Relationship: Jayanta Mahapatra

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

Relationship, The First Volume of Indian English Poetry To Fetch Jayanta Mahapatra The Sahitya Akademi Award For 1981

Relationship is the first volume of Indian English poetry writing to fetch Jayanta Mahapatra the award for creative writing in poetry and he is the first Indian English poet to be awarded with it. But to discuss it is to know about the institution of the Sahitya Akademi award. Since when is it given to? Were there any awards before it? Were there no Indian writers of Indo-Anglican verse? The answer is definitely yes, there were some to get it. Many did not get a chance. Many felt it not encouraged. Many used to write in their diaries, but never liked to open and claim at that time. Whatever be that, let us be with it. It is also a fact that the books of Indian English verse used to be out of print and out of stock. Most of the writers were unknown. This was also true with regard to Jayanta Mahapatra. The book shops and book stalls flatly used to deny with regard to the procurement of books and used to express annoyance. Even the books were not available in College Street, Calcutta. Even at Patna the volumes of Indian English poetry could not be traced.  

When I asked about the journals, the magazines stall-sellers saw me with wonder and asked to tell the names of some more dead magazines. The teachers were also not adapted to Indian English tradition and were critical of. Just the slender anthologies of Indian English poetry were before us counted on hands, ones or twos. To get the books of Sarojini is to search antique book shops or the libraries of Nehru’s time. Who will go to National Library, Calcutta to dust the racks or shelves? Even in the eighties modern Indian English poets were just evolving poets and poetesses rather than what they are today. Do not intermix the things of the photo-copier machines’ time with that of the smart phone and the computer. Nissim Ezekiel got the Sahitya Akademi Award for Latter-Day Psalms in 1983, Keki N.Daruwalla for The Keeper of the Dead in 1984, Kamala Das for Collected poems in  1985, Shiv K.Kumar for Trapfalls in the Sky in 1987, Dom Moraes for Serendip in 1994, A.K.Ramanujan for The Collected Poems in 1999,  Adil Jussawalla for Trying to Say Goodbye in 2014. 

But we cannot who have and who have not? Who should have? Something is also not in awards and prizes. Lawrence Bentlemen too was a good poet. K.D.Katrak too was no less than in his innovative writing. The modern Indian English poets were not popular since the start, they have taken time to develop and the world too has taken time in knowing them. Had the UGC not pressurized, these could not have been included, had the Ph.D. programme been not made compulsory for career advancement! At that time Ph.Ds. done on Indian things and topics used to appear as Indian language Ph.Ds. The problem lay not with the British-text schooled professors, but with the standard and quality of Indian English verse too as it was derivative, imitative, parodied and copied, a study in minor voices and slender anthologies. The publishers too used to refuse to publish. I myself heard it and the talks passed through my ears when one research student wished to do his Ph.D. on Arun Kolatkar in the nineties as suggested by one Indian-matter inclined guide, the varsity head of the department in a dilemma hesitated if to approve the synopsis as because Kolatkar had not so many books then. 

Even in M.K.Naik’s book he talks of collecting the stray poems of the poet and publishing in  a book format. We too were not accustomed to reading Indian English verses. The high-powered specs-wearing olden time professors schooled during the British period had no interest at all in these slender anthologies and puerile parodied stuffs. Frankly speaking, Indian English verse is a study in private and personal collections. The poets are here but self-styled poets and poetesses. The other thing too is this that it is easy to work on Indian topics as for the dissertations rather than the British stuffs.

What it pains us most in reading Indian English poetry is this that there are no critical texts as for to analyze them. There are no critics of it. The fresh research students pose as the critics of Indian English poetry who are in reality the novice fellows as well as the learners of such an evolving genre of literature. Here whatever your write will be accepted. There is none to contradict your theory. The biographical details too of the nondescript practitioners whose whereabouts are unknown and obscure are quintessential as for discussing their poems. If you are able to access and approach the poet, you will definitely turn into a critic here.

I searched for the books of Jayanta Mahapatra, but could not find them, even wrote to Prof. P.Lal who too responded with the proposal of photo-stating the materials and sending them after the payment of charges as required for the research. Somehow I got the address of Mahapatra and he was kind enough to send me the books. Similar had been the case with Daruwalla. But Nissim Ezekiel asked to write to Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi, but the books too were out of stock. It took time in corresponding with, getting the reply by post, sending of the M.O.

Relationship is a long poem consisting of a few pages, not so many in numbers, but is in continuation of his relationship with Orissa and the Oriya space, culture, history, myth, tradition and mysticism. Here he grappling with the topography and cartography glides with map and map-making, telling of his connection with the land of his birth, rearing, education and growing up. Just with the visionary glides and escapades he keeps on rolling and gliding, sometimes on the boat with the boatmen, sometimes with the sailors on the ships sailing on the sea and sometimes by the shore seeing the sea shores. The Oriya landscape with the rivers, forests, hills, lakes, sea beaches, historical sites, hamlets, exotic flora and fauna he binds them into a whole to weave the myth of his own delving to take the visionary flights. The Ganga kings, who to tell about? Who there to tell about the Konark Sun temple? How the sculptures and figurines of it inscribed upon the walls? What are they indicative of? What the motif behind? The tourist spots and destinations pleasurable and refreshing, where does mind get lifted to? The wooden statues carved out of fresh wood and placed in the Jagannath temple so bizarre and grotesque lift us from our busy schedule to see the Rathyatra and the gods and goddesses on outing, the chariot pulled by the mammoth of crowds following, held by reverence and piety, looking back in wonder and astonishment, devotion and religiosity and so full of festivity, mirth and joy. To read Jayanta Mahapatra is to feel that the history of Delhi is not the history of India. The history of Bihar and the U.P. is not the history of Indian politics. While doing his M.Sc. from Patna Univ., he would have definitely felt the caste system prevalent in Bihar.

