The Beginning “Where have I come from, where did you pick me up?” the baby asked its mother. She answered half crying, half laughing, and clasping the baby to her breast,– “You were hidden in my heart as its desire, my darling. You were in the dolls of my childhood’s games; and when with clay…
Read MoreIndians have remade London in various ways over the last five hundred years…
Read MoreI sometimes wonder why so many leaves are heart shaped…
Read MoreEverything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else…
Read MoreTemperamentally conservative poetry critic David Lehman chose only one lyric by Bob Dylan to include in his 2006 The Oxford Book of American Poetry.
Read MoreYou can get a sense of the tone of this book before even opening it. The title, a dizzy mirror and paradoxical double, casts into doubt fixed ideas of both “India” and “translation”…
Read MoreH.S. Shivaprakash (Hulkuntemath Shivamurthy Sastri Shivaprakash) is a poet, playwright and translator who writes in the Kannada language.
Read MoreWhitman, when I see you in my mind’s eye sometimes I confuse you with that other poet bard, that other guru of a nation, Tagore. But first I’d like to look a little more at your image…
Read MoreWhen I think of technology, of thinking about technology, I recall Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan and John Cage. Jessica mentions none of them…
Read MoreI was carrying a copy of the Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar’s Hashpatal Thhekey Lekha Kobitaguchho (Poems Written from Hospital) with me…
Read MoreAt best, art movements in Japan lead back over and over again to the same spot in oblivion— one that prevents Japanese and Western art…
Read MoreWhat shocked me was how quickly I said to myself, in earnest certainty, that “We have today no American poet who is anywhere near as powerful and important to poetry as Nabokov is to prose fiction.”
Read MoreIt had been so long since I last pulled out the Snakes & Ladders set that the cardboard box had warped. I’d put it away in that attic ages ago, and if the weather hadn’t been the way it was, and I hadn’t needed distraction, it never would’ve occurred to me to take it out.
Read MoreDear You, I am writing these lines from northern Washington on the day of the year when I most hate northern Washington; the one that does not end.
Read MoreCommonly hailed as the Shakespeare of Rajasthan, Vijaydan Detha never offered you a stale word…
Read MorePhotograph by Michael Gumtau by Lailufar Yasmin Secularism was one of the cornerstones of Bengali nationalism, but its spirit was enforced only by pen and paper. How can demands to ban religion from politics be satisfied? The United Nations categorizes Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim democracy. Meanwhile, the current Foreign Minister called Bangladesh a secular…
Read MoreAmy Lowell, from the cover of TIME Magazine, March 2, 1925 by Amy Lowell Why should one read poetry? That seems to me a good deal like asking: Why should one eat? One eats because one has to, to support life, but every time one sits down to dinner one does not say, “I must…
Read MoreChaupati Beach during Ganesh Visarjan From The Book: Unlike New Delhi, India’s capital, Bombay is not a city rich with history. Unlike Calcutta, whose cultural icons include Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, Bombay houses (in ostentatious bungalows) the stars of barely-watchable Bollywood melodramas. Bombay makes news when terrorists attack the city (as they did most…
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