I asked Tagore to write an essay for me so I could top my class. We got 4 out of 10

 In ‘Amader Shantiniketan’, Padma Shri and late Hindi author Shivani had written about ‘Gurudev’ Rabindranath Tagore teaching her Bangla.

The evening shadows were falling and the blood-red earth turned dark as we neared Gurudev’s chair. Dressed in a long black gown, the black cap he wore on his head highlighted his broad forehead and glowing face, and his eyes seemed lit up with an inner light. No wonder the Ashramites considered him the Guru of gurus. And yet, this towering figure was also among the gentlest and kindest of men. His serene and compassionate gaze included everyone in a warm embrace— rich or poor, big or small. All of us, whether we came from India or Japan, China or Sri Lanka or wherever, stood before him every morning as children who had come to an enchanted garden.

At the morning prayer assembly held every day in front of the Ashram library, we met the Buddhist scholar Fan-chu, who had come all the way from China, as well as Khairuddin, a Muslim student from Sumatra, Susheela from Gujarat, and Kumudini from—what then seemed to us a foreign land—Kerala. All of us stood, with folded hands and closed eyes, as we sang the hymns he had composed. Never once do I remember anyone trying to jostle someone or giggle or push. Such was the respect Gurudev evoked in all of us that whenever we were in his presence, we became better human beings. He looked up as we came near, and never, for as long as I live, will I forget that moment. Framed against the glow of the setting sun, he looked unlike any human being I had ever seen, and to my child’s eyes, he seemed to be what I imagined God would look like. Of their own volition, our hands came together and Jayanti and I bowed at his feet. His hand passed lovingly over our heads and he smiled as he asked gently, ‘Are you very homesick?’ How did he know, I wondered. ‘Learn to speak Bangla then,’ his soft voice urged us, ‘and you will never be homesick. Wait, I’ll introduce you to Pupe.’ ‘Banmali,’ he called out and his favourite companion ran out. ‘Go and call Didi, will you?’ We were then introduced to both his granddaughters and invited to share a meal with them that evening.

File photo | Rabindranath Tagore in 1925 | Wikimedia Commons

Gurudev’s daughter-in-law, Amita di, otherwise known as ‘Bouthan’ in the Ashram, presided over the table. ‘These two girls have come from very far. They can’t speak Bengali and look a little scared to me,’ he said to her. ‘After dinner will you take them to the rehearsal? That might cheer them up.’ So after dinner, his granddaughter Nandita (whose nickname was Burhi), took us on a guided tour of Uttarayan before she led us to the room where the rehearsal for a new dance drama, Varshamangal, was taking place. A large, airy space framed with open windows on all sides, the rehearsal room was placed like a jewel in the centre of Gurudev’s garden. In one corner was a collection of brightly polished copper and brass pots from Kumaon, while a huge wooden divan from Jamnagar was set against a wall. Gurudev himself sat on this, leaning against the bright Santhali and Burmese cushions as he directed the performers. Near him, on the floor, sat the musicians—Shailajaranjan Majumdar, Shantimoy Ghosh, Shishir da, Santosh da—as well as the students taking part in the drama. My eyes had scarcely taken all this in when, with a dramatic burst of bells, a tall dancer, Nivedita di, glided across the polished floor. Our jaws hung open with wonder and we forgot all our homesickness as the dancer and the song, with its mesmeric rhythm, cast a spell:

Hridoy amar naache re aajike Mayurero moto naache re . . .

[My heart dances today Like a peacock it dances . . .]

Our heads swung entranced from the dancer to the singers: the deep bass of Shanti da mingled with the sweet soprano voices of Kanika and Amita di; all of them blended with a melody on the sitar so beautifully that I felt even the stars outside were dancing. Everyone seemed totally immersed in the mood of that dance, especially the sitar player who was bent in ecstasy, his eyes closed in rapture as he played along. His long fingers slid over the strings of the sitar and cast a spell that was difficult to break. Gradually, over the next few months, I learnt Bangla, and the joy that I derived from this knowledge has stayed with me to this day. I am proud to tell you that it was Gurudev himself who taught me the alphabet, lovingly guiding me through the basic primer, Sahaj Path. Of course there were some hilarious moments. ‘Bone thake bagh, gachhe thake pakhi [The tiger lives in the forest, the bird in the tree]’ was one of the opening lessons. In my excitement at having mastered this difficult line, I read it out to Gurudev as: ‘Gachhe thake bagh, bone thake pakhi [The tiger lives on the tree, the bird in the forest].’

Gurudev sat patiently, waiting for me to finish, but the famous Bengali novelist Charubabu, who was sitting by his side, shook with silent mirth, his vast body rippling as he tried to contain his laughter. Oblivious to my mistake, I went through the entire lesson and turned eagerly to Gurudev for praise. He looked gravely at me and asked: ‘So, child! Do tigers live in trees in your part of the world?’ I remember another delightful instance. Until a brilliant Tamil student, Shivshankar Mundukur, joined the Ashram, I was the star of my class. I was Dr Alex Aronson’s favourite student and basked in this fact. However, under the brilliance of this new entrant, my reputation stood threatened. One day, Dr Aronson asked us to write a critical appraisal of a Keats poem and bring it the next day. I ran straight to Gurudev. 

‘Please write it for me,’ I begged him. ‘I don’t want that Tamil boy to do better. Please, please, please, Gurudev.’ He almost threw me out but when I refused to budge, he dictated a brilliant piece that more than matched the Keats poem. The next day, I confidently submitted my assignment, secure in the knowledge that a Nobel laureate in literature had written it. So imagine my horror when we got our papers back—that wretched Tamilian genius had been awarded a 6 while I had a measly 4 out of 10! Even more insulting was what Dr Aronson had scrawled at the end of my paper: ‘Too elusive.’ I ran straight to Gurudev. ‘You always tell us to honour our foreign teachers and look what they do! He’s given you just 4 out of 10!’ Gurudev threw back his head as he laughed. ‘Don’t tell anyone I wrote it,’ he told me in confidence.