The poetry-work, Relationship appeared in 1980 from the Greenfield Review Press, Greenfield Center, New York 12833, USA. With an extract from Whitman’s Song of Myself before the start of the poem, the small book opens up in its way opening the avenues of thought and idea, dream and vision; widening the spectrum and horizon of our delving. Relationship as a work cannot be analyzed, paraphrased and annotated as because so many abstract things have been assimilated into the poetic texture of the poem delving deep into Oriya land, cartography, history, art, culture, society, tradition, belief and heritage and living. How the people are, how the land is, how their living, how their language! How their deity, belief-system! His language is so metaphoric and mythic here reminding us of the Irish myth and mysticism of W.B.Yeats. What is this Orissa? How the stories of it? How to express his love and gratitude for the motherland, the place of his nativity is the question! It is Orissa which is his love; it is Orissa his dream and imagery and with it he sleeps and awakes and arises from slumber.

Wearing the mythically embroidered bespangled coat of Yeats, he starts the tale of Orissa and Orissan myth and mysticism engaging his inner space:

“Once again one must sit back and bury the face
in this earth of the forbidding myth,
the phallus of the enormous stone,
when the lengthened shadow of a restless vulture
caresses the strong and silent deodars in the valley,
and when the time of the butterfly
moves inside the fierce body of the forest bear,
and feel the tensed muscle of rock
yield to the virtuous water of the hidden springs of the Mahanadi,
the mystery of secret rights that make up destiny;”
( Relationship, The Chandrabhaga Society, Cuttack, Second Indian Edition, 1999, p.9 ) 

A poet he can show what it is in regional history and how have we kept our histories ignored. What more do we know about our histories? Just others’ versions we hear. We do not have our standpoint. We could not take a note of that. The replica of the Konark Sun-temple is the replica of his poetry; how the wheels of it, the wheels of the chariot and how the horses of Suryanarayana! Who made the Konark Sun-temple and how? Who were the architects? Who the forgotten masons? Just like the vagabond Whitman he wants to gloss over with his visionary stance. His leaves are not the leaves of America, but of Orissa. Plucking the green grass blade, Mahapatra like Tennyson wants to pipe and sing a song. Yeats’ An Acre of Grass not, but the whole panorama and landscape of coastal Orissa is the dream vision of Jayanta Mahapatra.

 The last lines of the poem take us to a different pedestal of make-believe dream sequence:

Is anything beyond me that I cannot catch up?
Tell me your names, dark daughters
Hold me to your spaces

In your dance is my elusive birth, my sleep
that swallows the green hills of the land
and the crows that quicken the sunlight in the veins,
and the stone that watches my sadness fly in and out
of my deaths, a spiritless soul of memory
(Ibid, p.38 ) 

Who are these dark daughters? Are these the poor toiling masses of our agrarian countrified society? Are these the poor daughters of India whose tales of pity and pathos we often hear it? Are these the tears of Sita and Yasodhara falling from their feminine eyes and cheeks? Are these the dark daughters of the temples working as devadasis or yoginis? Are the priests and the middle men okay? Are the astrologers and palmists and soothsayers true to their kindred souls? Scholasticism is good, so is classicism, but where do we go to finally? Can we detach ourselves from our bare realities and earthly connections? Can we close our eyes from seeing the trouble and tribulation of the common masses? Does hunger not malign us? Are the people not living below the poverty lines? What man does not do for the stomach?

Down the memory lanes, where does he want to go? Where is he going?  What does the poet mean to say it? Is it his day dreaming or night dreaming? In a vision where does he want to lapse into? Does he want to identify his self with the self of the motherland? Here his stand is mythic and mythological, so full with the flight of imagination, dreamy glide and slide, so full of generalizations.

Divided in twelve, each section tells a tale of own. The first is grappling with myth and mysticism, the making of the land, the drift of time and the phallus stone overshadowing it all. Against the backdrop of the sea and its hazards, dark forests and dark myths of creation, he tells the tales of life and this living of ours, that of the Oriyas. There is something of Riders to the Sea of J.M.Synge in it.

The second is autobiographical but written in the form of a reverie as Dream Children by Charles Lamb is. Marking the grave of his mother, he ruminates over the passage of time as which becomes what in course of time, how memory and reminiscence play a role in human life and the images keep shifting like the sands of time.

The third starts with the first rains washing the lands and stones, sin and blood and here lies in the story of the Daya river on whose banks the Kalinga and the Ashokan armies clashed. The imagery is one of The Waste Land and The Rime  of The Ancient Mariner. There is something of the Tower of Silence imagery when we think of the skeleton remains, bodies cleansed of rotting flesh. The penance of Bhagirath and the doing away of the sins of the sons of Sagar come to the mind as and when we sit to discuss it.

The fourth tells about his imagistic meanderings and loiterings. What he means to say it is not clear. The burden of peace, how to take to? Voices of children have always wronged.

The fifth as an ode to sleep though is not is all about the soothing flight of imagination, the visionary glide taken, the dream dreamt through, with the help of imagery and reflection, nostalgia and remembrance. If sleep is soothing, where will it land, all know it.

The sixth is again a glide in which he speaks of the gathering of clouds, rains and the Ganga kings and their ruins. None to  say where he goes from where.

