Spotify link to the voiceover -
One of Vijay Nambisan’s poems (The Garden Variety Show) ends with I do what is expected of me. It’s impossible to imagine, apart from writing (poetry in particular), anything else that would be expected of someone like him who was obsessed with the workings of language to the extent that in his long essay, Language as an ethic, he links the failure of societies to language -
those which failed for internal reasons, I have fancied, must often have done so because their languages were not adequate to their needs. It is possible for a society to evolve without implements, without manufactured weapons, but not without a language.
The Garden Variety Show is a poem from his first collection Gemini that was published in 1993. After that, it took him twenty years to bring out his second collection called First Infinities. He was writing in this period but was not publishing because he thought “poetry does not matter”1. Later, through mysterious workings his mind was more than capable of, he developed the notion that “poetry is the only thing that matters” and that made the life of readers like me and Indian poetry in English much richer. A poet who gives such serious thought to his vocation should not be taken lightly even when he is being self-indulgent. He says in the Foreword to First Infinities -
Too much sensitivity always makes for bad poetry. A few of these poems must be considered juvenilia, and have been called self-indulgent, but I take this opportunity of getting them out of my consciousness, where they've festered too long.2
Vijay Nambisan is the first Indian English poet I could feel at home with. I remember pre-ordering the copy of his collected poems and devouring them while ingesting large quantities of preservatives in my hostel. Vijay’s persona on page had everything that made him an intriguing figure for a young man in his early twenties navigating his way through the mysteries of what he considered his vocation - poetry. Mastery of forms, remarkable sense of humour, acute drinking problem, wit, and most importantly, a deep regard (almost reverence) for poetry. Throw in a serious interest in history and mythology and what you get is a poet made in a lab. Unfortunately, he also became prone to the ill-fates of a quintessential poet - he died early and has largely remained unknown to the world except for people who care about poetry. It took me some time to realise that the people who care about poetry do not think that poets are an accumulation of certain qualities to be assembled in a lab. In Vijay’s case this is even more stark. In his poem To have been written in Urdu3 he says -
I need, sometimes, to form a face which is a face, Not a landscape of eyes and nose and mouth and eyeless gaze
He was a poet who was a poet, not a landscape of the quintessential traits mentioned above. His poetry comfortably traversed the distance between being a list of things to being an organic being that evolves and has the ebbs and flows of life in it.
This is quite evident in the range of moods and emotions his poems hover around. Like the two poems quoted below where he is talking about ‘grass’ -
The rain is pouring down again4
On first looking into Whitman’s humour5
There is death written all over both the poems and it is handled in a dry non-sentimental way. But the mood is different. The first poem is more ruminative while the second one is something Vijay himself would have called juvenilia (I say this not because I knew Vijay personally but because he uses this word in his Foreword for some of his poems. Not that he specifically pointed out such poems but it is easy to guess which ones he meant. The ones with a light touch so to speak. Though I completely disagree with them being juvenilia but that’s for some time later).
In the first poem there is a sense of we. Not in a we the people way but in the way of a bunch of people thrown into the drama of this world that seems to run on collective consciousness.
The second poem is a more light-hearted and possibly personal account of stupid but creative questions children ask. Threw a book at him is a great expression of what he thinks of the child - a mild nuisance that hinders the process of smoking up which the speaker seems to be in love with. The title of the poem seems to be a parody of John Keats’ poem On looking into Chapman’s Homer and the poem alludes to the famous long poem of Walt Whitman, Song of myself. The image of grass being the uncut hair of graves is a Whitman image. There is so much to unpack in this short poem. Which book did the speaker of the poem throw at the child? Was it Leaves of grass that has the poem Song of myself? Did the speaker mean to say to the child that an old man in America had already dealt with the subject of grass and he didn’t stop at calling it the uncut hair of graves. Here, take this book and read more crazy theories like grass is the ‘flag of my disposition’ and even ‘grass is itself a child’. Vijay’s entire poem works because of the different meanings the word grass takes. The speaker, high himself, rambles on for four lines to slowly unpack the meaning of grass as marijuana. This might be my confirmation bias speaking but there is probably an oblique suggestion that Whitman was high when he wrote Songs of myself. I certainly believe so, because writing something like this in an era like that required one to be under influence. You can decide for yourself by reading the long poem here.