The other incident was a childish attempt at poetry writing. Every month, a literary soiree was organized. Sometimes it was for the little ones in Shishu Bhavan, sometimes for the middle-school scholars of Path Bhavan and sometimes for the college students of Shiksha Bhavan. Gurudev would give us the first line of a poem and each contestant got five minutes in which to compose the next. I normally didn’t dare enter the contest because the others were all outstanding students, among them my own brother Tribhuvan, who was a formidable rival. He was among Gurudev’s favourite students and had become a handsome, confident young man by then. Above all, he was so quick-witted that he had virtually no rival in the department of repartee. Anyway, I put up my hand for the contest.

That day, Gurudev had chosen the first line as ‘If I were a boy’ for the girls and ‘If I were a girl’ for the boys to complete. I brought the house down with my entry: ‘If I were a boy, what would become of the boy I love?’ I thumbed my nose at my brother as I proudly went to receive my prize from Gurudev. For the rest of the week, however, I had to put up with cheeky remarks like, ‘So who’s the lucky one, eh?’

This excerpt from Amader Shantiniketan by Shivani (translated into English by Ira Pande) has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.

(Source: The Print)

Memories of my father Faiz Ahmed Faiz and our simple dal-chawal meals

 Broadcaster Moneeza Hashmi remembers the quiet, unpretentious meals of her childhood.

I do not have clear memories of all of us, the whole Faiz family, sitting down at the dining table to eat together every day. Neither do I recall any particular occasion when we would all get together for a family meal. This was probably because my father, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was rarely home at mealtimes. Moreover, my mother, Alys Faiz, being a working mom, had to keep to the schedules of her office, as well as making sure we young girls, my elder sister Salima and myself, were never late for school.

What I can remember from my school days, back in the 1950s, is that each day during the winter term we would receive from home a tiffin, as we called it, or lunch box. All of us school friends would sit together in the grounds and share our lunch while we laughed and talked non-stop during the long lunch break. The food in that lunch carrier was always simple. One roti and one curry, sometimes a dal and sometimes veggies.

Courtesy: Moneeza Hashmi

Our dinner at home would mostly be a snack food. Perhaps omelettes and toast or Hunter’s beef sandwiches. Maybe dal and plain rice. When we had a treat, it would be a sort of pancake made with mashed potatoes and cabbage with a fried egg on top. I used to look forward to that as it was a hot meal.

Our dining table seated four. My father always sat at the head, and my mother next to him on his left-hand side, with me on his right and my sister Salima opposite him. The table itself was not too big, made of rather cheap wood and rickety, with a plywood top, and the chairs were straight-backed and simple. The tablecloth was cotton. The pattern, I remember, was a hand block print from the famous Jhandoo Khan who had a shop in the Mozang area of Lahore. The colours were turquoise and bright blue with matching napkins. We always had placemats too, but I don’t recall their pattern. The plates were white and made from simple china. Our cutlery was the most basic forks and spoons. The glasses were again straight and plain.

The dining room was next to the pantry, so our bearer would be in and out carrying the food. The kitchen was a few steps down, but the food was never cold when it reached us. These were not the times of microwaves or ovens, but we did have a toaster in the pantry, as well as a kettle to warm the water for my parents’ tea.

Kitchen Cabinet

There was never much talk at mealtimes. I cannot remember us eating together often, as lunch was always between my sister and myself or in school during winter. Dinner was usually a threesome as my father was almost always in the office at that time. Now and again, we had breakfast together on Sundays, but, on reflection, that too was not as frequent as I would have liked.

We had two servants in my childhood whom I can remember clearly, even to this day. Mohammad Ali, our cook, was a Punjabi and spoke only that language. I am surprised even today thinking how well my British mother Alys Faiz conversed with him. He stayed only in the kitchen and was never found in the main house.

The second servant was a sort of Jeeves figure who was known as “Bearer” throughout his life. I remember him as an oldish man who spoke only fluent Urdu. Again, how he and the cook got on is beyond me, but I never heard of any arguments or disagreements happening in the pantry or the kitchen. Our bearer used to double up as a sort of nanny for us two sisters as well. Since my mother worked for a newspaper, her hours were long and we would be left in the care of this male nanny. He looked after our food and our laundry, making sure we did our homework and at times even putting us to bed. He would cycle home late every evening after the dishes had been washed and dried. He was there too in the early morning to give my parents their “bed tea” and see us off to school after serving breakfast. He was with us for so long that I cannot recall how many years it was exactly. I do know my father depended on him for everything and my mother would admonish him at times for spoiling my dad.

Modest Resources

What I can remember of my father’s eating habits was that he was always completely dressed before he sat down for breakfast, which consisted of a fried egg, toast and tea. He would always eat his egg on his toast with a fork and knife and sip at his tea. His lunch, if at home, was again simple: a roti and possibly dal and some vegetables. We were not a meat-eating family, probably because we could not afford it. Both my sister and I were brought up with simple tastes in clothes and food. Now, I reflect this must have been the case because of the strains on our parents’ finances.

My father was fond of eating spinach in all forms, so I am told. He liked the desi palak and also sarson ka saag with missi roti. My paternal grandmother would sometimes send us exotic sweetmeats, which she must have learnt from the other Afghan wives of my paternal grandfather who lived in the same house. I loved to eat them and can smell their aroma even today. Unfortunately, nobody from our family learnt the recipe from Bebe ji, as we called our grandmother.

