Poets, in our part of the world, are treading terrains new to their art, and turning more heads than usual

A steaming cup of coffee, a crisp winter evening and a slim volume of T S Eliot’s caustic rambling for some. A damp corner of the bed, a mellow bedside lamp and nights aglow with Kamala Das’s angst for a few more. Poetry, its radicalism and romance had been the monopoly of not a sizeable number of people. However, with each passing day, poets like several other creative heads in the country, have been trying to let go of elitism. They are probably not out to give pulp fiction a run for its money, but are sure wanting to turn more heads than they usually do. And across the country, experiments with the form and its representation, are breaking myths and drawing more people into the fold of verses.

A case in point being Devashish Makhija. His debut book Occupying Silence explores a composite of poetry and images, he calls ‘graphic verse’. Sample this: ‘She had finally allowed me to kiss her. ‘Anywhere,’ she had said, ‘but not on my lips’. We had stood awkwardly at the 9th floor window and I touched her like a gawkish schoolboy. I left to get her some water.’ Makhija’s idiom, flippant and intriguing, not only reaches out to more people than convoluted and saccharine rhetoric could have, the accompanying images see to it that his work cuts across groups of people with varying interests. “When poetry is presented in a manner that doesn’t absurdly presuppose intellectual inclinations, it is accepted by several people with a lot of warmth,” says Sanoli, of city-based recitation band Mahul, which has been trying to revive poetry among all and sundry for some time now. From icons like Sukumar Ray to contemporaries like Srijato, Mahul works on poets across generations apart from writing their own stuff.

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