“To arrive is to die”
In which Oriya poet Rajendra Kishore Panda discusses language, rebellion, salvation and why – for a poet — “blankness is all”.
In conversation with Rabindra K Swain
RS: “Every peak is ascendable, be it death or immortality that you meet there”: you say this in the title poem of ‘Shailakalpa’ (The Mountainesque). How does it feel at the top, at the peak?
RKP: The peak cannot be one’s home. Even if one feels that one has reached there, descent is inevitable, if not death. My experience ranges from the abyss to the peak. Don’t you remember the invocatory dedication-poem of ‘Shailakalpa’? [The poet reads from the book; a rough translation follows] “Sometimes a landing seems to emerge in the middle of life, where one gets the delusion, ‘I’ve arrived’. And then, from that mysterious space, one can view the peak, as well as the abyss. Halved into two, I move in both the directions: towards ascent like a celestial bird and towards descent like a roaring hill-stream, at equal speed. But that move doesn’t ensconce me on the peak; nor does it destroy me by smashing me at the rock-bottom of the abyss. I rush back from both, once again, in reverse mode. Let that maya-space emerge in my journey, time and again.” The journey towards the peak is a continuum. To arrive is to die!
RS: Why the abyss? Why does one-half of the being move towards the abyss? I know, such questions are not asked about lines of poetry, but . . .
RKP: That’s okay, Rabi. Maybe, it signifies the totality of experience and realization: the movement covering the base, the midpoint, the abyss and the peak. The seeker wades through avidya (ignorance) as much as he moves through vidya (knowledge), isn’t it? There is totality and recurrence too.
RS: Your poetry is full of epigrammatic lines which enhance your stature as a poet of ideas. How exactly do you work them out?
RKP: A poet of ideas is averse to fixed ways of seeing things. “The poem must resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully”, as a poet has said. For a contemplative poet, often the ideas revolve around the interplay between imagination and reality, between consciousness and the world. ‘Reality’ could even be deemed to be an upshot of the imagination. Reality is a dynamic activity, constantly changing, not a static object. One approaches reality with a piecemeal understanding, fitting together jigsaw-parts of the world with a subconscious intent to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview. This is not a mere process of crafting, or a dry philosophising activity, but a passionate engagement in finding a meaning beyond meaning. In such a situation, you sense the poem continuously “birthing in consciousness”, as someone has observed. A paradoxical or epigrammatic utterance is perhaps an exclamation of the epiphanic moment. It is a creative accident you stumble upon and wonder, “Where did that come from?” You don’t work it out.
RS: You are a master in using apt vocabulary in Oriya poetry. If necessary you coin phrases, mixing words of Sanskrit origin with the colloquial. How do you create this blend?
RKP: Poetry is the finest art of language, which is a living organism, ever expanding. Basically, as has been said, poetry takes its life from the people’s speech and, in turn, gives life to it. A keen poet has his ears and mind open. He hears the twang of colloquial expressions of the people around him and the ‘music of nature’ all around. In addition, it is better if, during early years of his life, he has acquired a strong basic understanding of the etymological construct of words — the ‘roots’ and ‘patterns’ — in his language and in Sanskrit (from which most of the Indian languages have originated). All this leads to the accretion of an encoded-stored-and-retrievable ‘vocabularic memory’. It also keeps the word-sense — in all its connotative vitality — alert.
New words or phrases may emerge in various modes — innovative tagging of ‘patterns’ to ‘roots’; adding suffixes, prefixes or infixes to create words from existing words; blending or compounding two existing words to create a third one; drawing words from old texts by reviving original meanings or by assigning new meanings; using words in different parts of speech such as ‘verbification’ of nouns or ‘adjectivification’ of non-adjectives; compression of expressions into single words; nativization of words from other languages . . .
But these new words and expressions are not created for their own sake. They emerge from the retrievable ‘vocabularic memory’ of the poet and his creative-intuitive anticipation while he is writing. They emerge when they are needed in keeping with the context, the tone, the temper and the theme of a poem.
RS: Talking about theme, you are not shackled to any particular theme in your poetry. What do you have to say about a poet who writes on only one theme?
RKP: I have no quarrel with a poet who chooses the ‘ektara’ (a single-stringed instrument traditionally used by wandering bards and minstrels in the Indian subcontinent) mode of thematic and/or formatic singularity. Yes, my poetry has what you may call ‘polyvalence’ in theme, form, tone and temper. It’s normal, I think, as per psychology. Your mijaj (mood/ temperament) varies, and it may get recorded in intense moments of creativity. Despite the range and variety of themes and modes of presentation, one may sometimes discern a subtle cohesive whole in one’s poetic corpus.