The seventh is all about who stands where, who is for what if the notions keep shifting, images keep swapping places. The ideas are not clear here. If one searches Jayanta Mahapatra  for meaning, one will be at wit’s end.

The eighth is all about his connections with stones, the stones of history and archaeology, geography and architecture. It is the Konark Sun-temple that he discusses it here indirectly in a visionary style of rambling. The sweep and glance of Mahapatra is splendid.

In the ninth starting from the myth of happiness he lurks around  shuttling in between dreams and imagery.

The tenth is a door relating poem in which he speaks about stumbling upon the peepul tree and the meditational connect. Slipping through the doorways and planks, one can glimpse the outward world. The doors of dreams keep unfolding and opening new avenues of thought and idea. Just lie you by the door and go on seeing the ways.

The eleventh starting with the mirror mirrors it all happening underneath the consciousness layers of his heart.

The section twelve is about the dark daughters of the temple complex, of the countryside whose trouble and tribulation keep it swapping, taking forms, bearing fruits. None strove to know what it ailed them, their spirit and self. His style is folklorish and mythical as he keeps telling in a tell-tale way of deliberation. The dark daughter, why are they? What the cause of their darkness? Are they dark really or are affectionate daughters? Can daughters be dark? And even if are, what that to? What is it the myth of darkness, is it of the Dark Goddess? There is something of the Lingam-Yoni motif, the Prakriti-Purusha concept and the Shiva-Durga story indirectly relayed through the dream vision. But the base is one of proposition and supposition; the mythic base and he taking visionary flights. What we see as things is but mass and matter and the shapes keep changing. What it is today will not be tomorrow. The human mind is always in a flux. So are the fleeting images and impressions of life.

Sometimes we ask ourselves if Relationship is Kubla Khan of Coleridge and he writing under the impact and so is Mahaptra too here under the charm of dream sequence but without taking anything. Where will the parachutes of imagination will land them to, God knows it. Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet likes to silhouette and in his poetry imagery plays an upper hand with faith being so shaky and frail. The pencil images do not remain the same as they change it from time to time.

Bob Dylan As A Poet: Bijay Kant Dubey

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

An Icon of Pop Music And Culture; A Song-writer Superb; A Composer And A Singer; Above All, Poetry As The Songs And Lyrics of Modern Culture And Living;

A Representative American For The Country, Folk, Chapel, Jazz, Rap, Rock’ N’ Roll & Blues; Lyrics As The Discography of Music

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

                ----Robert Frost in "The Road Not Taken"

                         

In the literary history of the United States of America and that too into the annals of poetry, there is none but Dylan who has wavered and fluctuated so much in taking the award from the Nobel Prize Committee of the Swedish Academy the most-coveted Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 2016 as for keeping them in doubt if he would take or not, as for realizing within if these really would fall into the domain of poetry or not. His doubt was the doubt of a song-writer, his doubt the doubt of a poet if these are really worthy of being called poems, the songs if are poems in reality. The poet in him questioned and he kept mum and quiet maintaining silence for months letting them musing in the dark if he will accept or decline. He was at a loss if to take or not, quite disturbed and bewildered too, the dilemma, the dichotomy raked him so badly. But it was really a prerogative on their part, indeed a breakthrough in announcing his name for the most sought-after prize that he got it as he so richly deserved it and had been one of the contestants even though never aspired for. Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan is the name whose name has been nominated and accepted as the recipient of the most precious award as the jury thinks it right after adjudging to bestow upon. Who can better stand before in popularity and acceptance? Unrivalled and unparalled in his stature, he is no doubt a world class musician-composer carrying the traditions of music and song altogether so far. A guitarist, he is a musician, a song-writer and a singer and his lyrics the lyrics of the guitar. He is a bandsman and his poetry is the poetry of the bands, musical bands. He is a rock star, a pop star, the icon of American culture and tradition. But before we sum up, there are several things to be noted. In Bob Dylan, one can see an American tradition and legacy of music without which none can flourish. There are definitely some before him to be acknowledged, whose contribution we know it not. What are the impacts and influences on him? How has he grown? Who is it who has imparted the lessons to him in music? How has it been his experience? Who is that who has nurtured and inspired him? How has he grown over the years? Were there no introducers’? Were there no recommenders? There were definitely referees and still are whose services we know it not, what it goes in the making of a talent or genius. Talent hunt is equally difficult as writing.

Robert Allen Zimmerman whom we know as Bob Dylan was born on 24 May, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, but was raised in Hibbing. To see it differently, the diasporic origin can be marked in the lineage and heritage of Zimmerman as his paternal grandparents were Jews from Ukraine and maternal grandparents Lithuanian Jews. His paternal grandmother’s family had been originally from Turkey. But his father who had an electric appliance shop moved to the wife’s home in Hibbing as for his polio and Dylan grew up there. At Hibbing High School, Bob got the idea of poetry and literature as he heard the teachers delivering on poetry like religion and taking up so passionately. Even now he has not forgotten though far from classroom poetry. The ideas and remembrances create music in him and the attachment and the things poetical get relayed through music, songs and lyrics. The best of our songs are sounds and notes, the frequencies and wavelengths of the pitches and tunes of sounds as signs and symbols.

In his schooldays Bob had been interested in music, listening to the radio, while at school, he performed too, but once it turned loud. But at that time too he had not been Bob, but Zimmerman. Later on, he made a tryst with moving from this place to that place and performing for. When he had been trying his luck, he thought of changing his name to get a breakthrough and in that way he turned into Bob Dylan. To know him is to search for many a thing as his is a musician’s story, a music-composer’s, a songwriter’s story, a singer’s story, an artist’s story, a performing artist’s life.