I recall my father as quite a modest eater. Perhaps his smoking killed his desire to eat. By the time he sat down to food, he was either too tired or too stimulated for getting on with the next engagement. However, when he did sit down at the table, he ate slowly and carefully, chewing his food quietly and cleaning his plate completely.

I am told he liked meatballs, which we call koftas, with gravy. He preferred roti to rice, and I can still see him breaking his roti into small pieces and picking up the meatballs one by one. He liked chutney made of coriander and green chillies, but was not a fan of hot spices. Pickles were something he was partial to, and his favourite was mango pickle. He also sometimes liked to have a paratha, a roti which preferably had butter mixed into it and was then fried. This bread is rich but so filling and satisfying. Parathas are still usually enjoyed in the winter as they keep you full and warm.

Author

Simple Tastes

His morning and afternoon tea habit continued throughout his life, almost like a ritual. In the morning, his newspaper accompanied his cuppa. The afternoon tea was just a simple cup without any snacks. He would sip the tea slowly and gently with a cigarette in one hand, usually remaining silent.

When we shifted to London in 1962 for two years and lived in Cornwall Avenue in Finchley, I remember he started liking steak and kidney pies, as did I. During those days in Britain, our evening meals were again simple. Usually, we had fried eggs on toast and baked beans, sometimes chicken sausages. My mom probably did not want too many dishes piled up to be washed, and so she kept it straightforward. Also, in Britain, there were no servants, so it was only my mother doing all the housework. I was still going to school and my elder sister Salima was at university.

Yes. We were a simple family with simple tastes and simple needs. I think we still are.

Moneeza Hashmi is a broadcaster, television producer, media consultant, and former general manager of Pakistan Television. She is also the youngest daughter of the prominent Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

This article is part of the project “Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India”, curated by Tarana Husain Khan and edited by Siobhan Lambert Hurley and Claire Chambers. It has been funded by Global Challenges Research Fund through the Arts & Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom. Read the other parts here.

(Source: Scroll)

The spirit writing of Lucille Clifton

 It all began one night in 1976, when the poet Lucille Clifton was lightheartedly using a Ouija board with two of her daughters. The board began to spell out the name of Clifton’s mother, Thelma. At first, Clifton was incredulous, but as she received more messages, she came to believe that they were truly from her mother’s spirit. Later, Clifton wrote that “There was no point, no single statement that said unequivocally ‘this is she.’ It was/is the accumulation of things, the pattern of her self. Which is how we know anyone.” According to Clifton’s first-born daughter Sidney, over the years Clifton “evolved from the Ouija board” to automatic writing to, eventually, a spiritual state in which she could directly access the spirits without the need for writing. In the seventies and eighties, the Clifton’s Baltimore home became a spiritual way station through which a wide assortment of spirits apparently passed.

Despite her fame as a poet, Clifton’s trajectory as a self-described “two-headed woman” is a little-known part of her legacy. “Two-headed woman” is a traditional African American term used to describe women gifted with access to the spirit world as well as to the material world. Clifton’s unpublished spirit writing is housed at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. These materials range from past life regressions to treatises on Black astrology to pages of unbroken cursive detailing the histories of Atlantis and Egypt. In many of Clifton’s documents, Blackness and the Black body are decentered by the concept of reincarnation. When she asks her spirit interlocutors about her previous incarnations, she is surprised to learn that in many of them, she was not a woman at all. Clifton’s spirit writing, while ostensibly fitting into a race- and gender-blind New Age tradition, should be read as an important contribution to Black feminist theories of embodiment. Clifton’s spirit communications foreshadow contemporary global issues like climate change and the rise of the far right, and they position Black women at the vanguard of addressing these issues.

LUCILLE CLIFTON. PHOTO: RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS.

In August and September of 1978, for example, Clifton received a series of dire warnings about the fate of the human world from a mysterious group of spirits she called “the Ones.” The Ones did not assume the personality of a departed human, and they did not weigh in on day-to-day affairs. They spoke of things of cosmic importance: the deep past of human civilization (for instance, the origins of Atlantis and demystifications of ancient Egyptian civilization) and its tenuous future. They returned “to remind human beings that they are more than flesh,” and in 1978 they warned Clifton:

If the world continues on its way without the possibility of God which is the same as saying without Light Love Truth then what does this mean? It means that perhaps a thousand years of mans life on this planet will be without Light Love Truth It is what we were saying indeed that there will be on Earth that place which human beings describe to the world of the spirits Hell Now there is yet time but not very much your generation Lucille is the beginning of the possibility and your girls generation is the middle etc.

The Ones, characterized by their mythic tone and liberal use of a royal we, peppered their messages with a line they repeated like a refrain: “There are so many confusions so many potential dangers in the world of the Americas.” It was a strange way of phrasing it, given that the fate of the entire world, not just the Americas, seemed to be in the balance. These spirits seemed to espouse a kind of post-racial universalism, yet they located “the Americas,” and their increasing globalization, as a place of unique evil. The spirits tell Clifton, “America is not a country where things sounding right are taken as right,” and say that this resistance to the truth is destroying the world. According to the Ones, the generation born at the end of the twentieth century would be the last to have the possibility to avoid an earth turned to Hell, making now the time to act on their message.

In the loneliness of the two-headed woman, the burden of saving the world falls disproportionately on Black women. In popular culture, the figure of the Black woman medium fulfills a deep social need for white people to see Black people as channels to a past they otherwise pretend to ignore. In the 1990 film Ghost, the psychic character played by Whoopi Goldberg asks, in dismay, when the ghost of Patrick Swayze’s character first speaks to her, “Are you white?” She already knows her body will be used as a surrogate for white people to connect with the afterlife they otherwise pretend not to believe in. In a society that consumes yet ridicules the supernatural abilities of Black women, Clifton sidesteps these narratives by emphasizing her own Blackness as a gift both linked to and on par with her supernatural abilities. Despite the heaviness of her role as a medium, Clifton regards it as a privilege of her present incarnation as a Black woman. An untitled poem in Clifton’s 1980 poetry collection Two-Headed Woman reads:

the once and future dead

who learn they will be white men

weep for their history. we call it

rain.