RS: Yes. But if polyvalence is your forte, what do you have to say to those who opine that ‘a poet writes only one poem’?
RKP: That’s a nice hyperbole. As you know, I too have made a similar observation in my Sahitya Akademi award acceptance speech more than two decades back. [The poet reads from ‘Bodhinabha’, a bilingual work] “Perhaps a single poem is being written, continually in instalments, by all the poets in their variegated splendour.” A hyperbole, yes. But it does signify the value of the entirety of creative endeavour of all seekers, transcending the limits of space and time. In fact, a good poem transcends the bounds of type, school, age, mode and finds its kinsfolk in any living time, any fitting place, without at the same time surrendering its own unique inimitability. As Paz says, “All poems say the same thing and each poem is unique.”
RS: Another major vein in your poetry is rebellion. There is an Oriya proverb: “A kenaf stick may break, it never bends.” You have poeticized the proverb to define ‘rebellion’: “The cracksound a kenaf stick makes, when it's snapped, is rebellion.” Even when the Establishment is decimating him, the tenacity of the rebel remains unconquerable. What do you think a rebel poet is up to?
RKP: You mean the contemporary relevance of the poetry of dissent, or political poetry?
RS: Yes.
RKP: Well, poetry or art, you may say, is an act of subversion. The poet is basically a conscientious person, living in human society with the gift of deeper perception and the power of articulating his ‘voice’. In human society, several ills abound: inequities, injustice, wars and skirmishes, State authoritarianism, oppression by the Establishment, corrosion of basic values and so on. A conscientious poet cannot but articulate his dissent, his protest, his non-conformity, without, of course, compromising the aesthetics of the utterances. It is natural and it will continue to be ‘relevant’ for a long time. Howsoever we may wish, the age of equity and universal beatitude is still far away. No one can shun the impact of ‘politics’. As someone said, the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. Those who pretend a total blindness to societal ills may be ‘politically correct’ by design! Yes, a major segment of my poetic corpus is ‘political poetry’, the poetry of dissent and protest.
RS: During the period of turbulence in India from June 1975 to February 1980, you published several anti-Establishment poems, which eventually comprised the collection Nijapain Nanabaya (Lullaby for Self). And I recall that expression of yours in ‘Golam Das’, the opening poem of that collection: “I’m the agent, I’m the agent, Shoot the first bullet at me.” Do you, or does the protagonist, confess to complicity? How do you envision a poet’s role in society?
RKP: It is not mandatory that a poet must turn into a radical activist. Nor need one have the illusion that the planet will be changed overnight through poetry. That he lends his positive and creative ‘voice of conscience’ for the inarticulate is a great support. There are some who tend to stand on a self-righteous pedestal and shout in demagogic and denunciatory tones. In fact, there is much badly written verse in the guise of political poetry which reads like a propagandist pamphlet chopped into line breaks, or singsong rhyming doggerel. I believe that a poet should take responsibility. He too is responsible for the continuance of social and political evils. Hence, “shoot the first bullet at me . . .”
RS: Speaking of your rebellious spirit, I recall your re-working of the myth of Shambuka, which occurs in the Ramayana. Rama was the king of Ayodhya. When the death of a child occurs in the kingdom, he is told that calamities such as this occur when the norms of ‘dharma’ are not followed in a kingdom; a shudra called Shambuka is performing tapasya (meditative austerities) which a shudra is not supposed to do. Shambuka refuses to discontinue the austerities and is finally decapitated, personally by Rama. In your poem, you go beyond the Shambuka story and question the very objective of tapasya. “The endeavour of Man is neither to become a star…nor to merge with God; it’s to become wholly God,” you conclude. Is that the goal of human life?
RKP: An allusion to the shudrahood of Shambuka and the unjust punishment due to the pressure of the biased rules of a caste-based social order is there in the poem. But Shambuka and God get metaphorized. It ultimately becomes a climactic position of Man versus the Elements. Man’s quest should not be a limited to a ‘boon’ or ‘moksha’ (mergence with God); He must become the Omnipotent wholly, the ultimate dispenser of all things. As regards ‘whole Godhood’ being the goal of human life, as you know, personally I am not a believer. At best, I am an agnostic. God in my poetry is an invented one, mostly to quarrel with and to chastise! But I am an incorrigible humanist: “I've declared love against all of mankind, unilaterally.” I affirm life.
