Description
There is nothing bigger than your heart.
Take in all you can
like a tall tree on a Spanish boulevard
gobbling up the sun.
Like a scavenging bird, feed on dead meat,
the refuge, the remains;
choose the revolting rubbish heap
over the fragrance of a field full of jasmines,
the maladroit over the well-adjusted,
the fallen over everyone else,
the diseased dust over the seduction of silver.
Abhimanyu Kumar has tested the poems of Milan & the Sea in magazines far and wide, online, in print. He is a poet of the people, writing without rhetoric, using informal idioms. These are poems I celebrate by writing this praise song. I laud their frankness, their unprejudiced human angst, the revelations that he finds digging in the imagist garden, as well as in Beatnik fields of poppies and encounters that cross the borders of sex, ideologies, economies.
Abhimanyu comes from, consists of, and writes for you and me, and, in particular, for the betel leaf seller, the rickshaw-walahs, the bucolic visitor from the country at the elite South Delhi party, the misfit, the ill-mannered, the shy. He orients his passion towards the great majority, the dilemmas of the ordinary:
Early morning
Sleep tugs at the eyes
Like a dog
At a polythene bag
Hanging from a rubbish bin.
This poem costs five rupees to write.
He is biologically and thematically an Indian poet, a singer of greater and multiple ‘Bharat’. But he also travels beyond the subcontinent, seeking to document the lives of the left out, the downtrodden, the ignored in every landscape. Hence, in Amsterdam, travelling with a girlfriend, he walks the
…narrow, cobbled streets
looking at the birds in cages
who sing their song at a price.
What price? Wisdom?
In ‘Waiting for you’, he writes:
The bamboo tree has finally bloomed,
which means it will die next year,
says my father-in-law.
He is worried it will be
a lot of work
taking out the remains.
‘It will destroy half the garden,’ he says.
This morning I had the first stirrings
of mortality. It was real, like a slap in the face.
It hurt but did not sting.
Abhimanyu’s poems sting. They pull off the scab, expose the skin to the healing wind. But the reader has to survive the raw hurt, to accept that poems bring you to catharsis but that catharsis is not anodyne, painless.
Abhimanyu is also a Beat in India, honouring Allen Ginsberg with versions of his signature poems in Indian landscape.
Let us note the debt he feels to the frank cry for accepting ‘the other’ that surged from Ginsberg’s consciousness in an America whose apple pie and dream did not readily include the daimon-ized poet, the recent immigrant, the homosexual, not to mention the Negro (as the term was used in the 1950s), the communist.
In ‘Being human’, Abhimanyu declares:
The nicest
kindest
least cynical
most noble
people that I know in this world
are the cycle-rickshaw drivers
who live near my house.
I would add Abhimanyu to that list, for his honest, courageous declarations.
I salute him at this new stage in his career, and I hope that we can break bread one day, real bread, and sip coffee or tea while reading poems. And let us invite other poets as well, including the ones who travel abroad to accept literary prizes or enjoy fame in the contemporary press.
Let us make peace while screaming.
— Indran Amirthanayagam
(Poet, essayist, and translator Indran Amirthanayagam, who writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole, because he believes in cross-cultural encounters, lives in America.)
Abhimanyu Kumar works as a journalist in Delhi. He lives with his wife, son, and two cats, Erasmus and Hypatia.