[Reader-list] [Announcements] Poetry Reading by Jeet Thayil at Sarai

[Vivek Narayanan]

PRESENTATION @ SARAI
Tuesday, March 29, 6:00 pm

'You Are Not Here'
Poetry Reading by Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil will perform from his most recent collection, 'English'
(Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004) and a selection of newer poems.

'English', has been widely received as an important and unprecented
signpost  in the history of Indian English poetry. Fusing lyric and
narrative energy in  a drowsy, mongrelized Americanese, alternating
between strict and free forms,  Thayil fashions a voice and persona that
is only indirectly autobiographical,  half-fiction: addicted to opium,
shapeshifting, drifting across borders and  stumbling through rehab, while the surrounding world teeters perpetually on  the brink of apocalypse.  "Ruined still by syntax", the narrator hangs on the  margins of both America and India because English is his only language of  love, his truest inheritance- "English fills my right hand, silence my left." Thayil's specialty in these poems is a very finely-tuned emotional precision,  played out in an unmistakable register that is not crudely bitter or caustic,  never heroic, but unconsolably blue, beset by visions.

Jeet Thayil was born in India and educated in Hongkong, New York and
Bombay.  In 1998 he returned to New York where he received an MFA from
Sarah Lawrence  College and a 2003 poetry award from the New York
Foundation for the Arts.  His poems have appeared in 'Stand', 'Verse',
'Agenda', 'London Magazine',  'The Independent', 'Salt Hill' and 'Kaviya
Bharati', among many other  journals. He is an editor with 'Rattapallax'
and a contributing editor with  'Fulcrum', and is currently based in
Bangalore and Delhi.
<http://www.rattapallax.com/thayil.htm>

TWO RECENT POEMS BY JEET THAYIL:

IN THE CITY OF INSOMNIA

There’s a parade in the white
streets of the city.  All night

the armoured cars trundle past
the avenue.  Dazed

men and women stand
making circles with their hands,

their smudged
eyes wide

open.  At dawn the silent mayor
arrives, climbs the stair

to your room, takes a moment
to catch his breath and present

you with a key you will wear
round your neck like a star.


SPIDERMAN

Leap tall buildings in a single bound? Forget
you buddy, I
leap years, avenues, 
financial/fashion/meatpacking districts, 23
MTA buses parked end to
end. I leap Broadway,
yoyo to
traffic light, to 
bus top, to Chrysler, to jet.
You need a mind of sky, of rubber, 
to understand moi. You need 
silence, cunning. Exhale!
You need to know that everything is metaphor, 
that poems sprout 
in my hands 
like mystic confetti, like 
neural string theory.
My brother, Mycroft, is tiny, but a genius,
oh a tiny genius, whose
"art is subtle, a precision of hallucinatory brilliance,"
–  that's serious talk, boy –
he's 'furthermore' and 'however,' I'm
'know what I'm saying?' and 'whatever.'
He is the ghost ant, the one who is not
there, unseen until he stops 
moving. I am
companion to owl and peregrine,
emperor of air, and I'm loyal 
to you my loyal subject, whose hard-won 
pleasure I perform, 
and though I'm not rich it takes a lot 
of cash to keep me 
in the poverty to which 
I'm accustomed.



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