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    Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose
    Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose
    Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose
    Ebook228 pages2 hours

    Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose

    By Srinivas Rayaprol, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Graziano Krätli

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    Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation
    A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Classics
    Release dateApr 2, 2020
    ISBN9781784109264
    Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose
    Author

    Srinivas Rayaprol

    Srinivas Rayaprol was born in 1925 in Secunderabad. He studied at Nizam College, Hyderabad, and Banaras Hindu University before going to Stanford University from where he obtained a masters in Civil Engineering. While in the US, he started writing poetry in English and interacted closely with writers like William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters and James Laughlin. His correspondence with Williams has been published as Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 (2018), edited by Graziano Krätli. His books of poetry include Bones and Distances (1968), Married Love and Other Poems (1972) and Selected Poems (1995).

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      Book preview

      Angular Desire - Srinivas Rayaprol

      SRINIVAS RAYAPROL

      Angular Desire

      SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE

      edited by

      GRAZIANO KRÄTLI &

      VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN

      v

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Preface

      Note on the Text

      poems

      Uncollected

      The Rain

      Untitled (Fragment)

      Untitled

      from Bones and Distances (1968)

      Dogs in Ruin

      Four Love Poems

      Crabs in the Seine

      Oranges on a Table

      Letter to Ezra Pound

      On Growing Old

      A Letter for Mother

      Les Saltimbanques

      Bones and Distances

      Poem for a Birthday

      Here It Is Spring Again

      Under the Bo-Tree

      Legend

      The Man Who Died of a Fever

      Still Life

      Pastorale

      Yellow and Blue

      The Blue Woman

      For Another New Year

      Portrait of a Mistress

      To a Christian Lady

      For a Nun in a Waiting Roomvi

      The Widow in Washington Square

      The Peter Grimes of Benjamin Britten

      Sometimes

      from Married Love and Other Poems (1972)

      Valdstejnska Hospada, Praha

      A Taste for Death

      Married Love

      Middle Age

      I Like the American Face

      Gone Now

      I Sit Here

      Life Has Been

      These Days

      from Selected Poems (1995)

      An Ordinary Life

      10 Downing Street

      The Golden Gate

      Some Thoughts on Trees

      Pictures at an Exhibition

      You Can Die

      The Dead

      This Is Just to Say

      I Do Not Grieve Every Time

      A Funeral

      I Am All that I Love

      Sunrise over Kamareddy

      All Kinds of Love

      For Mulk Raj Anand

      Nagarjunakonda

      Poem

      Godhuli Time

      Diwali Days

      My Son

      Friendshipvii

      On Approaching Fifty

      Shakuntala

      Streets

      Old Rain

      For John Everyman, Poet

      This Poem

      To an Editor

      Yesterday

      It Rains Softly on the City

      Opening Day… University of California

      Portraits of America

      translations

      The Train You Would Wish to Take

      A Poem

      Sad Voices

      Call Me by a Name

      Nobody, Nowhere

      from Vishnuparijatamu

      Jailhouse Clock

      My Stricken Voice

      Embers of Hope

      prose

      City of Mine

      Louis MacNeice: a meeting by the river

      To Stanford

      The Physics of Colour

      Heart Condition

      Remembering William Carlos Williams

      Preface to Selected Poems

      Notes

      Afterword

      Landscapes of the Heart

      Index of Poem Titles

      About the Authors

      Copyright

      5

      PREFACE

      There are any number of reasons why we keep reading a writer – where I say ‘read’, one might add ‘publish’, ‘review’ and ‘teach’ – and yet the truest goal must be an experience of literary complexity. A style of thinking contingent upon their uniquely disposed forms. Postcolonial literature is insufficiently considered as art. In fact, there are those for whom aesthetics seem fatuous, beside the point, or, worse, one of the disguises worn by hegemonic power. But I don’t agree. And, in fact, I think it’s about time that authors from underrepresented, and misrepresented, communities were taken seriously as writers – not witnesses unto atrocity, or speaking wounds.

      Srinivas Rayaprol’s verse, and prose, has to it a peculiarly hightailing swiftness that – resembling Louis MacNeice, whom he met – makes discoveries as it goes:

      For me it was the step yesterday

      That makes me see

      That the release I’ve always sought

      The knot I’ve wished to unknot

      Is nothing more

      Than the crab’s dignity in the sand

      (‘Crabs in the Seine’)

      ‘For me’ qualifies what is to follow: we bounce from the past into the present, and back again; ‘the awful daring’ of, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘a moment’s surrender’ coexists with fatalistic processes. Rayaprol devises with his syntax and lineation a 6‘knot’ – one of, as Graziano Krätli writes in the afterword, his key images – which, unlike the Gordian one, can’t simply be cut asunder. You can’t paraphrase, that is, these cussedly tortuous lines, which are also a movement of thought, or the opposite – a stalling action which remains totally compelling.

      The problem is this. Rayaprol writes strong poems and weak ones, and, worse, even the intertextures of his best poems can fray. Graziano and I worked with, to produce this edition, texts mobbed by misprints and skew-whiff English, not all of which can be blamed on his editors. The poems evince, when they become unidiomatic or phrasally clenched, an Indian English distinctively his. He writes of an emotional disorder which his language to some extent reproduces, but with felicities that imply deliberation. This seems to me the big question: are the poems consciously (not haplessly) wonky? I think so, though I also prize in them a voice that isn’t wholly and perpetually self-secure, that expresses without undue defensiveness a hybrid intelligence informed, and deformed, by both Indian living and US writing.

