Sherry Chandler

Rukmini Bhaya Nair

from India – Poetry International:

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is a Delhi-based poet and professor of linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology…Her ‘polyphonous’ literary style seeks to connect her varied interests in literary theory and cultural studies. She claims that the impulse to turn out “fat academic volumes and fragile books of verse’ is the same in her case – to discover the limits of language. Her ambition, she says, “is simply to write and research, whatever the genre and whatever the odds”. …In an interview with Manish Chand of Tehelka, she says, ‘The belief that literary criticism is jargon whereas poetry is pure transcendental experience is simply false. You have to address literary problems in your poetry – for a writer like me this crossover is inescapable.’

Nair writes in English and her poetry has many references to American culture, with titles such as “A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman” and “Five Uneasy Pieces.” Here are some excerpts from “Love:”

…
Erich Segal, sentimentaliser of a generation
you knew love was about crying, Ryan O’Neal
had to love Ali McGraw, if it was really

Love

you knew about the accusations, the guilt
but you had no inkling that all the schmaltz
the romance, begins with this instinct
for pairing
with recitations, incantations
encirclements
spells
…

Love

is not never having to says things
it is to say things, show things
over and over and over again
with all the desperate jazz at your disposal

see, that’s Romeo on his bum guitar
and that’s the moon, shameless mauve
riding the tide

You will find more of Nair’s work at The Other Voices International Project, Volume 16. Her collection is entitled Digital Delhi.

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