About the Book
An established classic, A.K. Ramanujan's Collected Poems represents the complex distillation of a lifetime of unusually rich sensitivity, intellectual rigour, and feeling. Best known for his pioneering translations of ancient Tamil poetry into English, Ramanujan made it apparent to modem poets and scholars that there was a wealth of poetry yet to be discovered in several Indic traditions.
About the Author
A.K. Ramanujan (1929-93) was one of the finest Indian poets writing in English and probably the most scholarly. At the time of his death, he was Professor ,of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, and was universally acknowledged as a leading authority on South Indian language and culture.
Preface
A.K. Ramanujan left at his death one hundred and forty-eight poems on three computer disks. Eight editors read the poems, and selected those they thought could go into a volume of collected poems. Poems that were chosen by all or most readers were included in The Black Hen, which was then arranged and edited by Molly Daniels. Many of the poems not chosen were clearly publishable, but they seemed more suitable for a volume of uncollected poems.
Ramanujan worked on these poems off and on for years, as was his habit. He often joked that poems were like babies, they dirtied themselves and he had to clean them up. He said it took him ten years to really finish a set of poems.
The earliest of the new poems seem to have been written in 1989, in Michigan, the latest in March or April 1993. Like many poets, A.K. Ramanujan began writing poetry when he was seventeen. At the time he was reading a great deal of English literature from his father's library, English being his third language. His initial interest was in writing plays for the radio. His favourite poets were Shelley and Yeats. While he always loved Yeats, in later life he preferred Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.
The poems in The Black Hen are in some ways different from their predecessors. At first reading, they seem light, easy, some almost like exercises. After a few readings, a complete reversal takes place. When the poems are read in sequence, they seem entirely different. The ear begins to hear the voice as full, rhythmic, passionate, complex, changeable, and in a variety of voices, styles and forms. The poems are metaphysical and full of a frightening darkness. There is a sense of both a pressure towards this darkness and a simultaneous revulsion from it. The poems begin to seem denser and fuller than anything the poet had done before, the culmination of forty-seven years of writing poetry. It is almost impossible to avoid the idea that the poems seem to press towards death and disintegration and even beyond to transmutation, like lines drawn from different angles which converge on a single point, without apparent intention, and yet inevitably.
What is astonishing is that the idea of nothingness, of zero, occurs frequently, as in the following lines:
How describe this nothing we, of all things, flee in panic yet wish for, work towards,
build ships and shape whole cities with?
Salamanders
Ramanujan was very interested in Buddhism. (He tried to convert in his twenties.) I think there is here a Buddhist idea of nothingness, as well as perhaps an Existential one.
Animals appear everywhere in the poems, but the poems are not 'about' animals. They have a double vision. The poems are about life, death, cycles of birth, pain, and love. They are also about poetry. They are full of irony, humour, paradox and sudden reversals.
A volume of Collected Poems, which represents the best work of a lifetime, is a milestone in any poet's path. This volume, which was considered during A.K. Ramanujan's lifetime, is now being published posthumously. The Collected Poems consists of three previously published hooks: The Striders, Relations, and Second Sight, and a fourth, The Black Hen published within a book for the first time. Now, as Auden wrote, may the 'words of a dead man' be 'modified in the guts of the living.'
Introduction
When I first read A.K Ramanujan's last, unpublished poems several months ago, their impact as individual pieces and as a fortuitous group took me by surprise. In November 1989, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he had shown me the first few poems he had completed after the publication of Second Sight (1986), and in June 1992, in Chicago, he had asked me to read nearly forty poems that he wanted to include in a new collection. But these occasions, among others, did not prepare me for the large number of poems that turned up in his files in the autumn of 1993, or for their unexpected qualities and effects.
As readers of this edition of his Collected Poems will discover on their own, Ramanujan's final poems contain elements that are not present in the three volumes of poetry he published in his lifetime. These formal and thematic elements now alter our understanding of what the poet felt and thought, why he chose certain voices, images, and metaphors, what his conceptions of nature and culture were, how he re-imagined time and human history, where he located the conflicts and interdependences of society, family, and self, or how he resolved some of the ethical dilemmas of poetry in the late twentieth century. But even as the finished work enlarges and rearranges his poetic world, it reinforces the continuities between the various phases of his career over three or four decades. It thus creates a new imaginative whole in which late and early poems interact associatively with each other, and long-standing preoccupations combine echoes and resonances with variations and counter-points to achieve an integrity that is at once essential and ironic.
One of the recurrent concerns in Ramanujan's poetry as a whole is the nature of the human body and its relation to the natural world. This theme first appears in The Striders (1966) in an early sonnet called 'Towards Simplicity', which represents the body as a natural mechanism. The poem suggests that the body is a structure with organic as well as mechanical properties, and consists of parts like 'Corpuscle, skin, / cell, and membrane', each with 'its minute seasons / clocked within the bones'. The body's internal seasons, such as its 'hourly autumn', parallel the external seasonal cycles and establish a relationship of co-ordination between body and nature. But the body's processes are 'minute' and 'complex', while those in nature are 'large' and 'simple'. Besides, the body houses the mind, which possesses unique powers-'reasons gyring within reasons'-that seem to transcend the domain of nature. At the time of death, however, 'into the soil as soil we come', so the body finally subsumes the mind despite the asymmetries between them, and the earth in turn subsumes the body. Since external nature thus controls our internal organic processes and mechanical properties from beginning to end, it completely 'contains' our bodily lives.