      During and after his stint in the States, Rayaprol was nourished by his friendship with William Carlos Williams (‘when in the winter of 1950 I found myself in New York on a winter vacation, I wrote to Dr Williams that I would like to meet him… though he had mis-spelt my name, his welcome was warm and genuine’). He learned from that poet to forgo crypsis, to detail sincerely, and to be explorative rather than confirmatory in his lineation:

      Each night the flesh moves

      its heavy weight on the air

      and at morning the distant

      wall of a broken barn breaks

      through the nightlong snow.

      7From night, to morning, and then back to ‘nightlong’ – the mixed time-signatures do so much, but I was stuck to explain the force upon me of ‘Here It Is Spring Again’ until I read ‘Yesterday’: a poem about US race-relations, spoken from the perspective of an African-American woman and bus-passengers ‘with blank eyes / and unlovely faces’, who won’t sit next to her (only a blind man does). ‘Unlovely’ took me back to Tennyson, and a lyric from In Memoriam:

      Dark house, by which once more I stand

      Here in the long unlovely street […]

      He is not here; but far away

      The noise of life begins again,

      And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

      On the bald street breaks the blank day.¹

      Rayaprol engages unconventionally with the developments of Anglo-American modernism, but his reading goes back still further: words and sounds (‘bald street breaks’; ‘broken barn breaks’) migrate – I can think of no better word, for doctors also use it to describe the transference of pain from one limb to another – out of Tennyson’s verse and into his. When the image recurs in ‘Pastorale’ – ‘the first broken wall of a barn / broke the rhythm that monotony / sometimes has on the moving eye’ – we see that his enquiry into perception is also, as in Williams, a self-consciousness of poetic style.

      These borrowings need to be distinguished from the sentimental copy-and-pasting by Indian poets writing in English, of the banalities of Victorian and Edwardian verse. Rajeev Patke tells us that nineteenth-century poetry was 8‘diligently imitative’; what you get from the colonised’s first attempts at artistic originality is ‘mimicry, incongruity, and ineptness’.² In his memoir, The True Paradise, the Sri Lankan writer and critic Gamini Salgado tells of being defended, absurdly, in court, for playing truant. At first glance, his lawyer appears to speak the kind of malformed, wordy, and in Arvind Mehrotra’s phrase, ‘babu’ English which has evolved grotesquely out of what the Raj left behind. But we realise that this scatter-plot of fevered citations from Palgrave’s Treasury is in fact quite brilliantly constructed, as de Silva (hired with a couple of rupees the boy was meant to spend on biryani at a cricket match) preens in court as marvellously as Oscar Wilde:

      ‘Your Honour, we have here a truly piteous case of oppression and harassment. Consider this young lad setting off at break of day with shining morning face, eager to arrive at his alma mater and there imbibe the invigorating waters of learning from the Pyrennean springs.’

      The magistrate looked imploringly at Mr de Silva but he was too far gone for imploring looks.

      ‘Education, Your Honour, is the inalienable right of every citizen of this resplendent isle. It is the cornerstone of our democratic system, the stepping stone on which each and every one of us rises from our dead self to fresh fields and pastures new.’³

      It’s funny but there’s a point to it, because English was, and perhaps remains, an aspirational matter to Indians and Sri Lankans, a ‘stepping stone’ to power: magnificently authoritative, it seems to promise, if conquered and internalised, an eloquence that would put one forever beyond 9harm. The slave dreams of taking the master’s language, and, with it, his magic.

      Rayaprol is never so boring as to put the point so plainly (I doubt, in fact, that he could put anything plainly) but it’s worth considering ‘white’, as it appears in his poems. It is often applied, as above, to snow, with which he’s obsessed – having never seen it, one imagines, before coming to the US – but which he often turns into an abstract ‘white’ weight descending from the sky. Yet he also writes frankly, sexually, of complexions:

      Fat old men with flat white faces

      That shine out of the pages of Time

                And speak to me

      Of the unspeakable pleasures possible

      Between our bodies.

      (‘All Kinds of Love’)

      […]

      I speak not of the mystery that is woman

      Nor of the great white being that is God –

      I do not speak of love, or of people,

      For I have known neither father nor lover

      And none have I reached with what I cannot utter.

      But I speak of the lonely word

      That will not reach beyond my tongue

      Nor fulfill my frustrations.

      (‘This Poem’)

      Sexuality can also be a matter of aspiration, to reach a locus of power and fame – this is what Time magazine stands 10for – where all one’s yearnings will convert, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, into a banquet of unanxious pleasures. ‘Many years ago, when I was about seventeen or eighteen, my one ambition was to be a great poet, but I did not know what it meant except to thrill at a line of Auden or a word of Wallace Stevens, and imagine the unimaginable – that one day I, too, would join the galaxy. Poets were lonely people, I had heard, and was I not the loneliest of the lonely?’ As an Indian immigrant (and then an Indian back home) it was harder for Rayaprol than for others to ‘speak’ of his homosexual feelings, but the slap-bang candour of the first poem, and the contrary hauteur (the inversions, the syntax) of the second suggest that it was never easy for him to ‘speak’, in his verse at least, on any subject. There were always obstacles, and he couldn’t make up his mind whether to glide above them in the passenger-jet of a refined high style, or to make his way on foot (again, like Williams), incorporating into his poetics the textures of the terrain.

      Can a frustration be ‘fulfilled’? Perhaps: it’s another of those moments where we see Rayaprol seeking the foothold of a received phrase, or the contour of a pre-existing idiom, only to veer towards a

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