To be born a white man, despite its material benefits, is here represented as a kind of cosmic misfortune, a sullying of the soul with all the dirty deeds of white men’s history. If a soul’s incarnation as a white man is cause for weeping, then it follows that a soul’s incarnation as “both nonwhite and woman” should be cause for something akin to celebration.

Two-Headed Woman is her first published work to narrate her spirit communication. It begins, however, not with the story of Clifton’s spirit visitations, but with a series of oft-quoted homages to various aspects of her body: “homage to my hair,” “homage to my hips,” and “what the mirror said.” The latter poem ends with the exhortation:

listen,

woman,

you not a noplace

anonymous

girl;

mister with his hands on you

he got his hands on

some

damn

body!

This poem both reveals the interchangeability of the Black woman’s body and challenges it. The anonymity of “somebody” is interrupted by the emphatic imposition of an admonitory “damn.” Clifton’s emphasis on her body in a poetry collection that describes the demands of the spirits is not accidental. Clifton asserts the preciousness and integrity of her body in the draining work of spirit communication. In an untitled poem in her 2004 collection Mercy, Clifton describes the Ones chiding her with, “your tongue / is useful / not unique.” Her embodied poetry is itself a rejoinder to the spirits’ insistence that she is “not unique.” Just as Frantz Fanon famously ends his philosophical meditation in Black Skin, White Masks with an appeal to his body—“O my body, make of me always a man who questions”—Clifton similarly enshrines the importance of the body in questions of the spirit. When read together, Clifton’s poetry and her spirit writing represent a both/and reality, one in which race is merely earthly, profane, and temporary, and yet the racialized body matters in this realm.

Clifton’s spirit interlocutors view race in interesting ways, neither disavowing its existence nor inflating its importance in the afterlife. They are post-body but not post-racial. In 1977, Clifton put out an open call to the spirit world for celebrity spirits who would like to take part in an anthology of sorts, which she titled “Lives/Visits/Illuminations.” By asking the spirits questions like “What was the experience of death like for you?” and “Would you like to clarify anything about your life for our world?”, Clifton hoped to bring them peace and closure through a discussion of the lessons they had learned since their deaths, and sought to serve spirits and humankind by allowing them to share their experiences in their own words. The resulting replies were a strange, rollicking, and deeply moving compilation of voices, often speaking against racism and the human tendency to hierarchize physical differences. Of the twenty spirits who volunteered, many of them would today be recognizable as important historical figures, but Sidney Clifton emphasizes that the lessons of the afterlife made their messages more important than their worldly identities and accomplishments. The spirits seem to have learned a gentle disregard for human markers of difference. For instance, when Clifton interviews one spirit, who was a religious leader in his life, and asks what he looked like, he replies somewhat dismissively, “Shall we deal in statistics?” But he concedes that he had brown hair, brown eyes, and was of medium height. 

A spirit who lived in eighteenth-century Germany, when asked whether it was true that he was of African descent, replies, “Yes. Yes, Grandfather, yes. Of course in the old days in my country we would never admit it. Silly.” Another spirit insists that she does not want to be reincarnated, “Not for awhile, till things get better. I want to come back when I can go anywhere and be a Negro and nobody notices.” Spirits who had been secretly queer in their previous incarnations returned to say that they “didn’t hurt a soul and didn’t corrupt no children” and to warn the living that in their time to be queer was to be “like a [sic] animal, a dog, worse than a dog – DON’T BE LIKE THAT PEOPLE. Don’t make somebody miserable.” All of these answers strip back class, race, gender, and sexuality, revealing them as the changing weather of a soul’s journey, not the journey itself. Certainly, these were not the most valued aspects of the spirits’ incarnations on earth. When asked what things still attract them to our world, the spirits’ answers are simple: trees, autumn, “sparkly places,” children, happy families, laughter, singing, running around.

In her writing, Clifton adopts an ethereal stance in which “the soul survives bodily death, has survived numerous bodily deaths, will survive more. There is some One in each of us greater than the personality we manifest in any life. The soul does not merely select her own society, the soul is her own society. And love is eternal, is God. Is.” And yet, while impermanent, she does not view the Black woman’s body as a halfway house on the way to more fortuitous incarnations. Like the soul, the body is its own society with its own values, lessons, and codes. Although the spirits admonish Clifton for her fixation on earthly matters of race and gender—“you wish to speak of / black and white […] have we not talked of human”—she maintains a delicate balance between the idea of a raceless soul and her incarnation as a Black woman. In her view, it is no accident that her body and its specificities became a channel for the spirits. In her writing, being a Black woman is a way of listening, a radical form of receptiveness to the lessons that history teaches. And as her daughter Sidney puts it, “I think her actual gift was her openness and ability to hear.”

Clifton’s theory of spirit does not succumb to fatalism. When one considers the trials Clifton’s mother Thelma faced —poverty, epilepsy, a philandering husband, death at forty-four years old—there is some comfort in this expansive view of the soul. Thelma’s spectral return represents a Black woman’s soul unbound by the structural misfortunes of her life. She bears witness to these trials but is not erased by them. Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing makes the pangs of my own embodiment as a Black woman easier to bear amid constant reminders of the perils of Black embodiment. There is solace in the idea that this brown skin and these wide hips were made for listening to the voices that could not be erased by time, history, or death. Oh my body, make of me always a woman who listens.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Sex, lies and despair: Unseen letters reveal Larkin's tortured love

A cache of 2,400 letters between the poet and his long-time lover and muse, Monica Jones, charts an explosive and flawed romance

“He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.” So Monica Jones described the revered poet Philip Larkin – a pithy but affectionate account of a lover who was serially unfaithful, but whose “utterly undistinguished little house” in Hull she turned into a shrine after his death.

