poetry and flesh

Sometimes you may not want to know the poet behind the poem (let’s not go into that right now), but sometimes it’s unavoidable.  When I say “poem”, I think of a page – white A4, bound into a book, or some kind of virtual scroll.  Unavoidable and instant association.  And while I know there is a poet behind the page, culturally the page appears as some kind of mask.  The implied contract between reader and writer is to focus on the writing, and that the writing will involve a self or selves that both reader and writer readily identify with – but who is neither of them.  Reality is a metaphor.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between the body of the poet and the body of the reader.  A close friend loaned me their copy of “Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability”.  This anthology of poems and essays, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black and Michael Northen, is a brilliantly provocative (though US-centric) introduction to the advancing maturity of the “disability poetry” community.  It’s thrilling and confounding.  Because bodies are foregrounded, because the real world is not a metaphor, but unavoidably seeps through the page onto the fingers of the reader.  And, as we all know, skin is porous.

I want to quote two poems.  The first is by Jillian Weise, and also appears in her book “The Amputee’s Guide to Sex”.

The Old Questions

When I asked you to turn off the lights,

you said, Will you show me your leg first?

 

I heard Rachmaninov through the wall,

a couple making love without prerequisites.

 

Do you sleep with it on? I forgot

there would be this conversation.

 

Do you bathe with it on?

I need to rehearse answers to these questions.

 

Will you take it off in front of me?

I once steeped into a peepshow in New Orleans.

 

Over the door, signs read: Hands off our girls.

Is it alright if I touch it?

 

I am thinking of a hot bath, a book.

The couple on the other side of the wall laughs.

 

She has found the backs of his knees.

What I love about this poem is its revelations and its withholdings, how it turns the usual mix of discomfort and furtive empathy that sex usually conjures into a productive and open encounter with another person.  I was going to write “encounter with the other”, but this poem proves such a phrase abstract and almost absurd.  We are reminded that sexuality is an encounter between particular bodies,  bodies that desire, but also can’t escape their history, politics and positions.  It begins with a moment of iconic intimacy, but its trajectory is interrupted – by the “old questions”.  She is pulled back into self-consciousness, memory and the allure of easier sensualities (a hot bath, a book).  The reader is taken, too, from this scene of intimacy into a peep-show, from the private to the (male) public, where broader questions of spectacle, exploitation, entitlement and ownership are opened.  And it is also no coincidence (I think) that Rachmaninov is the composer who seeps through the walls – a man who suffered depression and (arguably) Marfan Syndrome.  Bodies and their unerasable traces.

Weise is revelatory here.  She takes risks.  But while the poem ushers us into her private, bodily space, it also pushes us back out into the world, into ourselves and our own positions.  It re-presents us with the complicated, beautiful weight of our bodies.  Interestingly, “The Old Questions” is also an intensely visual poem that absorbs and refracts the gaze.

John Lee Clark’s poem “Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain” engages with the visual and otherness in another way, both witty, mundane and sublime.

 

Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain

BARBARA WALTERS IS IN AWE

of a deaf- blind man

who cooks without burning himself!

Helen Keller is to blame.

Can’t I pick my nose

without it being a miracle?

 

AM I A NOBODY, TOO?

I am sorry to disappoint,

but I am.  But nobody

would let me be one,

not even when I catch

a bus stinking of Nobodies.

 

ONE AFTERNOON, I FOUND MYSELF

walking with my cane dragging

behind me but still knowing

the way.  There was nothing

to see.  Everything saw me

first and stayed in place.

Again, one of the things I love about this poem is that Clark has placed himself firmly in the center of the frame (and I do mean this visual metaphor deliberately), but uses this turn the reader’s gaze back on the broader society – on stereotype and othering – and finally on our own subjective sensory worlds.  Not only do we find ourselves in a bus “stinking” of Nobodies, but we’re also drawn empathically into the experience of negotiating city streets as a blind person.  Knowing most of his readers will not have had this experience (and that some certainly will), Clark writes with a lightness and vividness that brings the poem close to a sense of epiphany, while never allowing his experience to be anything but everyday.  His embodied life cannot be appropriated, but it can be appreciated.  Like Weise, Clark uses honesty, movement (both poetic and physical) and discomfort to open up some vital questions.  The answers, like our bodies, our lives, are always ultimately outside the poem.