Contents
Acknowledgements
xi
Preface by Krittika Ramanujan
xv
Introduction by Vinay Dharwadker
xvii
Book One: THE STRIDERS (1966)
The Striders
3
Snakes
4
The Opposable Thumb
6
Breaded Fish
7
On a Delhi Sundial
8
A Leaky Tap After a Sister's Wedding
9
Two Styles in Love
11
Still Life
12
This Pair
13
On the Very Possible Jaundice of an
Unborn Daughter
14
Still Another for Mother
15
Lines to a Granny
17
A Rather Foolish Sentiment
18
Looking for a Cousin on a Swing
19
I Could Have Rested
20
On Memory
21
Instead of a Farewell
22
Self-Portrait
23
The Rickshaw-Wallah
24
Which Reminds Me
25
Sometimes
26
Chess Under Trees
27
No Man Is an Island
28
Anxiety
29
KMn04 in Grandfather's Shaving Glass
30
Christmas
32
Conventions of Despair
34
A Certain Democrat
36
Towards Simplicity
37
A River
38
A Hindu to His Body
40
Excerpts from a Father's Wisdom
41
Epitaph on a Street Dog
43
Images
44
Still Another View of Grace
45
An Image for Politics
46
Case History
47
One Reads
48
Lac into Seal
50
The Fall
51
A Poem on Particulars
53
Book Two: RELATIONS (1971)
It Does not Follow, but When in the Street
57
Man and Woman in Camera and Out
58
A Wobbly Top
60
Of Mothers, among other things
61
THE HINDOO: he doesn't hurt a fly or a
spider either
62
Time and Time Again
64
Love Poem for a Wife, 1
65
Routine Day Sonnet
68
Army Ants
69
One, Two, Maybe Three, Arguments
against Suicide
70
One More After Reading Homer
73
Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day
74
A Lapse of Memory
76
Eyes, Ears, Noses, and a Thing about Touch
77
The Hindoo: he reads his GITA and is calm at
All events
79
Poona Train Window
80
Time to Stop
82
Love Poem for a Wife, 2
83
Entries for a Catalogue of Fears
86
The Hindoo: the only risk
90
Real Estate
91
Any Cow's Horn Can Do It
93
When It Happens,
95
Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House
96
Small town , South India
100
Some Relations
101
Take Care
103
The Last of the Princes
105
Old Indian Belief
106
History,
107
Compensations
109
Obituary
111
Prayers to Lord Murugan
113
Book Three: SECOND SIGHT (1986)
Elements of Composition
121
Ecology
124
No Amnesiac King
126
In the Zoo
128
Questions
130
Fear
132
Astronomer
134
Death and the Good Citizen
135
The Watchers
137
Snakes and Ladders
138
Pleasure
139
A Poor Man's Riches 1
141
On the Death of a Poem
142
A Poor Man's Riches 2
143
A Minor Sacrifice
144
Alien
149
Saturdays
150
Zoo Gardens Revisited
153
Son to Father to Son
155
Drafts
157
At Forty,
159
He too Was a Light Sleeper Once
162
Highway Stripper
163
Middle Age
167
Extended Family
169
The Difference
171
Dancers in a Hospital
174
Moulting
176
Some People
177
Connect!
178
Looking and Finding
179
Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees
180
Looking for the Centre
184
Chicago Zen
186
Waterfalls in a Bank
189
Second Sight
191
Book Four: THE BLACK HEN (1995)
195
The Black Hen
196
Foundlings in the Yukon
198
Dream in an Old Language
199
Shadows
200
At Zero,
202
Salmanders
204
Traces
205
Fire
206
Birthdays
208
Fog
209
One More on a Deathless Theme
212
August
214
Three Dreams
215
It
216
Not Knowing
217
On Not Learning from Animals
218
Blind Spots
219
LOVE 1: what she said
220
Sonnet
221
Mythologies 1
222
LOVE 2: what he said, groping
224
Turning Around
225
LOVE 3: what he said, remembering
226
Mythologies 2
227
LOVE 4: what he said, to his daughter
228
Mythologies 3
229
LOVE 5
230
Contraries
231
Engagement
232
The Day Went Dark
233
LOVE 6: winter
234
That Tree
235
PAIN: trying to find a metaphor
236
Fizzle
237
A Devotee's Complaint
238
In March
239
A Meditation Difficulty
241
Poetry and Our City
242
No Fifth Man
243
Bulls
246
Bosnia
247
A Report
248
As Eichmann Said, My Brother Said
250
The Guru
251
A Ruler
252
Poverty
253
Butcher's Tao
254
A Copper Vat
255
Museum
256
257
If Eyes Can See
264
Elegy
265
Lines
267
To a Friend Far Away
268
Some Monarchs and a Wish
269
From Where?
271
Death in Search of a Comfortable Metaphor
273
Pain
274
Fear No Fall
275
A Note on The Black Hen and After by Molly DanieIs-Ramanujan
278
Index of Titles
282
Index of First Lines
285
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