The Shape of a Poem: The Red River Book of Contemporary Erotic Poetry |
Poetry Anthology | Editors: Srividya Sivakumar & Paresh Tiwari |
Red River Press, New Delhi (July 2021) |
ISBN (P): 978-81-948164-6-1 | pp 251 | ₹ 399

Locating ‘The erotic’ somewhere between spiritual ecstasy and the banality of porn

Your tongue lifts mine
from its bed of silence
and fires are taught in speech

– Carnal, Vinita Agrawal.

It will be as much of a truism to note that ‘erotic literature’ has been an integral part of the Indian imagination since time immemorial, as it would be to recognise that it is also the most misunderstood, and misrepresented of art forms. This is something that the editors of this anthology take cognizance of in their aptly titled Preface, Writing the Body, while also acknowledging the influence of seminal books such as R Parthasarthy’s Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Sam Hamill's The Erotic Spirit: An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing (Shambhala Publications). The editors confess that, ‘the erotic is not an easy animal to possess.’ One is tempted to add that not only is it not an easy animal to possess, but also, the direction this animal will run, or fly, or dig – by itself, and in the reader's mind/heart – is not easy to predict, or gauge.

For instance, to an average (Indian) reader, the erotic beholds the promise of steamy scenes, sexual innuendoes, bawdy full-blooded lust, typical masala stuff, really! Nancy Friday comes to mind; so do the covers of James Hadley Chase novels that teenage boys use to gawk at (before the Internet Age). To an informed reader, the erotic poses a different challenge – that of enjoying it, without enjoying it too much, if you know what I mean. To the aspiring writer, it means delicately tiptoeing the thin tinnitus of a line between the vulgar and the sensuous, the visceral and the quotidian, between, also, ‘the image’ and what happens of it, in the before, during, and after, of ‘the (sensuous) act’, as well as grappling with important caveats, such as appropriation, and fidelity. Lastly, to most publishers, it either means adorning bookshops at five-Star hotels and airport kiosks with the many gilt-edged editions of the Kamasutra (as if this was the be-all, end-all of erotica), or flooding footpaths outside shady gambling dens and railway stations with fifteen rupee comics of the buxom, feisty Savita Bhabhi. In our search for the representations of (presumably our deepest) desires, of the sensuous, of the corporeal, we tumble from the subliminal, perhaps unattainable, heights of sensual ecstasy, to the banality of soft-porn (or hard-core, depending on our preferences).

This gap – between seeing the ‘sexual’, and its representation, in the erotic, either as some fantastic, spiritually liberating enterprise, or as lascivious, yet quotidian fulfilment of everyday animal need – needs to be bridged – and this anthology bridges this very gap, or at least attempts to serve the function of as an elliptical, curiously-constructed staircase snaking through the myriad doors, windows, and hidden chambers of the body that is as much a desiring machine (to use the Deleuzian term) as it is a spiritual echo-chamber. Zones change. Paths criss-cross. That poetry becomes the brick and mortar of such a staircase should not surprise us. Though as we trundle through its pages, and the multitude of voices, we gather courage and confidence in the staircase's ability to delight, to startle, to celebrate, to pleasure, and to enlighten our emotional and physical understanding of the erotic.

For instance, in Nabina Das’s ‘Alchemy of a Love Bite’ (p. 133), the hickey – that torrid medium of communication between lovers – becomes an intimate detritus of intimacy. She writes, “who knew the other uses of teeth/ who knew the colour palette they carry – from raw quivering rose tint/ it goes to blue, bright purple, lit.” The ‘love bite’ that the speaker carries, becomes a memento, to be carried to ordinary places – “Katwariya/ then Ber Sarai”, imbuing them with a certain quaintness. Later these purple, blue, pink mementoes, “etched marks”, become akin to flowers, “hidden during the day some blooming at night” [emphasis mine], perhaps, bringing back memories of the erotic act.