Previously unpublished letters, however, reveal the full extent of her fury, fears and frustrations over a painful four-decade-long partnership with the man who wrote some of the most cherished verse in the English language.

“I don’t want to be and I won’t be an object of pity like a beggar’s sore,” she wrote to him in one letter. “I know you just think of me as a SITUATION, something to be fixed,” she lamented in another. She wrote repeatedly of feeling terribly alone and “so frightened”. Such was her despair that she referred to a bruised shoulder as “a kind of company”.

Monica Jones in a photograph taken by Philip Larkin. Photograph: The estate of Philip Larkin

Her heart-wrenching thoughts are contained in 54 boxes filled with 2,400 letters to Larkin that she left to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with the strict instruction that they were to remain closed until decades after her death. She died in 2001, aged 78.

Now Professor John Sutherland, a leading scholar and Jones’s close friend, has been given unrestricted access to the extraordinary collection.

He told the Observer that the letters were “explosive in their nature”, and represented “virtually everything that she wrote to Larkin over 37 years of separated love”.

Describing it as “the last great exchange of letters in literary history”, he said it was “like she’s ripping open her soul and her mind, letting it pour out. There’s a whole range of emotions. 

Sometimes she is furious when he doesn’t turn up for a meal she’s cooked. Other times, she’s just meditative.” She wrote of her emptiness: “Every smallest thing is too much for me.”

Larkin and Jones were both born in 1922 and studied at Oxford, although they first met at the then University College Leicester in 1946. He was a newly appointed deputy librarian and she was an English lecturer, a striking woman with peroxide hair. Larkin transferred to Queen’s University Belfast in 1950 and then five years later to the University of Hull. Jones lived for his visits. Their once-passionate relationship, blighted by their heavy drinking, lasted until his death in 1985.

Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman at Westminster Abbey, London, in 1984. Photograph: Getty Images

Sutherland said: “Larkin had two women in Hull [one of whom was Maeve Brennan]. He would fit Monica in when he was visiting his mother up the road [in Loughborough] … Then he’d be back to Hull and the other women.”

Jones knew of those women, yet she repeatedly declared her love for Larkin in her letters: “I am so blessed to have you in my life.”

Sutherland said: “Her letters resemble a literary stream of consciousness – at times, more surging flood than stream. They have odd disjunctions. After a pages-long savage diatribe against Maeve, Monica suddenly reminds Philip to water the flowers.”

Larkin appreciated Jones as his intellectual equal, unlike his other women. He dedicated his breakthrough collection, The Less Deceived, to her – though it includes poems about his other partnerships. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate to her.

But the fact that he wrote so little poetry has been blamed on the stultifying effect of Jones, Sutherland said: “His poetry depends on four slim volumes … Around 100 poems.”

He noted that Kingsley Amis, Larkin’s closest friend from Oxford, was particularly vicious, dismissing her as a “grim old bag”.

“Margaret Peel in [Amis’s novel] Lucky Jim is a terrible caricature of Monica. Kingsley hadn’t met her at that point. Philip gave Kingsley all the details. He could be cruel in that way. She wrote an incredibly impassioned letter to Philip saying, ‘I am not so egotistical as to think everybody wants to put me in a book and I do not believe you would be so treacherous’.”

Jones has also been vilified for destroying 30 volumes of his diaries and private papers.

Sutherland, professor emeritus of modern English literature at University College London, was taught by Jones, and he attributes his career to her. He is now finishing a book on Jones, based on the letters, to be published next year by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He expressed surprise that no one had written a biography of her before as she was the most important person in Larkin’s life.

Monica Jones photographed by Larkin on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, 1971. Photograph: The estate of Philip Larkin

He said no other biographer of Larkin had “enjoyed access to these letters”, which the Bodleian has catalogued in a “feat of librarianship at the highest level”. Poignantly, some of the envelopes still bear her lipstick marks.

The correspondence ends in the early 1970s when they got telephones. Sutherland said: “After that, he would telephone every night. When her health collapsed in the early 1980s, she moved in with him. They got drunk together. He died and she lived on drunkenly.

“She was a strange woman. You had to know her, to know the good things about her. He treated her badly, but always wrote fondly. It was an odd mixture … He did come near to trying to break up with her, but they needed each other. They were both very unhappy people.”

Sutherland hopes “to salvage Monica Jones from the versions of Monica Jones which circulated in her life and still circulate”. “From the unplumbed depths of the 54 boxes, one can exhume a Monica Jones to stand alongside Philip Larkin, not behind him as his dim correspondent shadow.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Out of the cradle endlessly revising

There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention.

One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other.

WALT WHITMAN IN 1891. PHOTO: SAMUEL MURRAY. PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversize production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet.