I said earlier, I’d been thinking about the relationship between the body of the writer and of the reader.  But it’s broader than that – I’ve been thinking about how different art forms affect us differently, how bodily presence is sometimes viscerally communicated, while at other times the body is theoretical, abstract, conjured but not felt.  Recently, I visited ACCA to see “We are all flesh”, an exhibition of sculptures by Berlinde De Bruyckere.   In the cavernous main room, two huge bodies hang suspended from industrial structures – they are horses and yet not horses, corpse-like yet somehow they have the weight and presence of life.  In another room, a museum cabinet displays branches and blankets.  In another, a lump on the floor becomes as you approach it a human figure, curled in on itself, as if wanting to escape a world of grief or terror.  Sticks, bones, flesh, intenstines, hair, history, colonialism, war, animality and humanity.  What sounds on paper grotesque is in presence beautiful and sympathetic (while always remaining viscerally and philosophically challenging).

It’s not a cop-out on my part to say that it’s hard to communicate the power of these sculptures, but it’s at the heart of what I’m trying to get at here.  After going to the exhibition, my partner and I looked up more images of her work online.  In a short span of time, I found myself fatigued – the sense of empathy I had in the gallery had evacuated, leaving me with a sense of discomfort in the spectacle/spectacular, the freakish otherness of these bodies.

We have a visual culture, no doubt.  But there is a huge difference between the digital screen and the breathing body, between the reproduction and the original.  In the presence of a something or someone, you are in a relationship.

What’s that got to do with poetry?  I’m still unsure.  But I have an instinct that moves me towards readings – where poets take to the stage or microphone or just stand up and project their poems to an audience.  I don’t want to play that off against the page, like some contest.  I just know that when a poem is lifted off the page by a voice, pushed across the space between people, landing on bodies with skin, organs, hearts, histories and desires, the poem is changed and our relationships to each other are re-vital-ised.  Anyway, I have spent enough time now with this computer, thinking, typing, erasing, rewriting.  Maybe I’ll see you out there.

welcome back to Chennai

We have a (what can I say…?) a complicated relationship.  There’s a lot of love between Chennai and I, but it’s a little like an arranged marriage.  Coming back here from Kochi (via Vellore) was almost a little bit slightly like coming home, somewhat.  Especially Mylapore.  Nageswara Rao Park, my regular restaurant haunts, the bustle and honking, the streetside stalls, the local Temple…  Familiarity breeds affection.  Which is reciprocal.  But not always.

Chennai, view from the Metro

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have learnt a lot in the process of this week (well, I feel I’ve been taught a lot – who knows if I’ve learnt anything!).  One small example – I’d been invited to give a talk at Anna University about how to teach creative writing.  Me being stuck inside my own experience, I suggested the ideal number for facilitating creativity is around ten, twelve at most.  When it came to question time, someone said their classes are usually around 50 or 60, so did I have any suggestions as to how they could incorporate creativity and participation under such conditions?  Ummmm…..  Sometimes while here I have felt so very very Australian, sheltered…

Speaking of Vellore, I wish I could show you a few photos of this intriguing, bustling, paradox of a town.  Essentially, it’s really a small city, centered around trading and industry, but dominated by two buildings – the Christian Medical College Hospital (CMC) and the Vellore Fort.  The CMC isn’t monumental or extravagant visually, but it’s renowned as being one of Tamil Nadu’s best hospitals, if not India’s.  And there are also many signs around the town which commemorating how CMC donated the funds for this or that piece of infrastructure.  Where government fails or is slow, business or community steps in.  The CMC is also absolutely surrounded by rickshaw drivers and people sitting on the footpath in various states of illness and misfortune begging.

The Vellore Fort is another thing altogether – a mediaeval fortress with its own moat (now plied by paddleboats!), inside is a still-functioning 14th-century Hindu temple, a mosque, a church, two museums, and various government offices.  In a way, the architecture provides a physical narrative of India’s succession of colonial and internal empires.

Why no photos?  My camera broke down!  But I did find a fantastic shop in Chennai called Camera Service Point.  It’s currently at 1st floor, Bata Building, 829 Mount Road (Anna Salai), but the building will be demolished some time in the next year or two, so maybe call them on 93800 62185 first, to check.  A huge thanks to the man who opened up my Sony and made it work again, with not a single photo lost.  Is it hyperbole to say that in India everything can be fixed?  Yes, probably, but still, I was impressed and grateful.

