Collected Poems

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About the Book

An established classic, A.K. Ramanujan's Collected Poems represents the complex distillation of a lifetime of unusually rich sensitivity, intellectual rigour, and feeling. Best known for his pioneering translations of ancient Tamil poetry into English, Ramanujan made it apparent to modem poets and scholars that there was a wealth of poetry yet to be discovered in several Indic traditions.

About the Author

A.K. Ramanujan (1929-93) was one of the finest Indian poets writing in English and probably the most scholarly. At the time of his death, he was Professor ,of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, and was universally acknowledged as a leading authority on South Indian language and culture.

Preface

A.K. Ramanujan left at his death one hundred and forty-eight poems on three computer disks. Eight editors read the poems, and selected those they thought could go into a volume of collected poems. Poems that were chosen by all or most readers were included in The Black Hen, which was then arranged and edited by Molly Daniels. Many of the poems not chosen were clearly publishable, but they seemed more suitable for a volume of uncollected poems.

Ramanujan worked on these poems off and on for years, as was his habit. He often joked that poems were like babies, they dirtied themselves and he had to clean them up. He said it took him ten years to really finish a set of poems.

The earliest of the new poems seem to have been written in 1989, in Michigan, the latest in March or April 1993. Like many poets, A.K. Ramanujan began writing poetry when he was seventeen. At the time he was reading a great deal of English literature from his father's library, English being his third language. His initial interest was in writing plays for the radio. His favourite poets were Shelley and Yeats. While he always loved Yeats, in later life he preferred Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

The poems in The Black Hen are in some ways different from their predecessors. At first reading, they seem light, easy, some almost like exercises. After a few readings, a complete reversal takes place. When the poems are read in sequence, they seem entirely different. The ear begins to hear the voice as full, rhythmic, passionate, complex, changeable, and in a variety of voices, styles and forms. The poems are metaphysical and full of a frightening darkness. There is a sense of both a pressure towards this darkness and a simultaneous revulsion from it. The poems begin to seem denser and fuller than anything the poet had done before, the culmination of forty-seven years of writing poetry. It is almost impossible to avoid the idea that the poems seem to press towards death and disintegration and even beyond to transmutation, like lines drawn from different angles which converge on a single point, without apparent intention, and yet inevitably.

What is astonishing is that the idea of nothingness, of zero, occurs frequently, as in the following lines:

How describe this nothing we, of all things, flee in panic yet wish for, work towards,

build ships and shape whole cities with?

Salamanders

Ramanujan was very interested in Buddhism. (He tried to convert in his twenties.) I think there is here a Buddhist idea of nothingness, as well as perhaps an Existential one.

Animals appear everywhere in the poems, but the poems are not 'about' animals. They have a double vision. The poems are about life, death, cycles of birth, pain, and love. They are also about poetry. They are full of irony, humour, paradox and sudden reversals.

A volume of Collected Poems, which represents the best work of a lifetime, is a milestone in any poet's path. This volume, which was considered during A.K. Ramanujan's lifetime, is now being published posthumously. The Collected Poems consists of three previously published hooks: The Striders, Relations, and Second Sight, and a fourth, The Black Hen published within a book for the first time. Now, as Auden wrote, may the 'words of a dead man' be 'modified in the guts of the living.'

Introduction

When I first read A.K Ramanujan's last, unpublished poems several months ago, their impact as individual pieces and as a fortuitous group took me by surprise. In November 1989, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he had shown me the first few poems he had completed after the publication of Second Sight (1986), and in June 1992, in Chicago, he had asked me to read nearly forty poems that he wanted to include in a new collection. But these occasions, among others, did not prepare me for the large number of poems that turned up in his files in the autumn of 1993, or for their unexpected qualities and effects.

As readers of this edition of his Collected Poems will discover on their own, Ramanujan's final poems contain elements that are not present in the three volumes of poetry he published in his lifetime. These formal and thematic elements now alter our understanding of what the poet felt and thought, why he chose certain voices, images, and metaphors, what his conceptions of nature and culture were, how he re-imagined time and human history, where he located the conflicts and interdependences of society, family, and self, or how he resolved some of the ethical dilemmas of poetry in the late twentieth century. But even as the finished work enlarges and rearranges his poetic world, it reinforces the continuities between the various phases of his career over three or four decades. It thus creates a new imaginative whole in which late and early poems interact associatively with each other, and long-standing preoccupations combine echoes and resonances with variations and counter-points to achieve an integrity that is at once essential and ironic.

One of the recurrent concerns in Ramanujan's poetry as a whole is the nature of the human body and its relation to the natural world. This theme first appears in The Striders (1966) in an early sonnet called 'Towards Simplicity', which represents the body as a natural mechanism. The poem suggests that the body is a structure with organic as well as mechanical properties, and consists of parts like 'Corpuscle, skin, / cell, and membrane', each with 'its minute seasons / clocked within the bones'. The body's internal seasons, such as its 'hourly autumn', parallel the external seasonal cycles and establish a relationship of co-ordination between body and nature. But the body's processes are 'minute' and 'complex', while those in nature are 'large' and 'simple'. Besides, the body houses the mind, which possesses unique powers-'reasons gyring within reasons'-that seem to transcend the domain of nature. At the time of death, however, 'into the soil as soil we come', so the body finally subsumes the mind despite the asymmetries between them, and the earth in turn subsumes the body. Since external nature thus controls our internal organic processes and mechanical properties from beginning to end, it completely 'contains' our bodily lives.

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