The third edition, of 1860, included 146 new poems—a nearly unbelievable number! Some sixty-eight of these were written between the appearance of the second edition, in 1856, and June 1857, when the poet was clearly in a kind of creative fever, one that essentially did not subside until the 456-page third collection was headed for the press. This third volume was produced by a commercial publisher, and is indeed more traditional in design. Dropping the models of coffee-table book and portable testament, it looks more like most mid-nineteenth-century books of poems, with small line drawings and ornamental flourishes around the poems’ titles. The frontispiece presents the poet in an engraving taken from an oil portrait, Walt Whitman with lush but not yet prophetic locks and a stylish cravat, more Romantic spirit than one of the roughs. Somewhere between two thousand and five thousand copies were printed, and the book was largely well reviewed, and fared better in the marketplace than the earlier editions.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Whitman had abandoned his practice of expanding and rearranging his book. Why not write one collection, set it aside, and write another? This is one of the primary ways poets progress; looking at a book you’ve finished, you don’t want to pursue exactly that same path again. A new collection invites us to vary form and tone, try on a new stance, strike out in a new direction and thus view familiar territory from another vantage point. In truth, our obsessions, our ways of making meaning, even our signature vocabulary and syntax often stay remarkably close to where we began; if we’re lucky, we just get better at using them. But, as we move from book to book, serious attention to the matters at hand can help to widen the embrace of our work a bit, and just a bit can prove plenty. Suppose Whitman had decided to bring a thread that had been recessive in one book—the abject self-doubt he reveals in the chilling final section of “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” for instance—and bring it more into the foreground in the next? What unexpected, potentially rich poems we might have had!

Or maybe not. I can see reasons why Whitman would have wanted to go on cultivating the singular field of “leaves” that comprised his book. In a way that is true of no other great poet, his poems were a tool to make something happen; the change he wished to effect, and sometimes believed he could, was more important to him than art. This is why he could later say he wished he’d been an orator instead, when he’d written at least two of the greatest poems in the language. Of course poets themselves don’t get to know if they have written anything that will last, but Whitman tells us, in no uncertain terms, that he will be read after his death, by men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence. I can confidently say that, had I written “Song of Myself” or “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” I would not be wishing I’d chosen another career.

It’s in the 1860 edition that the poet first begins to arrange his poems in clusters, making thematic clumps, breaking one off here and adding another there. He would go on remixing the order for the rest of his life.

This was largely a mistake. It results, at the worst, in sections of poems about the sea, or winter, and this kind of organization inevitably diminishes the work. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” takes place on a beach, but it is not “about” the sea, because great poems are not “about” in this way; they are profound reaches into that “furnace of meaning,” and they use whatever is at hand—the sea, a ferryboat ride, an unruly field of grass—to get to where they need to go. The “subject” matters until the furnace is lit, and then the poem almost seems to burn its ostensible occasion clean away.

It may be that Whitman arranged and fiddled because he came to understand, over time, that he was losing the capacity to create the magnificent, visionary odes that had launched his career. He would suffer from poverty, and from anxiety over his reception and reputation; as an outsider who both wanted and did not want to be on the inside, he was in a position of near-constant instability. He saw the boys he adored, the ones he hoped might base a newly energized democratic order on their affection for each other, tear one another apart on the battlefield instead, in a war of mind-bending brutality. He wandered from bed to bed for five years in makeshift hospitals, in appalling conditions, offering what comfort and witness he could, and destabilized his own health in the process. He suffered a massive stroke and required help for the rest of his life. How could I expect him to go on writing great poems when he’d already created ones that no one had known how to write in the first place, poems that sail right past what we thought a poem could do?

(Source: The Paris Review)

British writer and poet Pico Iyer on life, love and mortality in Japan

One morning, Pico Iyer stepped out of the flat he shares with his Japanese wife in suburban Japan and instantly felt transported to the Himalayas.

“A sudden mist enshrouds our little lane and there’s a mountain enclosedness to everything, though in Nepal the trash would never be confined to a single compact square on the street corner,” writes the celebrated author in his latest book, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells. A woman, he adds, is “padding past in her jammies … I suppress a smile, until I remember I’m in jammies, too.”

British writer Pico Iyer and his wife Hiroko Takeuchi at a Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Los Angeles, California, the US. Photo: Pico Iyer

Readers unfamiliar with Iyer’s writing would be forgiven for asking why any of this, with the possible exception of Japan’s and Nepal’s contrasting garbage disposal methods, is interesting.

Others, however, will not bother suppressing smiles of their own as they anticipate Iyer’s next cross-cultural surprise: “At the bus stop across the street, a young woman appears to be sleeping where she stands, one of those Japanese tricks the likes of me will never fathom.”

Born in England to Indian parents who migrated to California when he was seven years old, Iyer is a sharp-eyed observer of cultural collisions and cross-pollinations, a modern-day Mark Twain capable of leaping across borders by highlighting a single conundrum, irony or ambiguity.

Iyer (left) and Takeuchi (right) with the Dalai Lama. Photo: Pico Iyer

In Autumn Light, he presents to the outside world with simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity an idyllic, upscale neighbourhood in Nara, Japan’s ancient capital. Called Deer’s Slope, the place is inhabited mostly by retirees, many of them a full decade past 70, but agile enough to beat teenagers at ping-pong.

The British writer aged 17 years old in 1974. Photo: Pico Iyer

His portrait of suburban life, he says, is “relatively unmediated, so we can see how close Japan can be to the rest of us, on a human level”.

A painting of four-year-old Iyer. Photo: Pico Iyer

Indeed, a refrain of Tolstoy’s runs throughout the book’s long, rich sentences, scalloped cadences and galloping drive: “Look carefully at your village and you’ll be universal.”

A prolific author regularly featured on TED Talks, Iyer shot to literary prominence in 1988 with Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports From the Not-So-Far East, his debut work that foresaw the post-cold-war convergence of East and West. He has written a dozen books since then, and his 14th, titled A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, is scheduled for publication in September. It’s “the exact opposite” of Autumn Light, says Iyer, “more like an outsider talking back to Japan and focusing on everything about it that’s different and startling”.

Much of Iyer’s non-fiction is inspired by the sense of foreignness he carries with him wherever he goes. He was among the first writers to put his finger on the perils and promises of a rapidly globalising world in which an international lifestyle often tends to be both enriching and alienating.

