Favorite Poet, once upon a time
Posted on | September 14, 2006 | 58 Comments
In my opinion (oh, don’t I have some! And it is not even ‘humble’) the only readers of poetry are wannabe poets and desperate lovers sniffing around to make off with a verse or two. The poetry public likes has already been made or is being made in to rock ballads and pop songs without help from any poet laureates.
Why did I read poetry? I was not a desperate lover, for I was the proverbial late bloomer. A wannabe poet then? A wannabe for sure, a poet – a grand illusion. I must have just crossed in to my teens, thumping through the pages of yellow moth eaten slim volumes of contemporary poetry, before deciding which one to take home. Some of these were as recent as 1967, which more or less marked the end of the period called contemporary in our neighborhood public library. That was as current as I could get in 1989 without straining my pocket.
And then I met him….. in a lonesome city, listening to the warm – Rod McKuen. Here was a man after my own heart. A poet singing love, loneliness, angst and all things in between. Reading McKuen was the closest I came to reading paperback romances, but it does not undermine the value of his works nor do I regret reading them, I enjoyed every secret bite I took of his poems. He was my first girlish crush in the world of words and had a permanent seat in my altar before T.S.Eliot unseated him some years later.
This former rodeo cowboy, lumberjack, cookie cutter, railroad worker, surveyor and US Army Infantryman in Korea (wonder whether they still make such renaissance men?) has sold 75 million copies of his books, translated into 28 languages world-wide. A poetic mouthpiece of the sixties flower children, McKuen has recorded 215 albums of original music, 67 went platinum and 115 gold. McKuen’s songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists from Frank Sinatra to Madonna and from Barbra Streisand and the Boston Pops to The Kingston Trio.(Thanks, Wiki)
Critics say he has no rhyme or rhythm, it is prose faking as poetry. Who cared, back then I enjoyed it. I hate the maze of metaphors, or in the present day, the overuse of thesaurus. Poetry should be simple, understandable and from the heart. If someone blames McKuen of being self centered, for pimping his life, I pity him/her – isn’t a person an agglomeration of his experiences and some scattered leaves of memory in someone else’s scrapbook when s/he is dead?
Looking back, most of the McKuen stuff I had once liked with their recurring love-loneliness-sex themes seems cheesy for my now evolved, refined senses(or so I’d like to think), but once upon a time they did serve my girly teenage spirit just right.
Turned out that the first city which became my home in US is also a favorite muse of McKuen. Here’s a McKuen poem about a street I had walked, at the corner of the hippydom’s Mecca – Haight, in San Francisco, there’s Stanyan Street and other sorrows….
And now unable to sleep
because the day is finally coming home
because your sleep has locked me out
I watch you and wonder at you.
I know your face by touch when it’s dark
I know the profile of your sleeping face
the sound of you sleeping.
… I have total recall of you
and Stanyan Street
because I know it will be important later.
It’s quiet now.
Only the clock
moving toward rejection tomorrow
breaks the stillness.
-Rod McKuen, from Stanyan Street and other Sorrows
Not earth shattering, not even poetry by many people’s standards, but somehow those lines got me started on writing and has led to this day that you’ve to endure my blog.
My current favorite poets(English or translated to English, excl. Malayalam and Hindi – they’d require another post) are Rilke, Eliot, Akhmatova, Neruda and Vikram Seth. Who are your favorites? Gimme a bite of their words, if you can.
Seasons at Westchester
Posted on | May 24, 2005 | 42 Comments
Westchester Lagoon, May 22, 2005
Seasons at Westchester Lagoon
Blue waters frame the pale mirth
of yet another season. Spring startles
the frost on the sidewalks in to a burst of green,
where we had walked in the winter
of yesterday, with much certainty,
ducks glide by, cruising on invisible currents.
we sit on the shore, feel Summer
lap around our soles and ponder
how flighty the seasons have been lately.
overhead, a gaggle of geese flies against
time, seasons and the tenets of trade winds,
stringing along a perpetual summer.
From the far end of the lagoon, a few
autumnal men start chasing the receding sun,
wave and pass us by, jogging towards the sunset.