The difference in moods of both the grass poems is also evident in the way the sounds are arranged. In every line of the first poem (except for the last), the unstressed syllables are kept at the bare minimum. The poem is tightly packed with stressed syllables which accentuates the impact of the words that are supposed to carry a lot of weight of wisdom. To give a specific example -
Naturally it knows/Nothing of the jaws that clomp in half/Its pride, the guileful steel that cuts/In two its prime
The internal rhyme of pride and prime is quite evident if you read the poem aloud. What is also important to note here is that the speaker wants to convey the idea of cruelty. For that, a choice of using plosives (especially the ‘t’ sound) as the dominating consonantal sound seems to have been made and to accentuate the effect, every line is given at least as many stressed syllables (‘it’, ‘knows’, ‘No-’, ‘jaws’, ‘clomp’, ‘half’, ‘pride’, ‘guile-’, ‘steel’, ‘cuts’, ‘two’, ‘prime’) as there are unstressed ones (‘the’, ‘that’ etc). The decision to break the line at ‘cuts’ also attests to the fact. These are lines dense with stressed syllables while the other poem that quite evidently is a bit lighter in theme is equally so in the way its sounds are arranged. Notice, for instance, that every line is infused with unstressed syllables. One can call them light syllables. Also, the consonant sounds are mostly fricatives (f, v, s, h, z, th sounds) that are softer as compared to plosives (p, b, t, d, k, g sounds). A bit more air is given to the poem by keeping the stressed syllables to a bare minimum. The lightness of touch in his subject is reflected in the way the sounds are arranged. Though one should be wary of this distinction between the subject of a work of art and its form as in most of the cases they are inseparable, it gives a convenient frame to assess a poem.
In one of his poems, Grandfather’s Beard6, he writes -
I would like my poems to be Like my grandfather’s beard, to be airy In the lean wind, to look up to the clouds And laugh. There are people unaffected By poetry, and there are those whom poetry Disregards - I would like to write a poem Like grandfather’s beard.
Poems being airy must mean that a poem that is not too self conscious. Vijay was a serious poet. I am sure by airy he didn’t mean frivolous. Rukmini Bhaya Nayar in the introduction to Vijay’s Collected Poems writes -
It is this unusual prophetic quality that makes his voice so valuable in our godless, techie times when each of us so easily has the chance to be a (false?) prophet on airy social media, to trade glibly in infinite futures.7
She highlights the prophetic qualities of his poems multiple times and cogently argues how Vijay had a seer’s vision and had a gift of looking into the heart of things. This vision is the difference between pantomime and humour. This is what airy must have meant for Vijay. How could someone who could see through and get to the true nature of things not succumb to the impulse of laughing at them? In this respect he might not have been very different from AK Mehrotra’s Kabir.
I seem to have painted him as a poet who was humorous through and through. His poem might serve as an evidence of the comedy of things around us, as all good poems do. But not all of them. Most of his poems were not meant to be funny. As I have said before, Vijay Nambisan was a serious poet. He was well aware of the things around him. I guess he couldn’t help but see and subject everything he saw to the mastery of language as was his wont.
This was an example of his diverse reflections on the same subject but he has written poems on a range of themes. Pop culture, capitalism, art, history, personal history, ducks, mundane tasks like making coffee and tea, religion, poets, poetry and so on. He had something to say about everything and he could say it in tight metrical lines which is the key feature of his poetry. In Mehfil, there will be more posts dedicated to his poetry. For now, I take your leave by urging you to read more of his work.
Source : First Infinities by Vijay Nambisan
Source : First Infinities by Vijay Nambisan
Source : These were my homes by Vijay Nambisan
Source : These were my homes by Vijay Nambisan
Source : These were my homes by Vijay Nambisan
Source : These were my homes by Vijay Nambisan
Source : These were my homes by Vijay Nambisan (Preface)
Thank you for writing and sharing this. Eager to dive into his work.