RS: Elsewhere you wrote, “I must admit, life, I love you” and went on to end the poem with your rejection of a possible salvation. What about that ‘salvation’ you reject?
RKP: As I said, I reject the concept of moksha, which propounds that the ultimate attainment of a seeker is permanent termination of the janmachakra (or cycle of births) by mergence with God! As such, moksha is a figment of imagination. Life on earth, with all its agonies and ecstasies, I affirm.
RS: You have not written on conflicts in distant lands. What do you have to say about a poet’s empathy?
RKP: A poet without any empathy is not a poet. Regarding the other part of your question, I have more than one response. First, it is true, not many of my poems have direct named allusions to conflicts in ‘distant’ lands — say, Vietnam or Africa or Iraq. Second, it is quite normal that I draw most of my ingredients from my ‘locus’ of existence. However, several of my poems against war, strife and hegemony and for positive humanism transcend political geography. Third, a poet generates place. I don’t recall who said that. And wherever you stand is the centre of the earth. The ‘my-country-right-or-wrong’ type of patriotism has not limited my range . . .
RS: Yes, you have said in your poem Mati (Earth): “Country? Don’t ask me about countries. There's no such thing. Only a few old fogies distort the cartography of the earth with divisive lines and colours; the poet disowns it.” And another poem, ‘Rashtradoota’ (The Ambassador), concludes with these lines: “I do not know the country / of which or to which / I'm the Ambassador…” You have also made it clear, in several interviews, that you are not a camp-follower or card-holder of any political groups or isms.
RKP: Sometimes, one’s perception — be it of mystery, love or subversion — is too sacrosanct and individualistic to be collectivized! And sometimes it is difficult to take sides. If you raise the point of taking ‘sides’, I have stated in a poem: ‘count me on the ‘opposite side’: not in the plural, but in first person singular.’ One thing is clear — the integrity of articulation of one’s intense realization. “We must wake up to the passion in things, to the subversion in every poem,” as someone has said.
RS: Your Collected Poems in two volumes were out in 2003. The poems you have written after that could, by now, be enough for a volume or more than that. What, according to you, is the afterlife of the Collected Poems of a poet?
RKP: “Blankness is all”. That, as you know, is the prefatory one-liner of my Collected Poems titled Sada Prusthha (Blank Page). The poems I have been writing after that will add blankness to blankness! Perhaps it is impossible to improve the blank page. Moreover, blankness is vast, limitless. As John Updike says, “Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else.” Yes, for a poet, blankness is all. Amen.
April 2007
RKP: The peak cannot be one’s home. Even if one feels that one has reached there, descent is inevitable, if not death. My experience ranges from the abyss to the peak. Don’t you remember the invocatory dedication-poem of ‘Shailakalpa’? [The poet reads from the book; a rough translation follows] “Sometimes a landing seems to emerge in the middle of life, where one gets the delusion, ‘I’ve arrived’. And then, from that mysterious space, one can view the peak, as well as the abyss. Halved into two, I move in both the directions: towards ascent like a celestial bird and towards descent like a roaring hill-stream, at equal speed. But that move doesn’t ensconce me on the peak; nor does it destroy me by smashing me at the rock-bottom of the abyss. I rush back from both, once again, in reverse mode. Let that maya-space emerge in my journey, time and again.” The journey towards the peak is a continuum. To arrive is to die!
RS: Why the abyss? Why does one-half of the being move towards the abyss? I know, such questions are not asked about lines of poetry, but . . .
RKP: That’s okay, Rabi. Maybe, it signifies the totality of experience and realization: the movement covering the base, the midpoint, the abyss and the peak. The seeker wades through avidya (ignorance) as much as he moves through vidya (knowledge), isn’t it? There is totality and recurrence too.
RS: Your poetry is full of epigrammatic lines which enhance your stature as a poet of ideas. How exactly do you work them out?
RKP: A poet of ideas is averse to fixed ways of seeing things. “The poem must resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully”, as a poet has said. For a contemplative poet, often the ideas revolve around the interplay between imagination and reality, between consciousness and the world. ‘Reality’ could even be deemed to be an upshot of the imagination. Reality is a dynamic activity, constantly changing, not a static object. One approaches reality with a piecemeal understanding, fitting together jigsaw-parts of the world with a subconscious intent to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview. This is not a mere process of crafting, or a dry philosophising activity, but a passionate engagement in finding a meaning beyond meaning. In such a situation, you sense the poem continuously “birthing in consciousness”, as someone has observed. A paradoxical or epigrammatic utterance is perhaps an exclamation of the epiphanic moment. It is a creative accident you stumble upon and wonder, “Where did that come from?” You don’t work it out.