Iyer in Kyoto, Japan. Photo: Pico Iyer

When people such as him embrace multiple identities, Iyer points out, they are rendered neither expatriates nor nomads, exiles nor refugees, but something in between.

“The country where people look like me [India] is the one where I can’t speak the language,” Iyer wrote in The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, his sixth book, published in 2000. “The country where people sound like me [Britain] is a place where I look highly alien, and the country where people live like me [America] is the most foreign space of all.”

The only child of Hindu-born theosophists, Iyer was educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. Except for his parents, who named him after Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the renowned Italian Renaissance humanist, Iyer never saw any Indians while growing up – and he learned not a single word of any of their native tongues.

The British writer fell in love with Japan when he was 26 years old and at the peak of his career as a journalist with Time magazine. Photo: Alamy

Iyer fell in love with Japan when he was 26 years old and at the peak of his career as a journalist writing about global affairs for Time magazine. In the autumn of 1983, he was returning to New York City from a business trip to Hong Kong when his Japan Airlines itinerary called for an overnight layover at Narita Airport.

“It was the last thing I wanted,” Iyer recalls in Autumn Light. “Narita was infamous for 11 years of violent protests by local farmers over the demolition of their rice paddies, culminating in a burning truck sent through the new airport gates not many years before.”

The next morning, with four hours still to kill before his check-in, Iyer took a shuttle into the city. He expected to be fully bored, but when the bus stopped at a tranquil Buddhist temple, Iyer suddenly felt as though he had been there in a past life. By the time he boarded his plane, Iyer decided to leave his cushy job in Manhattan and return to Japan.

Initially Iyer wanted to live like a Buddhist monk in Japan, but it only lasted a week. Photo: Alamy

He arrived four autumns later, suitcase in hand, and knocked on the door of a monastery in the backstreets of Kyoto.

“My boyish plan was to spend a year in a bare room, learning about everything I couldn’t see in Midtown Manhattan,” Iyer writes, adding: “The plan lasted precisely a week, which was long enough for me to realise that scrubbing floors and raking leaves before joining two monks crashed out in front of the TV was not quite what my romantic notions had conceived.”

At a Zen centre in Kyoto one day, Iyer ran into Hiroko, a charming young mother of two who invited him to her daughter’s fifth birthday a few days later. Before he knew it, writes Iyer, “my year of exploring temple life became a year of watching a new love take flight”.

"Falling in love is easy, but staying in love is often the real-world challenge many of us face – and brings its own enduring beauties." - British writer Pico Iyer

Hiroko went on to divorce her husband; in response, her elder brother, a Jungian analyst, cut off all ties with the entire family. In 1992, Hiroko and Iyer moved to Nara, where they have lived ever since in the same US$700-a-month, two-bedroom flat.

It wasn’t until 1999, however, that they got married. “I felt her children might suffer enough having a funny-looking foreigner in the house,” explains Iyer. “But to have an Indian stepfather might be even worse while they were in school, so we didn’t hurry towards the altar.”

Iyer spends an average of seven months a year in Japan – on a tourist visa, because he wants as little as possible to do with the country’s official side. He devotes the rest of his time to travelling for his work, meditating in a Catholic monastery in California, and looking after his 87-year-old mother who lives nearby.

Iyer spends an average of seven months a year in Japan. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Even though Iyer barely speaks any Japanese, and Hiroko speaks very rudimentary English, the couple have no trouble communicating. In fact, within a year of meeting Hiroko, Iyer felt he knew her well enough to write a whole novel based on her. Titled The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, the 1991 story is a sort of prequel to Autumn Light. On his recent book tours, many of Iyer’s fans asked him about the relationship between the two books.

Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells cover.

“I tell them that autumn has blessings spring cannot imagine, in part because it has the memory of spring within it,” Iyer says poetically, adding: “Falling in love is easy, but staying in love is often the real-world challenge many of us face – and brings its own enduring beauties.”

Parts of Autumn Light are devoted to the themes of ageing and children leaving home. Much of the narrative surrounds the death of Iyer’s father-in-law and the collapse of his mother-in-law into dementia.

Iyer checks out a parrot while travelling in Singapore. Photo: Pico Iyer

But the contemplations on loss are set against the background of a daily routine that involves living with the cycles of the seasons and learning to accept the permanence of change.

“Cherry blossoms, pretty and frothy as schoolgirls’ giggles, are the face the country likes to present the world, all pink and white eroticism,” writes Iyer. “But it’s the reddening of the maple leaves under a blaze of ceramic-blue skies that is the place’s secret heart.”

Steeped in the Buddhist idea of impermanence, Japan has always known to cherish things “precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty”, Iyer reminds us.

“Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.”

Autumn in Nara, Japan. Photo: Alamy

Although ostensibly about mortality and grief, at its core Autumn Light is a celebration of enigmas. Based on some 8,000 pages of notes collected over 16 years, it is a distillation of everything Iyer knows about Japan – a testament to his 32-year aspiration to embrace “the domestic spheres of Japan, rich in surprises and secrets”.

(Source: SCMP)

How poet Rupi Kaur became a hero to millions of young women

Rupi Kaur, one of Instagram’s favorite poets, writes about love, heartbreak and womanhood. She speaks to Jeffrey Brown about her rise to fame and her message for young women.

Judy Woodruff: And finally tonight, we take a look at a poet reaching new audiences in a new way.

At just 25, Rupi Kaur has burst onto the literary scene, surging to the top of nearly every bestseller list.

Jeffrey Brown reports how she’s done it by embracing social media, and building an avid following of young readers.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s become a strange new normal for 25-year-old Rupi Kaur, fans eager to share how her work has changed their lives. There’s often a photo and a hug. Sometimes, the exchange becomes emotional.