Most of us have experienced the impatient waiting for the lover. Most succinctly articulated by Roland Barthes in his A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, where the speaker confesses, “Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late...The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits”, in Nikita Parik’s ‘Apraxia’ (p.148), waiting (for the lover) becomes “the echo of silent, hot/ venom in neuron synapses”, it becomes a “thought-alligator that bites off my/ tongue”; it also “erupts/ as seismic tsunami waves in my/ numberless nerves.” ‘Waiting’ becomes a visceral, hungry animal that devours the speaker – a devouring one is certain is as much psychological as it becomes sexual – and yet, the speaker “wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Kunjana Parashar’s ‘To Him Who Sits Frozen on Kailash Parvat’ (p. 110), addressed (presumably) to Shiva, is a hot spanner thrown into the frozen realms of ascetic masculinity. The poem starts as a ‘If poem’, where (presumably) female-desire takes form of a “panting bear”, “barrelling down a slope/ for a rhododendron – / claw-longing/ pilgrim-tongued”; the colour of such desire is “an auburn deeper than/ the fire of palash leaves”; such desire hungers, “for some lick of/ primordial light,” – and suddenly the spanner hits us in the head, when the speaker asks, “will you thaw?” The presence of women has caused considerable anxiety within the hallowed corridors of ascetic masculinity, at the root of which, lies the notion of ‘semen anxiety’, or the loss of the semen via sexual intercourse, which in turn (presumably) leads to loss of virility, strength and self-control. Parashar’s poem profoundly unsettles this paradigm, by fashioning a provocation pivoting on the mere suggestion of seduction.

If Parashar’s poem brings to light the insular, nonchalance of ascetic masculinity, then Carole Mac Rury’s ‘Peach Stone’ (p. 67) sketches an intimate portrait of an emotionally intelligent male lover. The speaker tells us, she chose him because of “the way he chose a peach – / the gentle, testing press;/ because the way his eyes closed/ wit that first mouthed bite;/ because he didn’t wipe juice/ from lips, from chin –.” These lines are at once the image of a man gently, delicately eating a peach (literally), and kissing a woman (metaphorically). She chooses him because he holds the speaker, knows the speaker, “skin to centre core;/ this man who craves the flesh,/ the juice,/ the stone” [emphasis mine], and becomes a metaphor of a lover who loves, and accepts completely.

Chadramohan S’s ‘An Erotic Encounter’ (p. 69) is a smart, slick, striking metaphor articulating both the intimacy involved in translating a poem (or a text), and how surrendering to the erotic impulse translates (and liberates) us. He writes, “After reading the poem aloud/ smitten by her aftertaste/ The translator approaches/ the poem like a boy approaching/ a girl on the dance floor.” They share a “pelvic giggle,/ a grinding dance/ to the rhythm of their poems read aloud.” It was refreshing to note that the poem, rather than veering towards fidelity (of translation), celebrates the “rhythm of their poems read aloud”, thus, breaking-away from the traditional ‘original-translation’, ‘master-slave’ (and also, male-female) dichotomy – something that Lori Chamberlain speaks at length in her book, Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation – and strikes equality not only between translator and translated, but also between male and female desires, through a dense, erotic, transformative exchange.

Both of Arundhati Submramanium’s poems ‘Shorthand’ (p. 40), and ‘Black Oestrus’ (pp. 41-42), articulate in different ways, the tensions, and trepidations of falling for, and surrendering to the erotic impulse. ‘Shorthand’, structured with the brevity of shorthand, pivots around the intense desire to “hold each other all night” and yet, “not trusting/ the only art... stenography” – the act of writing in shorthand [emphasis mine]. ‘Black Oestrus’ brings to light the vulnerability of a (presumably female) speaker, experiencing the passionate throes of desire. Hence, she says, “I could lie against you,/ mouth on forehead, limbs woven/ into a knot too dense/ for yearning”, “I could swallow you,/ feel the slurry of you/ against palate/– and throat, ravish you/”, and yet, the speaker retracts, withdraws, saying, “I’m learning, love,/ still learning/ that there is more to desire/ than this tribal shudder/ in the loins.” The speaker, aware of the inequality of her and the other’s desire, withdraws. Both poems shine a light on a lesser known aspect of the erotic – that of how vulnerable it makes those involved – especially in context of modern-day ‘hook-up culture.’ The fear, to transcribe from Anain Nin, “of electing something one loves, and absorbing oneself in it.”

Amar Aziz’s ‘Making Love in Urdu’ (pp. 34-35), cleverly explores the limits of language (‘you want me to talk dirty/ But how does one do that/ In Urdu?’), and through it, how much it can be pushed to capture the breathless intimacy of the physical (‘even the words for genitals/ are not mundane’). Ellen Bass (‘Basket of Figs’, p. 80) and Vinita Agrawal (‘Night in Ladakh’, pp. 286), capture the restorative power of the intimacy. Agrawal writes, ‘something about the moment opened my deepest scars/ and I measured how many leaves the trees had lost’, while Bass’s lines, ‘Bring me your pain, love... I would live it/ tenderly, as a great animal might/ carry a small one in the private/ cave of the mouth’, take us to a space where an erotic act is both intimate and therapeutic.

In closing, I’d say that this landmark anthology, with its multitude of voices pushes us to look beyond the stock images and conventions that erotic writing is heir to; it also beckons us to believe, paraphrasing Borges, that to desire is to fashion a religion whose god is vulnerable.