© deepti2005
Behind the pic: Two days ago, we went for a walk with friends on the Coastal Trail. The picture above is of Westchester Lagoon, shot looking East. I had made several posts about Westchester Lagoon and thereabouts in this journal, the last one(refer below) being that of the skaters at Westchester about two months back.
Now all the ice has gone and it is time for migratory fowl to take over the pond. I was unable to get any photos ducks or geese this time because of low light conditions and most of the birds were too far out of my zoom range. For the time being I’ll repost a photo from my last summer’s post. The picture below is a gaggle of geese on a summer day at Westchester Lagoon sometime in 2004.
Seasons fascinate me, like the different faces of the same person, the four main stops on the earth’s cruise around the sun taking us to a new place every time without ever leaving home.
The Risk Taker’s Wife
Posted on | April 6, 2005 | 68 Comments
This was an entry for contest #8 at The Zero Boss: Blogging for Books. The subject was “RISK – about a time when you took a risk in your life on someone or something – a new romance, a new career, a new home, etc. Were you successful beyond your wildest dreams – or did you crash and burn?”
My entry was chosen as one of the seven finalists, but didn’t make it to the winning three.
Beware: This is a long entry, a little over 1000 words.
Be Aware: There are two kinds of people in Alaska – ones who love it and ones who hate it( and can’t wait to get out.)
Now read on, make sure you have some patience and some minutes to murder.
Here goes, a real life essay about the second-biggest risk we took in this life
A Trip of a Childhood
Posted on | January 24, 2005 | 159 Comments
I have revamped an old post of mine for this month’s Blogging for Books #12 contest. Of the three topics in the list, I’ve chosen to write about – A memorable trip or “mini-vacation” (with “memorable” covering everything from “best time of my life” to “unmitigated disaster”)
Note: The journeys mentioned in this post took place twenty years ago in India. All you need to know is, it was a different place and a very different time. Back then, in India, the railway and the public bus system were the most reliable means of long distance travel for the majority and the journeys were planned months in advance. The concept of hiking and camping were as alien to Indians as arranged marriage was/is to Americans/Westerners. Now hop on aboard, lets us travel back in time and space – to India of the early eighties.
There is an old nursery rhyme, I learned in Ist grade which predicted the future of people according to their day of birth. If you ask me, the best line in that snippet of a song was, “Thursday’s child has far to go.” Of course, obvious in the favoritism is the fact that I was born on a Thursday. A six year old with boundless optimism, I took the meaning in a literal sense – that I’d travel to all those far off places, the idea of long travels to unknown places thrilled me beyond description.
I seriously suspect that there might be a gene in human genetic makeup totally dedicated to wanderlust. Or how else could I explain my father’s erratic behavior when he spotted public transport buses sporting the names of unfamiliar destinations. The man who till that point of time had appeared sane, with enough common sense to design rockets (yeah, he did that for a living, so did more than 100 others in our small city) would shed all pretense of possessing any such quality and board the bus, exhorting us to join him, “Come on girls, lets see where this one goes!” We knew for sure that rickety public transport contraption had no intention of leaving the earth any time soon, this ruled out Moon and Mars as its final destinations. But if anyone thought that only extra terrestrial destinations caught the fancy of two hyperactive little girls, like my mother, they were wrong. Much to her dismay two of us would enthusiastically board the bus as if it was pied piper’s own private limo to the magic mountain. She’d have no choice but to follow.
That was how we found ourselves at places at the ‘ends of earth’. After three or four hours paddy fields fleeing backwards, rivers playing hide and seek in mango groves and all that poetry of nature later we’d arrive at the final stop of the bus. In most cases it’d be a nondescript place with a shack of a tea stall/cafe, sometimes there’d be a river flowing unobtrusively as possible and at other times there’d be mountains hanging back at the edge of the scene trying to look indistinguishable.
