Poems

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a noted Indian English poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator. He is well known for incorporating a post-modernist style in modern English poetry.  His poetry is notable for its quiet command of the reader’s attention; the small details of everyday life in India are its currency. ‘Ironing Lady’, a series of neat descriptions of the precise process of the activity becomes a metaphor for Mehrotra’s approach to writing itself: ‘Common everyday clothes, / Kept loosely in a bundle, / From which the ironing lady / Pulls out a kerchief / … / Making the wrinkles / Disappear under her hand’. In each of his poems it is the accumulation of such apparently simple details that build towards meaning and are allowed to speak for themselves, whether through the poet’s measured, rhythmic delivery in the recordings available here, or on the page.

Readers of Mehrotra’s later work might be surprised to learn that his early poetry was much influenced by Surrealism, a fact Mehrotra has attributed to his need to find an alternative language in which to convey his experiences, which seemed at odds with his ‘Eng. Lit.’ encounters with poetry – as he put it in an interview: ‘How does one write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales?’ His later work is firmly situated in – indeed anchored by – the recognisable world of home, domesticity and family. He has said: ‘Discovering the French and the Americans (Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg) was, for me, a moment of liberation. My subjects did not lie in Europe or the United States, but I had first to make a detour to those places, through their poetry, to realize that my subjects lay nearer home, if not at home.’

Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998) – as well as three of translations, most recently Songs of Kabir (2011). His Collected Poems 1969–2014 is to be published by Penguin Modern Classics. He lives in Allahabad, where he was Professor of English at the university until his retirement in 2012, and Dehra Dun. In his work as an anthologist and translator Mehrotra has done much to bring the work of Indian poets past and present to a wider audience and has been an outspoken critic of the failure of the Indian literary establishment to do more in this field, remarking in an interview with the Times of India that ‘the list of what Indian academics have not done is a long one’. In the 1970s, along with poets Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar, Mehrotra founded the Bombay poetry publishing collective Clearing House, in response to a lack of such outlets for Indian poets. He has edited several works on Indian literature including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), A History of Indian Literature in English (2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (2010). Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: ‘In the staid world of Indian poetry in English […] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called “cool”’.

His works are noted for their innovative exploration of modern concerns and ways of representation. Mehrotra's work has been wide ranging, including both traditional forms and unconventional techniques. Mehrotra's occasional literary experimentation, emphasizing a variety of perspectives, has made his work a part of modern Indian English poetry.

Continuities 

 
I

This is about the green miraculous trees,
And old clocks on stone towers,
And playgrounds full of light
And dark blue uniforms.
At eight I'm a Boy Scout and make a tent
By stretching a bedsheet over parallel bars
And a fire by burning rose bushes,
I know half a dozen knots and drink
Tea from enamel mugs.
I wear khaki drill shorts, note down
The number-plates of cars,
Make a perfect about-turn for the first time.
In September I collect my cousins' books
And find out the dates of the six Mughals
To secretly write the history of India.
I see Napoleon crossing the Alps
On a white horse.

II

My first watch is a fat and silver Omega
Grandfather won in a race fifty-nine years ago;
It never works and I've to
Push its hands every few minutes
To get a clearer picture of time.
Somewhere I've kept my autograph book,
The tincture of iodine in homeopathy bottles,
Bright postcards he sent from
Bad Ems, Germany.
At seven-thirty we are sent home
From the Cosmopolitan Club,
My father says, ‘No-bid,'
My mother forgets her hand
In a deck of cards.
I sit reading on the railing till midnight,
Above a worn sign
That advertises a dentist.

III

I go to sleep after I hear him
Snore like the school bell:
I'm standing alone in a back alley
And a face I can never recollect is removing
The hubcaps from our dull brown Ford.
The first words I mumble are the names of roads,
Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton;
We live in a small cottage,
I grow up on a guava tree
Wondering where the servants vanish
After dinner, at the magic of the bearded tailor
Who can change the shape of my ancestors.
I bend down from the swaying bridge
And pick up the river
Which once tried to hide me:
The dance of torn skin

Is for much later.

