THE POET WITH A PREFACE BY SELECTED POEMS Srinivas Rayaprol BOOK WORKSHOP REDBIRD A WRITERS f R.ayapwl : Sili.:ECTED P·OEMS Babyblrd children's bootes Blackbird serious comics Bluebird drama Greenbird fiction Greybird reference Gurubird educational texts Indi-bird regional language versions Mini-bird smaU-size classics Neobird experimentalia Redbird poetry Saj}ronbird transcreation $ Silver bird screenplays Sunbird cass.ettes & LPs Hardback Limited Edition : Rs. 150 F/exiback Popular Edition : Rs. 60 lSBN 81-7189-850-5 (HB) LSBN 81-7189-851-3 (FB) © .1995 Srinivas Rayaprol • WRITERS WORKSHOP books are p u b l i s h e d by P.Lal from 162/92 Lake Gardens, Calcutta 700045, India. Hand-set in Times Roman typeface and printed on an Indian-make hand-operated machine by Sanjoy Chakra­ borty at Chakraborty Enter­ prise(Press), Calcutta 700032 by (Phone : 72-3603), on paper produced in India. Layout and lettering by P. Lal with a Srinivas Rayaprol Sheaffer calligraphy pen. Gold-embossed hand-stitched hand-pasted and band-bound by Tulamiah Mohiuddeen with handloom · sari Cloth woven and designed in India. · This book is entirely hand set, single letter by letter. " A Writers Workshop PublicatfoD Son of Dr Rayaprol Subbarao, the " father of modern Gratitude is expressed to the editor; and publishers of Telugu poetry", Srinivas, Rayaprol was born in 1925 in Manuskripre, West Germany, Inferno, California, Occident, Secunderabad, and did his B. A. from Nizam College California, Simbolica, New York, Accent, Urbana, III., (Hyderabad) and Stanford University, California Pot?try, Chicago, Neurotica, New York, Atlantic Monthly, (M. S. in Civil Engineering). His poems have Boston, Mognuscoti, Hungary, Between Worlds, Puerto appeared in Indian and foreign magazines, including Rico, !magi, Philadelphia, 21st Century, Sydney, Chakra, The Atlantic Monthly (Boston) and Quest (Bombay). Madras, Quest, Bombay, Unilit, Hyderabad, The Journal His poems have been represented in six anthologies, of Indian Writing in English, Gulbarga, East and West, including Anthology of Indian Poems edited by Erik Secunderabad, Writers Workshop Miscellany, Calcutta, Stinus (Copenhagen). The Orient Review, Calcutta, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Bombay, Youth Age, Pondicherry, The Literary Half- Yearly, Mysore, Poet, Madras, Indian Literature, New Delhi, wh~re some of these poems have earlier appeared. LATER POEMS An Ordinary Life 13 Forebears 15 10 Downing Street 16 The Golden Gate 17 Some Thoughts on Trres 18 Pictures at an Exhibition 2U Not yet the End 21 You can die 23 The Dead 24 This is just to Say 25 I do not grieve everytime 26 A funeral 28 I am all that I Love 30 Sunrise over Kamareddy 32 All Kinds of Love 3 3 For Mulk Raj Anand 34 All Americans 35 Nagarjunakonda 36 The Hatred in my Heart 37 Paedicatto 3S The Jesuit 39 Poem 40 Godhuli Time 41 Diwali Days 42 · My Son 44 Friendship 45 On Approaching Eifty 46 Shakuntala 47 ' · The Suicide's Lament 50 Streets 52 Old Rain 53 Dear Ken 55 In Memory of the Poet 57 For John Everyman 59 This Poem 61 To an Editor 62 8 Conte nts Lines to a fellow poet 63 Yesterday 64 It rains softl y on the city 65 F or R omola Nijinsky 67 Opening Day: University of California 68 Portraits of America 70 From MARRIED LOVE Valdstejnska Hospada 75 A Taste of Death 77 Travel Poster 78 Married Love 80 Though the poem "Sometimes" was: written in Berkeley, Middle Age 81 California in 1948 and the poem "An Ordinary Life" written Gone Now 82 in Secunderabad, India in 1995 the seventy-odd poems in I sit here 83 Life has been R4 this collection still touch me and make sense to me. Most These days 85 of the poems in this collection have not been published before in book form but some of them have appeared in FIOm BONES AND DISTANCES Bones and Distances (1968) and Married Love (1972) both Dogs in ruin 86 Four Love Poems 87 published by the WRITERS WORKSHOP, Calcutta. Crabs in the Seine 90 As I say in one of my poems, life has been mostly a Oranges on ~ Table 93 matter of living the days. Except perhaps for that special Letter to Ezra Pound 94 Growing Old 95 ·occasion, the splitting of the brain into the ·myriad moments A Letter for Mother 96 of intensity and feeling that perhaps give rise to what is a Les Saltimbanques 98 poem. Not that there is a poem in every one of those Bones a nd distances lCO outbursts. Sometimes a precious word with its special Poem for a Birthday 101 Here it is spring again 102 meaning sits on