It is not that Bob Dylan has turned into a great artist all of a sudden and he has taken time evolving and someone has definitely helped him grow over the years. It is his teammates and bandsmen; it is his friends and lovers, the introducers. Joan Baez who had been popular even before lent a hand to him after recording his songs in the 1960s.

A musician-singer songwriter releases not his lyrics, but tries to sing and perform and in songs, poetry is tasted, the lyrical quality of poetry relaying sound, musical sound. He is first of all a musician then a singer, a composer of music and songs, setting songs to music, but vocal music too is poetry and song-writing a part of poetry. Were the Elizabethan age poets not lyric writers and songsters? A good reciter can convert any piece of poetry if the content and the length are okay.

The guitarist as a singer and a song-writer, a composer and a performer, an album-presenter, how to view it all in one? Dylan Thomas, his broadcasts and songs have definitely influenced him. George Harrison’s records too cannot go unheard. The beats and the Beatles, their fatigue with, search for cannot be sidetracked as Bob is bound to have these impact and influence which we can note in as traces.

For years the media and the papers used to talk of the probable conferring upon of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan. But the reality came true when his name was declared and the committee agreed upon giving the award. In him one can see the images of Walt Whitman, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Woody Gutherie, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and so on.

His poetry is the poetry of the guitar, the music of the guitar, words set to music and tuning, words coming through vocal sounds and systems. His love songs are the melodies of the guitar in rhythm with other accompaniments reflective of modernity, urbanity, modern accents of speech and colloquialism, colour, romance, dream, intimacy and stylish living and thinking and that too with a philosophical tinge never missing from. 

A musician’s history will always be different from the of a writer penning down poems though the goal is the same, but the song is the singsong quality of the verse whereas the poem is a representation of thought and idea, image and description, pattern and length as per the context of deliberation. A poem is a thoughtful presentation where emotion and feeling, thought and idea are considered. But in a song lyricality, melody, musicality, singsong quality and rhythm are considered.

Though the musical fields are different with the experts of their own, of the country, folk, jazz, rock’ n’ roll and blues, Bob Dylan has tried to assemble and assimilate the musical trends of America with poetry writing to be presented anew to take the generation in his stride.  It is a time of rap and pop, pop and jazz, rock’ n’ roll and going blues, pop and rock and Bob a hearer, a listener of all that and a performer too and in sole isolation how can one grow disinheriting it all? He is a composer, a composer of music and a songwriter-singer, a scripter of the song, a putter of words into music and its vocal sounds.

Songs and lyrics can be specified for the singing quality and the lyrical note, but a poem tends to be poetical merely. But it does not mean that a poem cannot be sung; it can definitely be recited as recitation is an art. The intensity of emotion and feeling can make anything impressive on the way we present, we take to. Can a lyric be not written as a prose-paragraph? So are the things with Dylan he has tried to imbibe the pop culture of America; the pop tradition of America; the vibes of it, the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the American language, the time-spirit.

Songs as poems, poems as songs, how to take the songs for a study? How to take up for studies in classrooms? How to teach them for the students of literature and poetry? What Dylan as a poet has to offer to? What the themes of his, how the images, how the ideas? Some of the poems can be taken and some may be left out where intensely personal and private is meant for the adults. The lyric writers write the songs personally and sometimes these are taken and put into a cinema. Sometimes situations are given to the lyric-writer or the song-writer and he writes keeping in view the context or imagining about the scene of the moment. This is like sit and draw or extempore speech.

As he has taken to the guitar and has kept performing so both the talents have gone together with him. Had he been in a band from the start he would not have got the chance of evolving. But he evolved as tried to grow it himself. The music composers rear talents as well as let them not grow. Of the many awards and honours he has received, a few may listed as for our ready reference. His is a personal story of personal intimacy and relationship from Sara Lownds  to Carolyn Dennis to Sally Kirkland to Ruth Tirangiel to Sara Dylan to Dana Gillespie to Mavis Staples to Chris O’Dell to Joan Baez to Suze Rotolo, telling of romance and relation, inspiring his songs with their presence, but how to look into things private, individual and utterly personal which but the singer guitarist and composer knows it well? Something hidden, something open, which is but whose memory and melody, which is but whose lyric? How to take the road, the road of life and of love?

Bob Dylan, is he a rapper, a folk musician-singer, a country cowboy singer or a blue man? A jazz man or a rock and roll artist? A musician or a music-composer? A singer or a songwriter or musician? Where to start from? Or, is he a poet as he inducts in philosophy, the philosophy of life? What is rap? What the blues? The rock ‘n roll? The jazz? What these to do in poetry? Poetry as the folk, country, chapel, jazz, rock’ n roll, disco, blues of life. Poetry is the music of the guitar. The music composers too think in creatively in consultation with the bandsmen keeping the soundtracks; accents, stresses and falling pitches of the words which are but signs and symbols combining transmuted sounds. Can a musical composition not echo a song? Musical compositions are songs, melodies breaking mean it. Pictures and images are poems. Bob Dylan, is he a guitarist, a singer-songwriter or a lover boy? A tall man in the hat, coat and pants and boots taking the stage in consonance with American vibes of modern life and culture is he the musical, singing stalwart giving an impetus to song-writing, Bob Dylan the musical-composer and songwriter; a representative singer-musician of the modern time. A rock star or a pop star? In the rocks, what does a rock star do? In the pop songs and music, what does a pop star?  Who is whose, which is of whose?