Over the years his style changed from flowing surrealism and seems to incline towards a leaner, restrained lyrical poetics in the later work. What remains constant, however, is a sense of the mysterious, the poet’s continued engagement with poetry as a form that deals with the unsayable. Quiet, laconic, sometimes deceptively throwaway, a Mehrotra poem leaves the reader on the verge of larger revelations; the poem’s strength is that these are never articulated.

In a poem entitled ‘The Death of a Sunday Painter’, for instance, a weekend painter is brought to life in a few spare strokes: we learn that he smoked a cherry-wood pipe, that he knew about cannas; that when an essay on literature is read out to him, he listened with a certain courteous attention. There is a fitting air of understatement to the close of the poem; it works not just as effective poetry but as a fitting tribute to a man of some taste and discernment; not a trailblazing artist perhaps, but a man who mattered in his own way to those who knew him.

I followed the truck on my bicycle
And left early; his friends sat all afternoon
In the portico of a nearby house.

The cities of Allahabad and Dehra Dun, the smell of university libraries and seminar rooms, the whiff of colonial history in old clubs and billiard rooms – these are the images that pervade Mehrotra’s poems. This selection also includes some of his family poems, which, to my mind, are among his finest. ‘To an Unborn Daughter’ remains a personal favourite. It combines a lightness of touch, an attention to detail (see the sudden poignant particularity of the “close-bitten nails and light-brown eyes”), a tone both wistful and whimsical, with that sense of the unspoken that pervades so much of his poetry. The last line is subtle and elegantly poised: “I think she wanted to say something.”

It is the style of Mehrotra to continually revise a small body of work, polishing, crafting, and aiming at elegance, wit precision and an impersonality which will fix the poem and the personal memories that are its source.

Mehrotras poetry largely falls into two groups. His earliest work is an immediate reaction to his discovery of various modern, post-modernist and earlier avant-garde style and poetics. On the contrary Mehrotra`s present phase is different as it involves a precise recording of external, a making of art from specifics and details, the notating of what he calls, "location". Often the subject matter comes from memories of childhood or from reading history. The technique which has been used by Mehrotra is generally the surrealistic technique. He likes to juxtapose bits and pieces of sensibility as represented by cliche'd language, sentiments and situations.

In the poems there has been abundant use of Allahabad because most of his poems are related to the nostalgic moments and reminiscences of Allahabad where he had spent a major portion of his life. Mehrotra`s increasing pre-occupation with personal and local realities is derived from his imagism and he demands that poetry be made of specifics and also express its locations.

As a poet Mehrotra also has the capacity to create continuities and connections between language and experience. Mehrotras early poems have several characteristics of post-modernism. The form is highly fragmented and relies on collage and montage with no mythic, formal or symbolic structure to create coherence. As in much post modernist literature it seems to enclose itself with the focus on the text rather than society or history.

The poems of Mehrotra show very little feeling of exhaustion and hopelessness which is noticeable in some of the other post-modernist writers. As far as humour of Mehrotra is concerned it was iconoclastic in nature. Mehrotra`s poetry offers a cool, clever, ironic catalogue of received ideas and ready made speech.

He picks mundane events of his childhood days to base his work, his matter at hand spans not more than a couple or more lines, some are even just one liners, they are subtle events of his childhood the beauty of which he has cherished even till now, not continuous of any single subject but is very much so with another mundane.  He finds poetic beauty even in insignificant things and events such as old clock towers, making a tent as a boy scout, having tea from an enamel mug, an old broken wrist watch, old homeopathy bottles, wornout advertisement sign of a dentist, old cottage that he lived, bearded tailor...