The conductor and the driver of the bus would take their mandatory 15-30 min. break, whereupon my father would lead our little pack of explorers to the nearest exotic feature – which might be an old well overgrown with weeds or a small hill that promised a fantastic view of the great beyond or some other feature equally glamorous. The word “hiking” had not yet invaded our dictionary then or else my mother would have surely claimed the title of ‘the best hiker in the house’ insisting that she hiked 5 kms(approximately 3 miles) to and from her work-place everyday(well, she did walk those 5 kms every work day). We did not know then, but our occasional bus-trips of fancy did involve some hiking. Sometimes it was a 30 min. walk to the nearby hillock and back, just in time to catch the bus on its return trip to the city. But if the location looked promising, my father would make inquiries with bus driver as to when the bus would make the next trip and we’d stay on ‘hiking’ longer and farther and sometimes we even ended up staying overnight if decent accommodation was available.
What passed off as decent accommodation would many a time be a houseboat which the owner usually used to transport farm produce to the city market but available for use for a night(this was a time long before the houseboat owners discovered another more lucrative cargo – foreign tourists) or an old palatial relic of the colonial times which had reinvented itself as a government guest house or sometimes a local family who thought it was only right to provide free room and board to a small family of city dwellers who were at last going to put their unremarkable village on the tourism map of the country. The success of my father’s unplanned excursions largely depended on the kindness of strangers. But in a country where a guest is considered next only to God, it was not really much of a gamble.
The insatiable wanderlust and the trust in human kindness have passed on from one generation to the next. As years pass, I have ventured farther and farther away from my home turf, from the humid tropics to the bone chilling Arctic, with the travel bug making inroads in to my psyche with every journey, getting bolder and more curious with every border crossed and every visa stamped.
The benevolence of strangers I have met on my journeys has been an inspirational influence in my life. It has made me less scared of farewells and partings, when friends part I am positive that I’ll find equally agreeable ones in the next friendly sunrise, to share coffee, a pair headphones or life. But places had a different effect; they grow on me like stubborn vines. Scar tissues of memories surface every time I walk out of the door in search of the next destination, ghosts of my past habitats compete to set standards for the new place beyond the bend.
Thanks to my father, my childhood had been my life’s most memorable trip. His spur of the moment outings to places long fallen off the borders of maps had led us to uncover small yet unforgettable surprises down the paths less traveled. The way the green slippery mud yields to tread leading down to a pond of water hyacinths, the rush of warmth when a winter dawn breaks over the distant hills, the almost-painting of a slice of a chimney emitting purple haze with morning coffee at the wayside cafe, the rhythmic sound of oars and the boatman’s song under a blue-black sky framed against the swaying black cut-outs of coconut palms – indelible impressions left by disjointed places I might not return to, but hold dear. From the whimsical journeys of my childhood, it has been a long walk from home, but there are no regrets. My feet walk on as my shadow stains the receding pathway in the fading landscape.
Homer – the story of a Greek who became an American
Posted on | August 16, 2004 | 102 Comments
Homer is not Greek anymore, this time around he asked Zeus to turn him into a place, a small fishing hamlet in South Central Alaska to be exact. He was tired of being a Greek man, it involved too much talking and all that feta cheese was getting on his nerves, it was time to try some fish, halibut to be exact – the king of all fish, this side of the grille.
Another long travelogue + photos, not Greek
Americana in Seldovia
Posted on | August 12, 2004 | 39 Comments
Seldovia is a small hamlet at the tip of Kenia peninsula in Alaska. No roads lead to Seldovia, it can be accessed only by small planes or boats. About 306 friendly people(so says the tourist pamphlet) live in Seldovia. They hide themselves pretty well, we hardly saw a dozen. An ideal idyllic place if you are an artist or an author and can live off your royalties. A long travelogue will follow later *people make themselves vanish* For the time being, I’ll post a few versions of Stars and Stripes I came across in Seldovia.
Till now I have not photoshopped any of the pictures posted in this blog, thinking it went against the photographer’s ethics, but tomlinsonian‘s pic(8th one in his post) has made me realize that even good photographers sometimes use photoshop, so why not a wannabe like me. In the photo below I have blurred the background using Photoshop Elements.