Bob Dylan as a poet is a lyric-writer, a songster, a music composer for whom melodies matter it more, the song qualities rather than themes, thoughts and ideas. A romantic, he moves clutching along American fashions, styles and trends rather than poetry which comes to him through musical melody and composition. Had he been not a guitarist, he would not have been a composer; had he been not, not a singer-songwriter. With the guitar in hand, he has thought of music to give and the song to set to it rather than emulating, following others.

His is a slangy base and American curtailed speech is his forte, a poet of the present contemporary living and time-spirit and love matter, not a poet exactly in the strictest of the term, but a melody-maker, a music-maker, a song-singer. His lyric is the lyric of style, modernity and fashion; living with love. A poem is a lucid, emotional, passionate, imagery-laden presentation in verse form, but the rap beat only a musical rapper can say it.

Bob Dylan as a poet is of the pop culture, so modn, colloquial and slangy, full of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the American language and Americanism singing the songs of the Americas be he from Texas, Massachusetts or California. He is a poet of modernity, urbanity and his poetry the poetry of the folk, country, chapel, jazz, rock n' roll and blues and the jargon of these. His poetry the poetry of the guitar and its music; the melody of music. A social activist, a civil rightist, he is a guitarist and his poetry the music of the guitar, vocal melodies cackling and taking us by surprise.

A singer-guitarist and songwriter of the 1960s, Robert Allen Zimmerman has been in limelight since 1960s with his debut folk song based album appearing in 1962, but Blowin’ in the Wind, 1963, The Times They Are a-Changin, 1964 songs impacting the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement contain in his notions and ideas approving and disapproving the establishment. 

We cannot help without knowing the song meanings and song facts as these are quintessential while dealing and dispensing with his poetry.

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right as a song was written in 1962. It is all about the proposal of love and disposal as well, approving and disapproving of stylistically. It is up to the babe to  decide. It is up to him to take it along or admonish it. Why to say goodbye? Why not to bid farewell? Do not think twice, it is all right, if feel you. Let the lover boy go whistling and piping. It is all about loving and proposing before and leaving which the romantics do it often. In his own admission, he loved a woman and a child, the woman wanted his soul and he her heart. Only a Lawrentine lover can do it.

Just two lines from Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right will suffice to do it:

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

It don’t matter, anyhow

The lines from the last stanza of the song, The Times They are a-Changing too may be cited in:

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don't stand in the doorway

Don't block up the hall

Bob Dylan raked by the dilemma if he really deserved the recommendation, a musician-composer, a singer-songwriter, he felt the dichotomy of being split in two rather than corroborating the stuffs and hesitated to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature for the poetic part merely, but in reality the song too is a part of poetry as the lyrical and singable qualities are quintessential while dealing with the same. Bob Dylan as a singer of the modn pop culture has tried to imbibe the vibes of American life and culture, the nuances of American speech and slang, the idiosyncrasies of the language.  

Most of the time he remains on guard of what it happening around, what it taking place, most of the time, people coming and going, he is indifferent to when he chances upon the lost love of the lost mistress, even if he comes to notice his past love going. Most of the time he keeps going, going on the road of life. There is no remorse for her; there is no lamentation or regret. To go is the name of life and so he keeps going, up and doing. He can handle everything what it to befall. Most of the time he is ready to keep abreast of things and events. The past things, let the past bury its dead.

Let us go through the opening lines of the lyric, Most of The Time:

Most of the time

I’m clear focused all around

Most of the time

I can keep both feet on the ground

I can follow the path, I can read the signs

The song touches the heart so the melody soothing. Most of the time, most of the time he keeps, he keeps following, following the path which it turns, turns to and winds unfolding many sub ways to go to, pass through most of the time, most of the time there is nothing to lament, lament if to take it, take it otherwise.

Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues marks the development and growth of psycho-analytical thoughts and feelings of the mind stored into the dark layers of our consciousness and it comes to the fore as the babbles, murmurs and whispers of the soul frustrated and depressed or in quest of something supernatural or exploratory conditioned by the situations of life.

It is a great book, the blues of the heart, the jazz of life continuing and encompassing in all that it happens internally, in the mind of a man and soul who is so lost and bewildered and perplexed searching for values, what it lies unto the end, where the path leads to ultimately. Half-said statements, poetic truths as from the abnormal drugged psyche tell of the life full of bare lies. But how to correct if one deviates from the path?

All these bemoaning and howlings of the age, be that of the Beats, Beatles, hippies, romantics, Krishnites, roamers and ramblers haunted him and he as a witness of the age and times tried to transmute them into the body texture of music and melody, lyric and lyricism.

Let us take the first stanza from Under The Red Sky:

There was a little boy and there was a little girl

And they lived in an alley under the red sky

There was a little boy and there was a little girl

And they lived in an alley under the red sky

Under The Red Sky is definitely a beautiful nursery rhyme written in a narrative, make-believe style reminding us of the verses of Walter de la Mare and William Blake as they are. The little boys will definitely like to hear with so much patience and curiosity as he keeps telling and taking them into his poem.

To charter the course of his career is to start from his guitar and to hear the melody of lyrics impassable. Bob’s association with Columbia Records, which has really given him a chance, how to negate it?

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

….

I’m with you in Rockland

   in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

               -----Allen Ginsberg in Howl

Robert Allen Zimmerman whose Hebrew name is Shabtai Zissel is a singer-songwriter, a musician-artist who starts his journey from the 1960s with his debut album featuring folk songs, but The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan strengthens his stature as a song writer with Blowin’ in the Wind, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall drawing attention from. The Times They are a-Changing as the album with the title track works splendid for him. It is here where Bob Dylan comes closer to social justice cutting across the lines of prejudice and bias even voicing against poverty, racism and asking for social change. Another Side of Bob Dylan too adds to his fame and places him on a pedestal of glory. But the latter albums of the same time-span introduce him as a rock star and he doing with the rock items. Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They are a-Changing, the songs have impacted the civil rights movement and the anti-war stance of the conscious people as Bob had been close to them politically, socially, emotionally and intellectually. 