Camera Service Point is in this building

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the last week, I’ve given 4 poetry readings, 1 lecture and 1 workshop, as well as sitting in the audience for 4 other readings, a poetry slam, and a carnatic music concert.  I am sated and exhausted.  Huge thanks go to the organisers and volunteers behind Poetry with Prakriti.  Like most poetry festivals, it runs on a shoestring, attracts passionate audiences (not always big numbers, but insightful and engaged), and provides a smorgasbord of words and performances.  Many readings were at local universities and colleges.  Thanks go too to the many students who listened, thought, and asked some fantastic questions.

I found Ranjit Hoskote’s translations of Lal Ded refreshing and intriguing, full of air and insight, especialy in the light of his accompanying discussion of this fascinating woman (14th century Shaivite mystic and Sufi saint from Kashmir, whose legacy now seems to be much contested between communities who wish to claim her exclusively as their own).  Kazim Ali’s poems were a potent blend of disorientation and revelation, both ecstatic and casual (at the risk of misquoting him, I loved the line “you unpacked all my shirts of silence”).  Wonderful too to meet Dutch poet Maria Van Daalen, whose metaphysical and subtly emotional poems were to be savoured.  I also was lucky enough to hear a few poems from Carrie Rudzinski (USA), Giuseppe Conte (Italy), Salah Stetie (France/Lebanon), Anand Krishnan, P Sivakami, Kavitha Muralidharan & Alok Bhalla.  I would have liked to have heard more, but I was either reading my own poems, in transit, or recuperating!

Of course, ironically, while this post is “welcome back…”, I’m typing it while I’m about to leave.  I have a mountain of affection and admiration for the people of Chennai.  But I am so looking forward to being home, with the love of my life…

form and content in India

 

 

 

 

 

No particular reason for this including this photo – it just says Chennai to me.  It’s my local train station.  10 rupees gets me into the University and back.  There was a little panic in the news in Melbourne a while ago that some of the doors on our metropolitan trains could be forced open.  Here, the doors are always open, passengers leaning out of them as we hurtle through the city…

Anyway, back to poetry and medicine.  I just finished reading a fascinating book on “modern Ayurveda” by Jean Langford, called “Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance”.  The title is good enough, but the exploration is brilliant.  To truncate its broad scope, basically she looks at how Ayurvedic training, knowledge and practice have responded to the modern world.  She concludes, among other things, that Ayurvedic practitioners have been torn between imitating the “scientific” and standardised approach of biomedicine and establishing Ayurveda as a valid and separate alternative.  The former seems to have predominated, but it is still haunted by the indefinability and mystery of the body as Ayurveda imagines it – this especially comes out in the (now fading) practice of pulse reading.  Anyway, a quick quote -

The modern state in its various brances cannot it seems enframe and enclose the social ethos.  Similarly, many practitioners seem to feel that modern Ayurvedic institutions cannot enframe and enclose the practices by which Ayurvedic knowledge is actually transmitted…  In modern Ayurvedic institutions, the illusion of an alignment between form and content seems to be less fiercely sustained than it would be for instance in the U.S…. Could the difference be partly that in modern India the dualism of form and content is more a syntagma to perform than an episteme to protect?…

Now, when I read this, apart from having to go and look “syntagma” up (it’s a linguistic arrangement), I really felt like Langford touched on something really crucial about the contemporary Indian mindset and way of being.  I’m still thinking what that exactly might be and mean, so any of your thoughts (or examples) will be welcomed with open arms. 

So, while my project does revolve around medical tourism, there is also a lot of interest in Ayurveda from foreign travellers (certainly in the massage, a little less in the blood-letting and purging…).  That angle is fascinating to me – the sense that Indian people are giving Westerners what they believe we want – there’s some kind of “feedback loop” going on here I’m interested in unravelling.  I’ve just arrived in Mamallapuram, which has a little tourist enclave, so I’ll see what I can find out.

Last week I also gave a poetry reading at the English Department of the University of Madras.  After being generously and capably introduced by Professor Armstrong, and by Assistant Professor Ms Supala Pandiarajan, I read a series of poems from “Among the regulars”, interspersed with a few words about my background, the themes I’m drawn to, publishing in Australia, as well as pre-emptively translating some Australianisms. 

