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Summer Reading
It is only as I prepare to move between apartments, write a dissertation, and enter the last year of my dissertation that the artificial constructed nature of this reading list seems like a beautiful refuge of kind.
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archive day 1
lessons from day one at the Marbach archive – The thing that you are looking for may not actually be there but it is more important to understand why is it that it is not there. What do you do with the things you find there? – The archive is a curated experience. What are […]
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some concrete poetry
I am preparing for the archive visit that starts tomorrow and found myself trawling through (what else?) the immense data of JStor to look for stuff on Carl Weissner. And out of nowhere the fabulous concrete poetry journal came to the screen.
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oil refinery
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objects of research: Titania Palast, Berlin
As I start digging into Indian poetry’s publishing circles and connections, I find myself within 20 mins from Titania Palast in Berlin. I take the S-Bahn, across the former borders that divided the East and West sides of Berlin, and end up at a generic Kino in Berlin.
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day something: interviews and poems
I have long been a follower of Vivek Narayanan. One afternoon in Delhi, the poet Michael Creighton introduced me to the poetry of Narayanan and there has been no stopping since. Narayanan’s work interests me not just because of the intense craftsmanship that he has about his work. It is also how he manages to […]
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day 10: how to speak poetry
maybe we should meet as complete strangers Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be […]
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The Price of Goodwill
The use of the word “goodwill” hints at the “peril” that he picks up later. Like, a host, he charges his Muslim guests of Bengali origin “goodwill” to accept the occasional snide remark and not dare use the language (s)he uses at home to create poetry. The peril – he says – is that of Hindutva. The fear, perhaps, is that Hindutva will do better what Assamese ethno-nationalism has not been able to do so well over the last decades.