Blowin’ in the Wind sets the tune of the song as such:

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

How many roads to take, how many pathways to be a man, to be a man? The answer is my friend, the answer is my friend, blowing in the wind, blowing in the wind. How much time to devote, devote and dedicate in knowing the things of life and the world and come to realization?

Like a Rolling Stone too has a melody of its own:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

But Series of Dreams is a different type where he talks of the conflicting times of crisis and influx and upheavals, psychological trauma and pain:

I was thinking of a series of dreams

Where nothing comes up to the top

Everything stays down where it’s wounded

In the song, Things Have Changed, he chooses the loving pair and keeps deliberating upon in a rocky mumbling and fumbling style of expression. Bob, who is the woman taking champagne? Whom has she assassinated? Say you, say you, Bob? Is she a bar girl? Is she a villain? Has she become herself or this society of ours has made her so?

Let us just see it:

A worried man with a worried mind

No one in front of me and nothing behind

There’s a woman on my lap and she’s drinking champagne

Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes

Even the pop culture has been impacted with his bourgeois consciousness and counter-bourgeois stance intercrossing so social, so romantic, so trendy, so folksy, so tonal and linguistic. There is something as that of George Bernard Shaw, the thesis and the anti-thesis of his but romantically, poetically in him which gives a new look of its own. His poetry is the poetry of the Beats and the Beatles, the music of the Beat tradition and the lyric of the Beatles which none can negate it the influences as man is a part of society which he lives in. His poetry is the poetry of the Afro-American world; his music the lyrics of the Afro-American world; the beats and nuances of it, the jazz, the blues, the rock n’ roll. 

The man in the black long coat, who, who is this man, waiting, waiting and wanting to take a girl away, away to where? Who, who the man in the long black coat? Where from? Is he? Man in the Long Black Coat is his excellent poem, really a marvelous and mystical one:

Crickets are chirpin’, the water is high

There’s a soft cotton dress on the line hangin’ dry

Window wide open, African trees

Bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze

Not a word of goodbye, not even a note

She gone with the man

In the long black coat

How to clear the identity of the man in the long black coat and who the girl going with him at his call? Where will he take to? And why is she going with him? For what purpose? Tangled Up In Blue is a beautiful lyric of Dylan touching the heart, taking our imagery away from:

Early one mornin' the sun was shinin'

I was layin' in bed

Wondrin' if she'd changed at all

If her hair was still red

Her folks they said our lives together

It is all about love and loving, what one thinks and what it becomes, how the things keep turning. Here the poet recollects and remembers his love, loved and lost and re-found. 

To consider him is to consider many a thing in literature; in poetry. What is poetry? What is songs? What the relation between poetry and songs? Are songs poems? What is music? How are song, sign, poem, song, picture, image, sound, music and melody related to? What is in a poem? What is it in a song? What is in a picture or an image? What is sound? What the letters? Are letters signs? Music, is it tuning, intonation, melody? Is the song a singable poem or anything can be sung? Or, a man should have the capability? Poetry as images and pictures; thoughts and ideas. Dhavani, rasa, how to take to? What is dhavani? What is it rasa? How the types of rasa? How the dhavani, lyrical or harsh or jazz or full of melodies? Who man poet? A singer or a man of thoughts? A man emotional and full of feelings, passionate, sensitive, sensuous and sentimental? Can prose lines be not poetry lines? Is modern poetry urban and of city-space gasping for open space? Is modern poetry of the hollow men? Broken lines as the lines of modern poems? How the jazz poems? How the blues? How the scripts of these? How do the musicians compose setting words to music? How the rock n’ roll compositions? How the country songs? The folk songs? How the chapel music ecclesiastical?

How the pop songs? The pop music and its composition? How the Beat traditions? What about the Beatles? How the rap music, the rappers and rap scripts? How the alignment and arrangement of words and melodies? What is that he has imbibed, how the traditions before? What the influences and impacts bearing upon? What is it that gone in the making of his personality? How have the bootleggers, hippies taught in adversity? Whatever be that, Bob belongs to a tradition, a legacy of musical tradition and lineage and is under the influence and impact of these definitely of which he is also a witness to that.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

             ----Robert Frost in "The Road Not Taken"

View of Larkin

Nihilistic, Bleak or Gloomy Outlook

Described by Eric Homberger as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’ due to the darker aspects of life such as isolation, alienation and death, Philip Larkin is often dismissed as bleak or gloomy in outlook. His pessimistic approach is deeply rooted in the predicament of human life on which based the poem “Mr. Bleany,” wherein the central figure is leading a sub-standard life in his apartment. ‘Deceptions’ somehow privileges the suffering of the rapist, whilst letting the victim’s suffering slide into insignificance. The ‘Afternoons’ reflected the pessimism of a young couple that is pushing them to the side of their own lives. This dissatisfaction is part and parcel of Larkin’s poetic ability. Instead of directly describing the massacre and destruction of WW-II, he crafted pain, suffering and helplessness of a man under the impact of these destructive forces.

Life and Relationship, and Realism (Socio-Economic)

Larkin, in the reconstructive post war era, gave the run-around to God, religion and religious creeds. In spite of this non-sentimental and agnostic approach, he had earned a reputation of a great poet of his time as one who deals with the stark and harsh realities of his time with great realism. In fact, it is his non-romantic approach towards the precarious conditions of life that has given his poetry a long lasting popularity.

