Poetry Live!

Following the success of Poetry Live! in India in February 2005 a second series of events took place in February 2006, this year with Gillian Clarke, Simon Armitage, Imtiaz Dharker, 13 poets from India, one from Canada and one from Ireland. The main event, a public reading under the trees in the David Sasoon Library Garden, was part of the Kala Ghoda Festival, sponsored by The Times of India. Other events included a day with Gillian Clarke and Simon Armitage for English teachers on teaching poetry, a major reading at Landmark Bookstore in Andheri and a workshop for young Mumbai poets at Elphinstone College.

The events were put together and largely financed by The British Council for West India. Its head, Dr Roopa Patel wrote: ‘Last year Mumbai Poetry Live was a fledgling. It was our first year and we were testing waters to see how right our instincts were. With its roaring success, this year we have expanded the scope of Mumbai Poetry Live with a greater variety of poets from the UK, workshops and engaging with some newer voices in Mumbai.’
The theme this year was ‘Love in uncertain times’, one of many ideas suggested by Imtiaz Dharker.

The Mumbai poets included such distinguished writers as Adil Jussawala and C P Surendran, established poets such as Ranjit Hoskote, Jerry Pinto, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Menka Shivdasani and a number of newer poets such as Deepankar Khiwani and Anjum Hasan.
As usual The British Council excelled itself by producing a beautiful booklet for all the events. Some of this is reproduced below. Each poet had one poem in the booklet. This was Deepankar Khiwani’s, ‘the vampire of the underground’

You caught my glance, as I got on, alone.
I looked at your shy eyes and shyly looked away. Bait.
I knew your smile completely. On the escalator,
I turned to see you, and a poem peeling off the walls.

It is a careful trap to lay, love. October, Melancholy.
Over coffee at a Costa’s, steam, and your eyes beyond.
Don’t talk to me of love, I said, because I knew you wouldn’t listen.
On the Northern line, the Friday, your knees touched mine at last.

Ah, it takes a long learning, skill and knowledge of love
to be cruel quite precisely. Your tongue
snared, your eyes shut, and your arms pinned down
by the longing you could never hope to unlearn.

When I bit into your neck at the sort-of end, and saw,
disentangling my trapped arms, you heavy on the bed,
no weight on me at all, I laughed at your helplessness.
But, as always (and I swear it), I wept to taste your blood.

The final excitement of this year was that, thanks to the sponsorship of The Times of India and the Kala Ghoda Festival, 75 double decker buses were painted inside and out in Poetry Live! colours with poems on the inside of the bus. Even in a large, crowded city like Bombay, 75 pink and white Poetry Live buses make quite an impact.

It is strange how, when the time is right for an idea, everything falls in place to support it.

The idea of making poetry accessible to new audiences, and especially to young people, had barely entered my conciousness last year, when I discovered that many others were focusing on the same purpose... Imtiaz Dharker came up with some great suggestions and put her energy behind the idea...Poetry Live! came up with the much needed support...Kala Ghoda Festival came up with a whole strand of poetry which programmed in all kinds of interesting ways...and Prithvi Theatre scheduled the whole month of February for poetry.

Poetry has emerged from songs and songs are expressions of the soul, its joys and sorrows. Young people today are perhaps realigning to this idea through rap, reggae and hip-hop, and opening up to poetry which speaks about their concerns in their languge.

Last year Mumbai Poetry Live was a fledging. It was our first year and we were testing waters to see how right our instincts were. With its roaring success, this year we have expanded the scope of Mumbai Poetry Live with a greater variety of poets from the IK, workshops and engaging with some newer voices in Mumbai. We have a new partner in Landmark who have been generous with their support to help us reach people in other parts of the city.

We wanted to give the festival a focus but did not want to rule out good new poems just because they didn't fit into a straitjacket.

We have come up with the theme which I hope will allow us that flexibility. The theme of Love in uncertain times seems appropriate to us. We live and love in times which are indeed difficult. The theme is broad and gives us the freedom to include all manner and shades of love and I'm sure the poets will find ways to stretch and subvert the idea.

Coming to India this year for Mumbai Poetry Live we have Gillian Clarke, a well known poet who is also a broadcaster, freelance writer, lecturer, poet playwright, editor and a translator. Her works have been translated into 10 languages and her poems are studied by GCSE and A level students throughout Britain.

Simon Armitage, with his superb ear for language, his outstanding poems and his dry sense of humour, is a highly accomplished performer known for his versatility, writing for TV, radio, films and stage. He won the 2005 Spoken Word Gold award.

Imtiaz Dharker needs no introduction to India. She is a poet, artist and documentary film-maker. Her collections Purdah, Postcards from God, Ispeak for the devil and The terrorist at my table include her own drawings. The terrorist at my table will be published by Penguin India in April.

We are delighted to have the director of Poetry Live! Simon Powell who will be introducing the British poets and setting the pace for the readings. Poetry Live! is known for its fast paced interestingly worked out poetry patterns.

In tthis celebration of poetry, some of the city's best-known poets will read together with newer voices: Adil Jussawala, Ranjit Hoskote, Menke Shivdasani, CP Surendran, Jerry Pinto, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Anand Thakore, Anjum Hasan, Jane Bhandari, Sampurna Chattarji, Malvika Sangghvi, Anahite Contractor, Subuhi Jiwani, Deepankar Khiwani and Peter Griffin.

This year we have also added two workshops. One for the teachers on how to make poetry interesting for the students and ideas for encouraging the pupils to write about poems. The other worshop will be for young people o encourage their appreciation and interest in poetry.

I would like to thank Poetry Live! for their generous contribution which has made it possible to enlarge the scope of this festival, Kala Ghoda Festival for collaborationg with us, Landmark for their generous support and collaboration and last but not least all the poets for giving us their time and sharing with us their thoughts.

Roopa Patel
Head Arts (West India)
British Council

for Charles Simic
I should have burnt my shadow on a wall ro remind them I'd been there and a tracery of leaves, for luck or good measure, and walked out on them, on that dramatic note, into a morning of rain or green distances best left unmapped. Or reckoned by the roofs of houses you could pick off with a pointed stick. But all I did was read to them from a book nailed to a table blackened by centuries of elbows, smiling around at my circle of listeners, dropping my glasses casually on the last page. I knotted my muffler very carefully before walking out and left an apple on the table at the end.