Description
These sparse and reflective poems carry depths of meaning and the lilt of orality — a luminous collection. — Namita Gokhale
As long as you keep/ your sculpture dancing/ you can keep it from falling apart. Madhu’s poems are strange comments on life as he sees it, the past as he sees it, synchronicity and serendipity that lies around us. Poems worth diving into. — Mallika Sarabhai
Madhu Raghavendra’s Seeking the Infinite is a tender meditation on his myriad world. Devotion and longing persist in these contemporary landscapes and experiences, where bhakti traditions emerge in unexpected places — from pallanguzhi games to coal clouds to flower stalls. … Here is work that understands how spiritual yearning dwells in both temple and landfill, camphor and ‘soaking words’, encouraging us to linger with Raghavendra’s searching poems of gentle and alert revelation. — Gemma Robinson
The poems in this collection are moments of dhyana or meditation, conversations with my myriad interpretations of Shiva. These are contemporary bhakti poems where I bow in spirituality, yearn for the divine, weave the thread of interspersed mindfulness through work, people, art, and artists across the world. The sense of reflection in the poems, with evident undertones of playfulness, everydayness, questions, trepidation, and longing, bring them closer to the sākhyatva (friendship with the divine) and ātma-nivedana (self-surrender to the divine), a kind of bhakti, if at all one needs to classify. The poems dwell in a space which suggest that divinity can be accessed through remembrance during the daily course of our lives. In these poems, it happens while engaging with visual art or watching a performance or walking down the road or picking up groceries or dabbling between slide decks and worksheets, reminding the permanence of infinity and the transitoriness of our bodily self. Some of the poems were written during my time as poet-in-residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland as a part of the Charles Wallace Fellowship. A few of them were written at the first edition of the Ajanta Ellora Arts Residency inspired by The Kailasa Temple (Cave 16) at Ellora Caves. — Madhu Raghavendra
Madhu Raghavendra is a poet, artist, and curator, who has authored four books of poetry, Make Me Some Love to Eat, Stick No Bills, Being Non-essential, and Going Home. He was a poet-in-residence at the International Writing Program Fellowship, University of Iowa, and the Charles Wallace Writing Fellowship, University of Stirling. He collaborates with global artists to create cross-disciplinary poetry experiences, and his poems have been set to classical music and contemporary dance in the United States, Finland, and the Netherlands. He conducts poetry workshops for young adults, and uses poetry as a tool in development conversations. He participated in PEN Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers at the United Nations Headquarters, New York in 2022. He curates the multidisciplinary Ajanta Ellora Arts Residency.
Madhu Raghavendra in conversation with Chittajit Mitra in The Chakkar
The Chakkar: This is your fifth book of poetry. How would you trace your journey from your first book to this one?
Raghavendra: Most of the time, I say that I don’t know who that person [who wrote the first book] is anymore, and I don’t know if I’ll cross paths with him. I think it’s also a sort of physical and mental state when you evolve. When you are in your late 20s, you want to experiment about writing about love and ending the book with Faiz. I find it astonishing when [the book] is kept in a lot of festivals and picked up by very young people. I realized that there was this person who is still speaking to young people, [but] that’s not me anymore. Even my publisher would say that young people still buy that book. It does feel beautifully weird, just thinking about that.
From love, you evolve being a ‘social bandana person’, and then slowly start seeing beyond the bodily grit and gore and think that it’s time to hold a breath and probably create something different. Some time ago, there were two youths who were killed from Guwahati by certain Karbi people, and suddenly people started branding the Karbi community as a murderer community. I went around with my friend Longvi Terang and we bought out a book of young Karbi people on love poems and nature poems and you respond differently. You learn to evolve, you learn to come back from the streets to your table and say that we are going to still respond in ways we think we want to do.
So, when I look back from my first book, I think there have been circular motions of love, from the physicality of love, to the sociality of love, to the spirituality of love, and to familial love in between.
Reviews
Gitanjali Roy in Scroll.in
Using allusion, intertextual references, metaphors, similes, and symbolism woven through acts of devotion, this collection of poems is an expression of the poet’s “dhyana” as he tries to yearn for the ultimate truth and reality. To him, the Divine is an omnipresence that provides the artist with his life force. Raghavendra undertakes a journey that tests the patience of the seeker before he can feel one with the Divine creator.