Besides giving plenty of space to his pessimistic and agnostic approach, he delineates a crystal clear picture of his society where the differences of class and culture emerge from the advancement of industrial revolution.

Anti-Myth

The poems on the course feature such ordinary occurrences as a lonely life in a room of Mr. Beaney, rapist and rape in “Deceptions,” boring wedding life of “Afternoons” remains the subject of poetry, instead of myth and allusion frequently finds in Eliot, Auden and others. Larkin said of his work: ‘I write about experiences, often quite simple everyday experiences which somehow acquire some sort of special meaning for me, and I write poems about them to preserve them’. Thus, there is less space for myth and more to realism. Larkin describes very realistically the truth of our social life, wherein a person’s character is judged by his style of living.

Even his love poems describe an utterly unromantic view of human life in the backdrop of the sexual act, which is generally believed to bring about fulfillment and sexual relief. 

Conclusion

In Larkin’s poems, the sexual act is altogether a deception and a sense of dissatisfaction attached to hopelessness that seems to penetrate everything with a feeling of emptiness. Thus, Larkin’s poetry is greatly reinforced by the cataclysmic scenario of post-war England. Intentionally and deliberately, he does avoid deceptions and through his perceptions, he presents the facts as they actually exist. If Christopher Ricks finds in him “a deep and true feeling for human loneliness and longing,” then Donald Davie described him as a poet of “lowered sights and diminished expectations.” His poems are marked by what Andrew Motion calls “glum accuracy about emotions, places, and relationships.”

The age of Larkin was an age of disaster and chaos on a social and moral level all over the world. The flames of Second World War were still burning in the late nineteen-fifties and there was a decline in the values cherished by societies. People had seen much destruction in the wake of first and second world wars and they had started raising questions about the existence of God. That was a scenario where Philip Larkin was born and brought up.

Mr. Bleany is a lonely person, isolated from others; there is nothing neither charming nor attractive in his life and in his apartment.. But

Larkin’s poetry is greatly overwhelmed by one single thought and that is death, which eventually leads the human mind to decline and deprivation.

Larkin’s so-called love poetry, devoid of any romantic passions and emotions by focusing on the peripheral issues of human life reveals tragic aspects and tragedies that have been inseparable to man, since time immemorial. This has been Larkin’s approach that altogether shuns superficial treatment of human suffering and presents pathetic, realistic pictures of human life.

They were described by Jean Hartley, the ex-wife of Larkin’s publisher George Hartley (The Marvell Press), as a “piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent.”

Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young

For Original click the link below:

Source: https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2017/08/seamus-heaneys-advice-to-young-by-maria.html#more

BY MARIA POPOVA

“The true and durable path into and through experience involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.” Seamus Heaney

“you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble” - James Baldwin

David Foster Wallace - This Is Water

wallace stevens and the 'academy of fine ideas'

BY MARIA POPOVA

In his spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the Irish poet, playwright, and translator Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939–August 30, 2013) celebrated poetry’s singular power to “remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values” and to “persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness.” It’s a task that poetry shares perhaps most directly with an unlikely cultural counterpart - the commence-ment address, aimed at equipping the young, most vulnerable in their consciousness, with values.

Seamus Heaney by Felix Clay

Seamus Heaney by Felix Clay

This might be why poets make such fine commencement speakers - from Adrienne Rich’s beautiful case for the true value of education to Joseph Brodsky’s six rules for winning at the game of life.

Heaney himself was no stranger to the genre and made several additions to the greatest commencement addresses of all time in his lifetime, lending the young his lucid and luminous wisdom on life. In May of 1996, months after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, 57-year-old Heaney took the podium before the graduating class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and delivered an extraordinary speech later included in Take This Advice (public library) — the compendium of timelessly rewarding commencement addresses that also gave us Toni Morrison on how to be your own story. Between verses of poetry, Heaney observes:

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others. Echoing James Baldwin’s admonition that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” Heaney adds:

This rhythm … is something I would want each one of you to experience in the years ahead, and experience not only in your professional life, whatever that may be, but in your emotional and spiritual lives as well — because unless that underground level of the self is preserved as a verified and verifying element in your make-up, you are going to be in danger of settling into whatever profile the world prepares for you and accepting whatever profile the world provides for you. You’ll be in danger of molding yourselves in accordance with laws of growth other than those of your own intuitive being. ...

The true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another. Calling a spade a spade may be a bit reductive but calling a wooden spoon a wooden spoon is the beginning of wisdom. And you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle. ...

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you....

But this wasn’t Heaney’s first commencement address. Fourteen years earlier, he stood before the graduating class at Fordham University and delivered his speech as a 46-stanza poem in metrical verse. (Two years later, an Australian scientist published an astronomical paper as a 38-stanza poem in metrical verse - perhaps a mere coincidence, perhaps inspired by Heaney’s address, which had gone “viral” by pre-social-media standards.) In the fourth stanza, Heaney offers a defense of the format:

For clarity’s what verse is good for.

It is a kind of aide memoire,

      A metronome

That ticks beneath the pace of talk

As feet convey you when you walk,

Shuttling on and shuttling back,

      On speech’s loom.

Despite the playful form, the verses shuttle straight into the political and the profound. A lifelong voice for the working class, Heaney considers the implicit privilege of higher education:

Inspire me, then, didactic muse,

Beyond clichés and pompous views

      Of Art and Science,

To be dulce et utile,

To speak sweetly and usefully

About the world and th’academy

      And their alliance.

