails through the printed waves/And soon disappears into a fog bank where/Grandma had saved her memories for years.” Elsewhere the poet says that, “The way I chew defines my mood; a sunset/or sunrise, upset or uprise…” (The Different Kinds of Chewing). It’s not just poetry; Linda describes a friend as her, “prega-news bar,” to confirm if she’s really got a poem!
In her engaging email, I got a sense of an unusual upbringing. To a large extent, Linda is who she is, due to her painter-poet father. Describing her childhood, she said, “our one room rented house turned into a heaven of books. All kinds of books. We had no furniture, bare minimum utensils, no fancy clothing, just books including bibles and about eleven dictionaries and musical instruments, images of Lennon and Paul McCartney, huge canvases of painting and colours.” Surely the makings of a poetic life.
Linda is invited to conduct workshops, to read at poetry festivals and to deliver talks on poetry. Pretty much par for the course, almost customary for a poet these days. But for me, there’s something else that makes this young poet so special and so vital.
In 2012, she established the RædLeaf Foundation for Poetry & Allied Arts, “as an enquiry into the system of poetics in India, its linguistic diversity and beyond.” The Foundation also instituted the RL Poetry Award in 2013, to encourage poetic talent from around the world. It’s a platform that requires participation, not payment from poets. 2014 saw 960 entries from all around the world. Linda Ashok has ambitious plans. She’s commissioned translations in various languages, she is looking to publish a critical anthology of major world diasporas. Here’s the thing- the events, the awards and the foundation, are all funded through personal finances raised by Linda Ashok and her partner.
In a time when it’s fashionable to hear about people who claim to be willing to die for their art, it’s magnificent and moving to find someone who chooses to live for her art. It’s not easy and it’s not for everyone. But for Linda Ashok, it seems like just the thing to do. And that makes her passion and her work, deeply inspiring.
Srividya is a poet. Read her work at >www.rumwrapt.blogspot.com
