Travel Poetry: From 'We blink' to 'Weblink'

 

-Brian Mendonca

Today, I shared my poems with staff and students - this time from Jaipur, Rajasthan. It was like coming home to Rajasthan once more. Rajasthan has been an integral part of my poetic palette. I have nipped across from Delhi to write poems in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Udaipur, Alwar, Gajner and Haldighati. 

I spoke to the students about how it is important to believe in your own writing. You are not the best judge of the value of your poem. I spoke about how dismayed I was when my poem 'Afternoon' was published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.

We write poetry because poetry connects us. It is about our aspirations, our history, our defeats and our hopes. What is travel poetry? It is the combining of the attributes of travelling and writing to produce new content.

Many of the poems we have read can be looked at through the prism of travel poetry. What are the impulses of travel poetry? If we take Yeats's 'Lake Isle of Innisfree' the first line is, 'I will arise and go now to Innisfree.' Travel poetry demands the effort of moving out to be ravished by a place. It is about writing a poem in transit. Once you arrive at a new place, and have not written a poem yet, don't get alarmed. Describe what you see in the new place. Wordsworth had to travel to Scotland to write the lines,  'Behold her single in the field, yon solitary highland lass.'

Sadly, travel poetry does not find itself in the Goa University course I teach on 'Travel Writing.' Included are excerpts from Ibn Batuta, Al Biruni, Che Guevara, William Dalrymple, Twain, Rahul Sanskrityayan, and Elizabeth Bumiller (on Sati and the Deorala incident). 

Prescribed texts need to be reviewed. There are so many cannons in Rajasthan.  We need to fire the canon. We need to write our own words.

Youth have a duty to write to document what they see. The landscape is changing rapidly so capture it when it is still there. I used to photograph the historical places I saw and then use the images to structure my poems.

Rather than blink / look askance at foreign models for poetry, we need to develop your own styles. Which is why I toyed with a subtitle as "From 'we blink' to weblink.'" We should emerge out of Western idioms and evolve our own. We should go beyond. If publication avenues dry up, one should self-publish and blog. Share your poems by providing weblinks.

Along the way I quoted Neruda in Spanish; Pessoa in Portuguese; Horace in Latin and Ghalib in Urdu. One should always practise writing poems - not necessarily travel poems alone. Keep writing and reading. Try your hand at all the genres, i.e. prose, short fiction, essay and novel. You could even do podcasts and upload your poems on YouTube.

Poems need not be long. Don't use big words. Just describe the mood. I ended by sharing the screen and reading some of my poems written in Rajasthan. See scanned images here. 

Sharing a poem by Aditi which she read out at the session:

Travelling Terrifies Me

-Aditi Mantri

I am brought

Face to face with the

Truth of Liminality

The running landscapes

Have fixating glances

Interrogating my indifference

My education gets laid out on the road

And I feel it getting crushed

Under the constant, consistent, compelling reminders

Poets never stay

Interrogating this indifference

Maybe sometimes the pathway gets tired too

Of being your Thalia, your Melopmene, your Erato

Funny how history has never paid muses

Maybe my Art doesn’t have the currency of attention,

The currency of revolt, the currency of empathy

Travelling terrifies me,

Reminding me of the bankruptcy of my Art

It terrifies me as

I am brought face to face

To match the pace of existence.

(Aditi is a BA Hons. student of English Literature at IIS University, Jaipur.)

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Google Meet curated by Rimika Singhvi, Faculty, Department of English, IIS University Jaipur, Rajasthan. Images from A Peace of India: Poems in Transit (New Delhi, 2011) by Brian Mendonca. Cartography by Anis Ahmad. Artwork by Gautam Ghosh. Updated 12 Dec. 2021.