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Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry is notable for its quiet command of the reader’s attention; the small details of everyday life in India are its currency. ‘Ironing Lady’, a series of neat descriptions of the precise process of the activity becomes a metaphor for Mehrotra’s approach to writing itself: ‘Common everyday clothes, / Kept loosely in a bundle, / From which the ironing lady / Pulls out a kerchief / … / Making the wrinkles / Disappear under her hand’. In each of his poems it is the accumulation of such apparently simple details that build towards meaning and are allowed to speak for themselves, whether through the poet’s measured, rhythmic delivery in the recordings available here, or on the page.
Readers of Mehrotra’s later work might be surprised to learn that his early poetry was much influenced by Surrealism, a fact Mehrotra has attributed to his need to find an alternative language in which to convey his experiences, which seemed at odds with his ‘Eng. Lit.’ encounters with poetry – as he put it in an interview: ‘How does one write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales?’ His later work is firmly situated in – indeed anchored by – the recognisable world of home, domesticity and family. He has said: ‘Discovering the French and the Americans (Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg) was, for me, a moment of liberation. My subjects did not lie in Europe or the United States, but I had first to make a detour to those places, through their poetry, to realize that my subjects lay nearer home, if not at home.’
Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998) – as well as three of translations, most recently Songs of Kabir (2011). His Collected Poems 1969–2014 is to be published by Penguin Modern Classics. He lives in Allahabad, where he was Professor of English at the university until his retirement in 2012, and Dehra Dun. In his work as an anthologist and translator Mehrotra has done much to bring the work of Indian poets past and present to a wider audience and has been an outspoken critic of the failure of the Indian literary establishment to do more in this field, remarking in an interview with the Times of India that ‘the list of what Indian academics have not done is a long one’. In the 1970s, along with poets Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar, Mehrotra founded the Bombay poetry publishing collective Clearing House, in response to a lack of such outlets for Indian poets. He has edited several works on Indian literature including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), A History of Indian Literature in English (2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (2010). Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: ‘In the staid world of Indian poetry in English […] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called “cool”’.
- See more at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/arvind-krishna-mehrotra#sthash.5CcaEJ6I.dpuf

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry is notable for its quiet command of the reader’s attention; the small details of everyday life in India are its currency. ‘Ironing Lady’, a series of neat descriptions of the precise process of the activity becomes a metaphor for Mehrotra’s approach to writing itself: ‘Common everyday clothes, / Kept loosely in a bundle, / From which the ironing lady / Pulls out a kerchief / … / Making the wrinkles / Disappear under her hand’. In each of his poems it is the accumulation of such apparently simple details that build towards meaning and are allowed to speak for themselves, whether through the poet’s measured, rhythmic delivery in the recordings available here, or on the page.
Readers of Mehrotra’s later work might be surprised to learn that his early poetry was much influenced by Surrealism, a fact Mehrotra has attributed to his need to find an alternative language in which to convey his experiences, which seemed at odds with his ‘Eng. Lit.’ encounters with poetry – as he put it in an interview: ‘How does one write about an uncle in a wheelchair in the language of skylarks and nightingales?’ His later work is firmly situated in – indeed anchored by – the recognisable world of home, domesticity and family. He has said: ‘Discovering the French and the Americans (Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg) was, for me, a moment of liberation. My subjects did not lie in Europe or the United States, but I had first to make a detour to those places, through their poetry, to realize that my subjects lay nearer home, if not at home.’
Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998) – as well as three of translations, most recently Songs of Kabir (2011). His Collected Poems 1969–2014 is to be published by Penguin Modern Classics. He lives in Allahabad, where he was Professor of English at the university until his retirement in 2012, and Dehra Dun. In his work as an anthologist and translator Mehrotra has done much to bring the work of Indian poets past and present to a wider audience and has been an outspoken critic of the failure of the Indian literary establishment to do more in this field, remarking in an interview with the Times of India that ‘the list of what Indian academics have not done is a long one’. In the 1970s, along with poets Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar, Mehrotra founded the Bombay poetry publishing collective Clearing House, in response to a lack of such outlets for Indian poets. He has edited several works on Indian literature including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), A History of Indian Literature in English (2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (2010). Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: ‘In the staid world of Indian poetry in English […] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called “cool”’.
- See more at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/arvind-krishna-mehrotra#sthash.5CcaEJ6I.dpuf