RS: You are a master in using apt vocabulary in Oriya poetry. If necessary you coin phrases, mixing words of Sanskrit origin with the colloquial. How do you create this blend?
RKP: Poetry is the finest art of language, which is a living organism, ever expanding. Basically, as has been said, poetry takes its life from the people’s speech and, in turn, gives life to it. A keen poet has his ears and mind open. He hears the twang of colloquial expressions of the people around him and the ‘music of nature’ all around. In addition, it is better if, during early years of his life, he has acquired a strong basic understanding of the etymological construct of words — the ‘roots’ and ‘patterns’ — in his language and in Sanskrit (from which most of the Indian languages have originated). All this leads to the accretion of an encoded-stored-and-retrievable ‘vocabularic memory’. It also keeps the word-sense — in all its connotative vitality — alert.
New words or phrases may emerge in various modes — innovative tagging of ‘patterns’ to ‘roots’; adding suffixes, prefixes or infixes to create words from existing words; blending or compounding two existing words to create a third one; drawing words from old texts by reviving original meanings or by assigning new meanings; using words in different parts of speech such as ‘verbification’ of nouns or ‘adjectivification’ of non-adjectives; compression of expressions into single words; nativization of words from other languages . . .
But these new words and expressions are not created for their own sake. They emerge from the retrievable ‘vocabularic memory’ of the poet and his creative-intuitive anticipation while he is writing. They emerge when they are needed in keeping with the context, the tone, the temper and the theme of a poem.
RS: Talking about theme, you are not shackled to any particular theme in your poetry. What do you have to say about a poet who writes on only one theme?
RKP: I have no quarrel with a poet who chooses the ‘ektara’ (a single-stringed instrument traditionally used by wandering bards and minstrels in the Indian subcontinent) mode of thematic and/or formatic singularity. Yes, my poetry has what you may call ‘polyvalence’ in theme, form, tone and temper. It’s normal, I think, as per psychology. Your mijaj (mood/ temperament) varies, and it may get recorded in intense moments of creativity. Despite the range and variety of themes and modes of presentation, one may sometimes discern a subtle cohesive whole in one’s poetic corpus.
RS: Yes. But if polyvalence is your forte, what do you have to say to those who opine that ‘a poet writes only one poem’?
RKP: That’s a nice hyperbole. As you know, I too have made a similar observation in my Sahitya Akademi award acceptance speech more than two decades back. [The poet reads from ‘Bodhinabha’, a bilingual work] “Perhaps a single poem is being written, continually in instalments, by all the poets in their variegated splendour.” A hyperbole, yes. But it does signify the value of the entirety of creative endeavour of all seekers, transcending the limits of space and time. In fact, a good poem transcends the bounds of type, school, age, mode and finds its kinsfolk in any living time, any fitting place, without at the same time surrendering its own unique inimitability. As Paz says, “All poems say the same thing and each poem is unique.”
RS: Another major vein in your poetry is rebellion. There is an Oriya proverb: “A kenaf stick may break, it never bends.” You have poeticized the proverb to define ‘rebellion’: “The cracksound a kenaf stick makes, when it's snapped, is rebellion.” Even when the Establishment is decimating him, the tenacity of the rebel remains unconquerable. What do you think a rebel poet is up to?
RKP: You mean the contemporary relevance of the poetry of dissent, or political poetry?
RS: Yes.
RKP: Well, poetry or art, you may say, is an act of subversion. The poet is basically a conscientious person, living in human society with the gift of deeper perception and the power of articulating his ‘voice’. In human society, several ills abound: inequities, injustice, wars and skirmishes, State authoritarianism, oppression by the Establishment, corrosion of basic values and so on. A conscientious poet cannot but articulate his dissent, his protest, his non-conformity, without, of course, compromising the aesthetics of the utterances. It is natural and it will continue to be ‘relevant’ for a long time. Howsoever we may wish, the age of equity and universal beatitude is still far away. No one can shun the impact of ‘politics’. As someone said, the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. Those who pretend a total blindness to societal ills may be ‘politically correct’ by design! Yes, a major segment of my poetic corpus is ‘political poetry’, the poetry of dissent and protest.
RS: During the period of turbulence in India from June 1975 to February 1980, you published several anti-Establishment poems, which eventually comprised the collection Nijapain Nanabaya (Lullaby for Self). And I recall that expression of yours in ‘Golam Das’, the opening poem of that collection: “I’m the agent, I’m the agent, Shoot the first bullet at me.” Do you, or does the protagonist, confess to complicity? How do you envision a poet’s role in society?