the page staring back at you, asking to be Legend 103 written. These poems are not of that nature. Many of The Man who Died of a Fever I 05 them have been conceived over days and written over and Still Life I 06 over again, but the actual birth of the poem has been like Pastorale I 07 Yellow and Blue 109 the first spark of semen that shoots out, uncontrollable at The Blue Woman 111 the climactic moment. For another New Year 11 2 - Many years ago when I was about seventeen or eighteen Portrait of a Mistress 113 Lines to a Christian Lady 114 my one ambition was to be a great poet, but I did not know For a Nun in a Waiting Room 11 5 what it meant except to thrill at a line of Auden or a word The Widow 116 of Wallance Stevens, and imagine the unimaginable-that The Peter Grimes of Benjamin Britten 117 one day 1 too would join the galaxy. Poets were lonely Two Poems for the Buddha 11 8 Sometimes lJO people, 1 had heard, and was 1 not the loneliest of the Coda 121 lonely? Poets had their minds full of words and thoughts Comment 123 10 Preface Preface 11 of unimagined beauty or ugliness. Was not my mind so attracted the attention of Mulk Raj Anand and Khusliwant ·often a garden full of flowers or a cess-pool full of filth that Singh who were the great gods of Indian English writing in I could not dare look into the mirror? Poets drank a loL .. those days and of Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams yes, I bad qualified by every known standard. Except from America who contributed to it and a host of younger perhaps that I could not sit down to write a poem. There writers who like myself were struggling to articulate. ' they were, in the mind, the beautiful unbelievables, the fire Looking back on all this, I feel that life bad always and the flame burning within me. But the ininute I put pen been eluding me. I and Chris were the dre~.m children, to paper, a million trite words would rush out. And so it walking down Kingsway in Secunderabad, dreaming of the would remain, a solitary word or a single line to convey the world. We lived in a second class · city in middle class magnificence of my unwritten poem. So I hope that these families but We bad big ambitions. We felt we were the poems, read by someone removed from my person, my mind, stuff genius· is made of anct' there was some truth in that. and the time and context in which they were written, contain We had problems of money, and ununderstanding parents, some of this mystique, and give satisfaction-....,.no, not that, conventions, and moronic companions and many moments but rather pleasure, that only words can convey, with or of·dullness. But we were there first. The Beardsley Prints without their meaning. Why do I write? Because. I like to of Wilde's Salome; Auden's abracadabra with the words write, because the words which . I use convey the meaning and feeling th~t I wish to convey, and the .reader wishes to High up in this vertiginous crows-nest above understand. Primarily the need is mine. I need to write Will you let us know what goes on in the world below, just like I need to eat or sleep or fornicate. As far as readers are concerned, a majority of one is OK with me. Eliot's special magic, Dylan Thomas's burning fire, all this I think I have achieved most of what I have wanted. to: was with us and more. With what perverse pleasure did we reach the top of my profession (as a civil engineer in the read of Herr Issywoo's Berlin stories, when our companions Government), publish a magazine in Englisb'from a remote 1"' were flaunting Somerset Maugham or James Hilton. For town in India during the fifties, EAST AND WEST, to which we were the outsiders, the brilliant people, not left out, but one leading English daily devoted its entire centre page standing away from the crowds, because we ... KNEW. under the caption "A Surprise from Secunderabad", publish But as the years have gone by and I am safely two books of English poetry in the days when Indian English ensconced in the world of wood, I have realized indeed was not acceptable to the Cambridge crowd. ·The magazine rather painfully that I am no longer the genius that I EAST AND WEST which I started with Kenneth Pettitt, an thought I was. But now that there is such a spate of Indian American friend, and my own meagre finances; was a English writing, and handsome books of poetry are coming satisfying but frustrating experience. I foresaw its inevitable out every year, I no longer am part of the scene.