Fire Hydrant
Twenty Mile Travelogue
Posted on | July 26, 2004 | 108 Comments
This weekend, two roads diverged in the woods and in true Frostian fashion we took the one less traveled by. That my friends, have made all the difference. Our almost neat apartment looks disbelievingly disheveled. Last night we had to excavate our bed from under a Vesuvian pile of laundry that had erupted over the weekend choking most of the living and non-living space out of our house. My limbs feel unmovable, aching from sheer exhaustion after ten plus years of physical inactivity and add to this I have this strange sensation of being lost, akin to what is experienced by a fish out of water or a potato out of a couch.
A long account with photos, might need some patience
Fields of Summer
Posted on | July 16, 2004 | 42 Comments
© deepti2004
Summer drips green,
stains the crisp cottony children
rushing in their impatient energy
to futures beyond
between the peeps of grass
and the shades of sun
how much longer
till they lose
their lithe little limbs
and frolicky eyes?
how much longer
till they forget the green?
Long Ago, Faraway – Anniversary of Cab Ride
Posted on | July 13, 2004 | 24 Comments
Wide eyed,I sat inside a yellow-cab ‘space ship’, enjoying its effortless sail up and down the humongous curves of concrete cats, which arched and stretched across an endless city. Before I knew it and much to my delight, our cab/cruiser glided up on one of the feline highway arches. Down below, I could make out the clover-leaf pattern of a mega-highway intersection. (I could recognize it, thanks to a friendly ghost of a boring transport planning lesson that turned up a light in my brain, right in time.) I had to blurt it out, “Whoa…clover-leaf highway intersections do really exist?”
“Oh, they are common and it is not a highway, these are called freeways,” N corrected me. Of course, a free world never stops advertising its virtues, I should have known. Nor did it stop advertising its avocados on FM.
What in the world were avocados? “It’s a buttery fruit, you’ll like it,” N offered his wisdom like
But who cared, with nose squashed against the window and eyes glued to the fleeting scenery I was busy drinking in the newness of the
Summer in Alaska
Posted on | May 8, 2004 | 72 Comments
It is the return of the prodigal son of the seasons – the summer. This much awaited season at latitude 61 is all set to outshine our days and nights. The birch tree skeletons outside my window have been washed by a shimmering green hue lately, light is stealthily outrunning the night – today the sunset was at 10:30 pm, tomorrow in all probability it’ll snatch five more minutes off the night.
When I was young, surrounded by coconut trees, in a land of perpetual summer, I had wondered why the people in the English novels I read, looked forward to summer so enthusiastically? After all, it was the one season which really tested my love for my native land. Did I really want to live in a simmering tropical paradise(simmering only in summer) for the rest of my life, amidst the mosquitoes, the sticky humidity, parched river beds and shriveling shrubs? But then the monsoons came, it was like falling in love all over again (ok.. only if you didn’t travel in public buses where drenched-to-the bones people jostled with soggy umbrellas for space). Well, that’s another story altogether.
I have found that I am one of those few people who look forward to the days of midnight sun. We are gradually getting there, we have 17 hour days now, it’ll steadily progress till it reaches 20-21 hours of sunlight here in Anchorage. Even the 3-4 hours of darkness we get during early June to mid-July period is not completely dark. The so-called night time has a hint of sun, smeared across the horizon, kind of like twilight. Spring and fall are rather short-lived here, usually a couple or more weeks on each side of summer, which will pass off before you have time to notice.
The best thing about summer in Alaska is, you seem to possess enormous reserves of energy. I think it has to do with the sun. At 11pm at night its like 4pm and you feel like you have the energy left to butcher the whole evening ahead! The amount of energy and the life bursting at seams, give you the impression that if you watch carefully you might really see the leaves grow, buds sprout up and flowers bloom. Nature is in ultimate frenzy during the four months of summer as if to make-up for the time lost during the long winter. For the next four months, the roads and highways of Alaska will be packed bumper to bumper by cars, RVs, tourist buses and Harleys, plastered wall to wall with tourists from all over and crammed with cruise-ships elbowing for berths at its crowded ports. Viva la summer!
Whatever the length of this visit, the traveler in me is thankful to that unknown force that brought me to this beautiful land.