RKP: It is not mandatory that a poet must turn into a radical activist. Nor need one have the illusion that the planet will be changed overnight through poetry. That he lends his positive and creative ‘voice of conscience’ for the inarticulate is a great support. There are some who tend to stand on a self-righteous pedestal and shout in demagogic and denunciatory tones. In fact, there is much badly written verse in the guise of political poetry which reads like a propagandist pamphlet chopped into line breaks, or singsong rhyming doggerel. I believe that a poet should take responsibility. He too is responsible for the continuance of social and political evils. Hence, “shoot the first bullet at me . . .”
RS: Speaking of your rebellious spirit, I recall your re-working of the myth of Shambuka, which occurs in the Ramayana. Rama was the king of Ayodhya. When the death of a child occurs in the kingdom, he is told that calamities such as this occur when the norms of ‘dharma’ are not followed in a kingdom; a shudra called Shambuka is performing tapasya (meditative austerities) which a shudra is not supposed to do. Shambuka refuses to discontinue the austerities and is finally decapitated, personally by Rama. In your poem, you go beyond the Shambuka story and question the very objective of tapasya. “The endeavour of Man is neither to become a star…nor to merge with God; it’s to become wholly God,” you conclude. Is that the goal of human life?
RKP: An allusion to the shudrahood of Shambuka and the unjust punishment due to the pressure of the biased rules of a caste-based social order is there in the poem. But Shambuka and God get metaphorized. It ultimately becomes a climactic position of Man versus the Elements. Man’s quest should not be a limited to a ‘boon’ or ‘moksha’ (mergence with God); He must become the Omnipotent wholly, the ultimate dispenser of all things. As regards ‘whole Godhood’ being the goal of human life, as you know, personally I am not a believer. At best, I am an agnostic. God in my poetry is an invented one, mostly to quarrel with and to chastise! But I am an incorrigible humanist: “I've declared love against all of mankind, unilaterally.” I affirm life.
RS: Elsewhere you wrote, “I must admit, life, I love you” and went on to end the poem with your rejection of a possible salvation. What about that ‘salvation’ you reject?
RKP: As I said, I reject the concept of moksha, which propounds that the ultimate attainment of a seeker is permanent termination of the janmachakra (or cycle of births) by mergence with God! As such, moksha is a figment of imagination. Life on earth, with all its agonies and ecstasies, I affirm.
RS: You have not written on conflicts in distant lands. What do you have to say about a poet’s empathy?
RKP: A poet without any empathy is not a poet. Regarding the other part of your question, I have more than one response. First, it is true, not many of my poems have direct named allusions to conflicts in ‘distant’ lands — say, Vietnam or Africa or Iraq. Second, it is quite normal that I draw most of my ingredients from my ‘locus’ of existence. However, several of my poems against war, strife and hegemony and for positive humanism transcend political geography. Third, a poet generates place. I don’t recall who said that. And wherever you stand is the centre of the earth. The ‘my-country-right-or-wrong’ type of patriotism has not limited my range . . .
RS: Yes, you have said in your poem Mati (Earth): “Country? Don’t ask me about countries. There's no such thing. Only a few old fogies distort the cartography of the earth with divisive lines and colours; the poet disowns it.” And another poem, ‘Rashtradoota’ (The Ambassador), concludes with these lines: “I do not know the country / of which or to which / I'm the Ambassador…” You have also made it clear, in several interviews, that you are not a camp-follower or card-holder of any political groups or isms.
RKP: Sometimes, one’s perception — be it of mystery, love or subversion — is too sacrosanct and individualistic to be collectivized! And sometimes it is difficult to take sides. If you raise the point of taking ‘sides’, I have stated in a poem: ‘count me on the ‘opposite side’: not in the plural, but in first person singular.’ One thing is clear — the integrity of articulation of one’s intense realization. “We must wake up to the passion in things, to the subversion in every poem,” as someone has said.
RS: Your Collected Poems in two volumes were out in 2003. The poems you have written after that could, by now, be enough for a volume or more than that. What, according to you, is the afterlife of the Collected Poems of a poet?
RKP: “Blankness is all”. That, as you know, is the prefatory one-liner of my Collected Poems titled Sada Prusthha (Blank Page). The poems I have been writing after that will add blankness to blankness! Perhaps it is impossible to improve the blank page. Moreover, blankness is vast, limitless. As John Updike says, “Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else.” Yes, for a poet, blankness is all. Amen.
April 2007