Or is it not a misalliance,

Ivory towers in a world of violence

      And corporate money.

Are college walls perhaps a door

Shut to the working and the poor

While the privileged and the few ignore

      The unwashed many?

Do we not mystify the facts

And milk the taxpayer of his tax

      By the illusion

That our minds serve much higher ends

Than bending backs and blistered hands?

How much of common good depends

      On education?

In other words, dear graduates,

How do we justify our fates

      As an upper crust

With handfuls of credit cards and dollars

In hands as pale as our white collars?

      All flesh is dust.

It makes me say such status symbols

Are trivial as sewers’ thimbles

      And just as hard

For they can form a callous shell

Against the little pricking needle

Of other people’s needs, and kill

      The feeling heart.

But here, perhaps, I should explain

I was the eldest child of nine

      And I have brothers

Who barkeep, schoolteach — and don’t write.

One labors on a building site.

One milks a herd morning and night

      And in all weathers.

My father bargained on fair days.

My mother’s father worked the railways

      And linen mills.

One uncle drove a rural breadvan.

One aunt was more farmhand than woman.

One who became an enclosed nun

      Worked in hotels.

So part of me half stands apart

Beyond the pale of books and art

      And is not moved

Until they justify their place

And win their rights and can keep face,

Until their value for the race

      Is really proven.

Heaney points out that the esteem of education alone is no guarantee of peace and justice — the highest-ranking Nazi leaders, he reminds us, were highly educated men and those who held down Galileo were esteemed scholars but were more concerned with keeping “the sum of knowledge static” than with advancing human thought. He considers, instead, the true sustaining force of the human spirit. Echoing Bertrand Russell’s ever-timely insistence on the role of “fruitful monotony” in a full life and Susan Sontag’s admonition against the false divide between intuition and the intellect, Heaney offers:

No co-ed dorm supplies the joys

Of an attic full of dusty toys

      And old dolls’ houses.

No faculty of engineering

Repeats the joys of tinkering

With model planes, that hankering

      To fly with aces.

It seems illiterate solitude

Is the first place where the true and the good

      Awaken in us.

The later freedom we call leisure

Cannot supply that buried treasure

Which is the basis and the measure

      of personalities

And which we name imagination,

A word I cite with much elation

      And some unease

Because it can sound slight and airy

An entry in the dictionary,

A bubble word. Yet while I’m wary

      I realize

I still want to declare its great

Sustaining force, early and late,

      From youth to age.

It does not just mean fancy thoughts.

Accountants, lawyers, graduates

In medicine, as well as poets

      Using language —

All need its salutary power.

All men and women must beware

      Who would deny it

And go against their childhood’s grain

And dry up like earth parched for rain.

They’ll grow mechanical and then

      No drug or diet

No health-farm, clinic, yoga course

No mantra om, no Star Wars force

      Will compensate

For what is lost when the mind divides.

Even science now concedes

The brain has two conjugal sides,

      The left and right.

To have to marry intuition

To the analytic reason

      For psychic balance.

Head sleeps with heart, begets a creature

Free yet cornered in its nature.

To be your whole self, you must mate your

      Brains and glands.

So scholarship and art must be

Fragrant with personality

      And moral feeling.

Distinction’s not an ego-trip.

Good luck helps many to the top

Yet once up there you can still slip

      And keep on falling.

Everything flows, an old Greek said.

Nothing’s secure. Gold’s only lead

      When you stop to think.

On your way up, show consideration

To the ones you meet on their way down.

The Latin root of condescension

      Means we all sink.

Let self-will be anathema.

Let the hierarchy and Mafia

      Join hand in glove

To doom and excommunicate

Whoever’s not compassionate,

Whoever will not contemplate

      The world through love.

Speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, in May of 2000, Heaney begins by naming the perennial problem all successful speeches must solve — that of how a single person can “address a crowd of 25,000 and hope to establish any kind of worthwhile contact.” And yet establish it he does, not only with the 25,000 people sitting on the Franklin Field bleachers that day but with millions more across time and space. In a sentiment that has only swelled in pertinence in the decade and a half since, Heaney offers:

Living in the world [of today] means that you inhabit several different psychic and cultural levels at the same time. And the marvelous thing about us as human beings is that we have been provided with a whole system of intellectual and imaginative elevators that whisk us from floor to floor, at will and on whim. This is the world of globalization where one thing can impinge unexpectedly and often drastically upon another; so much so that we no longer have any difficulty in entertaining the theory that the shake of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world is going to produce a tornado in another.

Considering the singular precipice of graduation, as the young part with their certain past and prepare to plunge into this uncertain world, Heaney counsels: 

My advice to you is to understand that this in-between condition is not to be regarded as a disabling confusion but that it is rather a necessary state, a consequence of our situation between earthy origin and angelic potential.

A master of metaphor, Heaney illustrates this notion with the poetic image of Terminus, the Roman deity of boundaries:

The image of the god Terminus was kept in the Temple of Jupiter, at a point where the temple was unroofed, open constantly to the sky. In other words, even Terminus, the god of limits, refused to recognize that limits are everything. The open sky above his head testified to his yearning to escape the ground beneath his feet… We are placed, as individuals and as a species, between a given history and habitat and any imaginable future.[…] Remember that the anchor of your being lies in human affection and human responsibility, but remember also to keep swimming up into the air of envisaged possibilities.

Complement with this cinematic tribute to Heaney, then revisit this collection of the most abidingly elevating commencement addresses of all time.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/19/seamus-heaney-commencement/