Woman: It’s because you remind me of my mom.

Rupi Kaur: I still don’t believe it. Like, I have to pinch myself. It’s real, but it still doesn’t feel real.

Jeffrey Brown: And how could it? Kaur’s debut collection of poems, “Milk and Honey,” has sold three million copies worldwide. And her new work, “The Sun and Her Flowers,” has already sold a million since its release in October.

Meanwhile, performances of her poetry, like this one in Washington, D.C., recently, routinely draw hundreds.

Rupi Kaur: There are mountains growing beneath our feet that cannot be contained. All we’ve endured has prepared us for this. Bring your hammers and fists. We have a glass ceiling to shatter.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Jeffrey Brown: It’s heady stuff for a young woman who grew up in the Toronto suburb of Brampton in a large South Asian community, and used social media to build an ardent fan base of mostly young women.

Rupi Kaur: They are like my sisters. They are me.

Jeffrey Brown: We spoke recently at Brampton’s Rose Theatre, where Kaur graduated from high school, and these days performs her poetry.

Rupi Kaur: I was 18, 19, 20 when I was writing “Milk and Honey.”

And so, we’re always going to be growing together, and I think what I want to say to them is like, I’m with you. I’m here.

I think people just want to feel understood and feel seen. It’s what I want growing up. And so that’s why I think the poetry works so well.

Jeffrey Brown: Kaur’s poems are typically short, even just a few lines, with simple, unadorned language and spare punctuation. They’re often accompanied by her drawings.

In them, she writes of everyday occurrences, like starting relationships, or ending them.

Rupi Kaur: You ask if we can still be friends. I explain how a honeybee does not dream of kissing the mouth of a flower and then settle for its leaves. I don’t need more friends.

Jeffrey Brown: But she also tackles raw issues of sexual violence and trauma and how to heal.

Rupi Kaur: The books are not 100 percent, like, autobiographical.

There are — the emotions of it, yes, perhaps, but they’re also stories that my sisters or my cousins or my mom or my aunt experience every single day. And so I have had the ability and the privilege to go and write poems about their experiences.

Jeffrey Brown: Kaur was born in Punjab, India, and emigrated to Canada at the age of 4. Her father is a truck driver, work that takes him as far away as California, her mother a stay-at-home mom.

At home, they speak only Punjabi.

Rupi Kaur: The rule was kind of like, you know, you’re going to speak English 90 percent of your day, you know, out and about, no matter where you go in the world. This house is like where you’re going to speak Punjabi.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, Kaur didn’t learn to speak English until the fourth grade. And she says it was through writing and performance that she found her voice.

Rupi Kaur: I think I just fell in love with the way the mic picks up my voice, and it like boomed throughout the entire space.

And for someone that felt voiceless for so long, that was so refreshing. For me, poetry is like holding up a mirror and seeing myself, and it gives words to these very complex emotions and these feelings that I had as a child, and not being able to put words to them.

Jeffrey Brown: She continued to write, posting work online, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she captured national attention, after the social media site Instagram twice removed a photo for an art project showing her with what looked like menstrual blood on her sweatpants.

Kaur responded: “I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear, but not be OK with a small leak.”

The response generated an outpouring of support online, and that same year, a major publisher picked up her first book. Since then, she’s cultivated a massive online presence. Nearly two million people follow her Instagram page.

A lot of lovers of poetry would think that poetry and social media just don’t go together, right?

Rupi Kaur: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Social media’s this ephemeral, surface-type thing.

Rupi Kaur: The gatekeepers of these two worlds are so confused. But, in my mind, it also seems so very natural that these two things would come together, because — because of technology and because of social media, so many things are changing, and social media has become a platform for so many different industries.

Why can’t poetry do the same?

Jeffrey Brown: But social media can also bite back. Kaur’s poetry has been the subject of frequent parody online, while some critics have questioned its literary merits.

And the title of Instagram poet, she says, comes with baggage.

Rupi Kaur: To be completely honest, I’m not OK with it. A lot of the readers are young women who are experiencing really real things, and they’re not able to talk about it with maybe family or other friends, and so they go to this type of poetry to sort of feel understood and to have these conversations.

And so, when you use that term, you invalidate this space that they use to heal and to feel closer to one another. And I think that’s when it becomes unfair.

Jeffrey Brown: Does it hurt you when the poetry is being critiqued as more therapeutic or more emotional, rather than real poetry?

Rupi Kaur: No, not really.

And it’s because I never really intended to get into the literary world. This is actually not for you. This is for that, like, 17-year-old brown woman in Brampton who is not even thinking about that space, who is just trying to live, survive, get through her day.

Jeffrey Brown: Kaur says social media, the thing that first connected her work to the world, can also be a cause of the pain that so many young people feel today.

Rupi Kaur: What happens when you’re so connected with other people through these things, you become so disconnected with yourself, and we find it so difficult to just sit with ourselves and just be alone.

Jeffrey Brown: And the poet who’s followed by so many on Instagram follows no one.

Rupi Kaur: What it teaches you is to put up your boundaries and really figure out, OK, this tool is so great, and it’s brought me so many great things, but I also need to protect myself if I want to continue to do what I’m doing.

Jeffrey Brown: Self-preservation.

Rupi Kaur: Oh, yes. Yes. And it’s like, I’m here to like be around for the long haul. Like, I’m not going anywhere. I want to be around until I’m 80.

And so I need to start some practices now, so that I can sort of continue on for the next 50 years.

(LAUGHTER)

Jeffrey Brown:

Kaur just wrapped up a North American tour. The next stops, India and Europe.

(Source: PBS)