Poetry

This is my first collection of poems at the age of 67. Besides a small tribute to my grandmother at her sraddha in September 1966, when I was 10 years old, I don’t remember writing any poems in my childhood, boyhood, or young adulthood. I wrote a decent poem in the late 1990s, submitted it to a ‘little magazine’ that folded around the same time. It was forgotten by me completely, and would have disappeared forever had the ex-editor, some two decades later, not found it in his old papers and sent it back to me. It’s finally getting printed here.

One other poem would be approximately ten years old. All the others have been written in the last four years, with productivity increasing as we near the present. The conclusion is inescapable that my senior years have revealed a side of me that was latent for long, and one, to be frank, I could never have predicted in my school and college days or even the middle years of life. I have been writing poems in Bangla too in roughly the same frequency and time-frame. With luck, I will assemble a collection for the light of the outer world to shine on them too.

I wish I could introduce my poems here in prose with clarity and sureness. On the contrary, when I read established, published poets, I am left with confusion and unsureness about whether I could even remotely pass muster in their company, or would exist and remain as a poet pretender, travelling a long cul de sac from latency to mediocrity to obscurity.

In a brief profile of the poetic me elsewhere, I wrote “He tries to be observant, restrained, but sensitive to feelings. His spontaneity is slow and strangely steady”. I’m still in agreement with that placid self-description. A friend who has read my drafts has pilloried me for being straitjacketed, and not letting myself go with the abandon of a properly self-respecting artist. His insight has merit, for as much because he knows my personality as for being forced every now and then to read my lines, in which that personality is only too evident.

In recent poems, i have been more conscious of this angle, or let me say less conscious of it to let my feelings and my lines flow wherever they choose. They never quite escape their source in me and never will. But their expression and then their consideration have been a wonderfully liberating experience. That experience, from staccato start to the recent rush, has been why I started writing, have enjoyed it, and kept writing.

With their accumulation, thoughts of publication of my poems have occurred recently, bringing with them new thoughts and  feelings, and to some extent the flow of creation has paused a little. I never thought of poetry as ‘serious business’, and once this is out, I hope to write more, much more. In that sense, this publication is a test of the waters with my toes, or a climb down the steel ladder at the side of the pool. If the experience is fun, i hope to dive in next time with the confidence of welcoming and relatively warm waters waiting. But even if I don’t go swimming again, I would like to keep writing – in the ‘changing room’ of my personality, so to speak.

Each poem was written as a ‘one-off’. I had no categories in mind as I wrote. But without some organising, the collection looked too haphazard for a reader to embark on. Hence, i have bunched them according to some underlying themes, although they are not in exclusion and often in some inclusion of each other. They are Happenings, Nature, Feelings, Persons and Ideas. I hope this makes for more interesting reading.

– Sanjib Basu