Hi, Apologies for reposting this, but I thought I would send it again with my writeup on Jeet (which I believe wholeheartedly, by the way) and also two recent poems below. Please note that "Spiderman" is unpublished new work and thus NOT for general circulation outside this list. "In the City of Insomnia" appeared in Fulcrum 3 last year.
By the way, Jeet has just finished a massive and quite startling anthology of Indian English poets for Fulcrum. It has some fifty or so poets, and includes: the entire text of Adil Jussawalla's long poem from his second book, Missing Person (which reads as brilliantly as it did nearly thirty years ago); and work from some never-before-anthologised, nearly forgotten pioneers, such as Gopal Honnegere (who published his first book from a small press in Bangalore in, I think, the late sixties, and had blurbs from W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and William Stafford!) and Lawrence Bantleman (an exciting Anglo-Indian poet who corresponded with William Carlos Williams, had a couple of volumes from Writer's Workshop in the sixties, went to England and disappeared). PRESENTATION @ SARAI Tuesday, March 29, 6:00 pm 'You Are Not Here' Poetry Reading by Jeet Thayil Jeet Thayil will perform from his most recent collection, 'English' (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004) and a selection of newer poems. 'English', has been widely received as an important and unprecented signpost in the history of Indian English poetry. Fusing lyric and narrative energy in a drowsy, mongrelized Americanese, alternating between strict and free forms, Thayil fashions a voice and persona that is only indirectly autobiographical, half-fiction: addicted to opium, shapeshifting, drifting across borders and stumbling through rehab, while the surrounding world teeters perpetually on the brink of apocalypse. "Ruined still by syntax", the narrator hangs on the margins of both America and India because English is his only language of love, his truest inheritance- "English fills my right hand, silence my left." Thayil's specialty in these poems is a very finely-tuned emotional precision, played out in an unmistakable register that is not crudely bitter or caustic, never heroic, but unconsolably blue, beset by visions. Jeet Thayil was born in India and educated in Hongkong, New York and Bombay. In 1998 he returned to New York where he received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a 2003 poetry award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in 'Stand', 'Verse', 'Agenda', 'London Magazine', 'The Independent', 'Salt Hill' and 'Kaviya Bharati', among many other journals. He is an editor with 'Rattapallax' and a contributing editor with 'Fulcrum', and is currently based in Bangalore and Delhi. <http://www.rattapallax.com/thayil.htm> TWO RECENT POEMS BY JEET THAYIL: IN THE CITY OF INSOMNIA There’s a parade in the white streets of the city. All night the armoured cars trundle past the avenue. Dazed men and women stand making circles with their hands, their smudged eyes wide open. At dawn the silent mayor arrives, climbs the stair to your room, takes a moment to catch his breath and present you with a key you will wear round your neck like a star. SPIDERMAN Leap tall buildings in a single bound? Forget you buddy, I leap years, avenues, financial/fashion/meatpacking districts, 23 MTA buses parked end to end. I leap Broadway, yoyo to traffic light, to bus top, to Chrysler, to jet. You need a mind of sky, of rubber, to understand moi. You need silence, cunning. Exhale! You need to know that everything is metaphor, that poems sprout in my hands like mystic confetti, like neural string theory. My brother, Mycroft, is tiny, but a genius, oh a tiny genius, whose "art is subtle, a precision of hallucinatory brilliance," – that's serious talk, boy – he's 'furthermore' and 'however,' I'm 'know what I'm saying?' and 'whatever.' He is the ghost ant, the one who is not there, unseen until he stops moving. I am companion to owl and peregrine, emperor of air, and I'm loyal to you my loyal subject, whose hard-won pleasure I perform, and though I'm not rich it takes a lot of cash to keep me in the poverty to which I'm accustomed. ------------------------ Yahoo! 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