I have to say, something about this event made me feel at home.  I’m very glad to have been able to read poetry to a group of intensely thoughtful (and thoughtfully intense!) young students/writers/academics.  What was particularly interesting to me is that there was a lot of questions about the creative process and about how a poem is worked on, shaped, finished, and how it can be assessed.  These are perennial questions, yes, but I suspect this is related to the University system also, how institutions baulk at marking creative work, leaving students to pursue those avenues externally (or not at all). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One more tiny thing I want to mention is my “Steripen Adventurer” – a little battery-powered UV wand that kills bacteria in water.  I’ve been using it for about a month now, which is a lot of plastic water bottles I haven’t been responsible for leaving behind.  I totally recommend it.  It comes with a solar charger, which I haven’t used, as my room hasn’t had sunlight coming in (probably a good thing that), but you can still charge it (slowly) from the wall.  The only real down side is that in some places and times, you can make the tap water safe to drink, but it still tastes awful.  After so many years of being separated, welcome back into my life – “Tang”!

the queue (if you could call it that)

Two weeks in, and I have yet to step foot inside a hospital.  Well, ok, I did walk into the Apollo, but more on that later.  For now, let’s just say the mood is ambivalent.  I’ve been writing poems, and I think some interesting things are coming out, but they’ve mainly been about the initial frisson of arrival, the spectacular differences and the struggle of bridging cultures.  Nothing yet about “medical tourism”.  All the contacts I have either don’t get back to me, or are in meetings, or want me to send them emails…  But, as India teaches you, you have to keep pushing – with a soft fluidity as well as a vigour.

 

 

 

 

The staff at the University of Madras have all been gracious and welcoming.  I have a room set aside for me on the rooftop of the main building, which overlooks Marina Beach and fills up with the sea breeze.  They’ve also continued to reassure me that the extent of my involvement at the University is up to me; that my poetry-writing is the priority.  We’ve organised a few things though, all at the University’s English Department -

• Poetry Reading – Thursday 3rd November, 1pm
• Creative Writing Workshop on Embodiment – Monday 5th December, 10am.
• Lecture/discussion on Recent Australian Poetry – Tuesday 3rd January.

Apart from the Uni, all my contacts with people have been accidental.  I met a lovely guy from Hyderabad who was staying at my hotel, who shouted me lunch (“it’s our duty”) and asked me what I hate about India the most, and what I love.  For the record, I said its poverty and its strength.  Which made me wonder about the relationship between the two…  While I was at my room at the Uni, Syam Sudhakar waltzed in to meet me.  He was actually at the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2009 (I was there in 2008 and 2010!) – he’s a fine poet, too – while we were chatting, he got mail, a copy of a journal with two poems of his in it.  Oh, and I was also (gently) harrassed for money by a group of hijras, laughing as one of them took my hat and wore it…

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, so, as I was saying, I did walk into the Apollo Hospital the other day.  I took a long, tiring walk to Thousand Lights (a few suburbs away from my hotel) to get a sense of what this renowned hospital is like – who goes there, what surrounds it, etc.  At a distance, I thought I saw it, but it was actually a luxury hotel – oops, Andy, don’t get carried away.  Apollo is of course a large medical complex, and it clearly has some money behind it, but it looks more like a standard country hospital.  The main difference being the huge crowds.  Hundreds of bikes and motorbikes are out the front.  Autorickshaws cruise the exit for customers.  Families wait in groups outside.  In the waiting room, it’s hard to move – dozens and dozens of people sit, stand, lie, pace, all without much apparent distress or frustration.  I can’t imagine everyone would be seen on the day they come.  But it seems accepted that this is just how it is.  In the corner is a sign that directs “international patients” to a separate cubicle.  Which reminds me of the time I went to a doctor in Kalimpong, West Bengal, three years ago – I was rushed to the front of the (albeit small) queue, and felt acutely relieved and ashamed.

The other thing I’ve noticed is the number of gyms here (which I didn’t notice in the north or centre of the country).  Wondering what that implies…

Oh, and where I’m staying – Sangeetha Residency in Mylapore – is pretty good.  It’s got all the basics you need and the buffet breakfast is part of the deal (mmm, idli…).  The choice you have to make is between a room with a window onto the inner car-park, which makes it feel like a cell, and a room that overlooks the road, which is almost always a cacophony of vehicles honking (and now that it’s Diwali, so many crackers and fireworks exploding through the night, which makes the air look like a thick fog and sounds like a small war!).  I prefer the latter.  You may prefer neither.

And below, some important places for Deepawali – temple, and a shop for fireworks…!