An email sent in response to an article recieved on Indian Poetry, published in the Hindu.

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C,

Thanks for this piece. I think I encountred both Thayil's and S. Roy's names somewhere before in the Indian blogsphere.

I was doing an accounting at Buoy today as it has been around four years now, and discovered half of the contents I dumped/ archived/ filed/ posted over there have something or the other do with poetry: 300 odd poems of others and 400 odd pieces (I don't claim the label of a poem for any of them) of mine. I think poetry is a personal habit, a way of living. And like most personal habits, I think, it is not amenable to transfer to the disinterested.

So the poets mentioned in this article, and also poets generally speaking, have to be satisfied with this curious habit of theirs to fool around with words mostly in private time and place, and maybe even stop bitching about the reading population not giving a shit about their fingering technique. No, maybe not, poets who are not miserable or who don't suffer don't cut such dashing figures! This makes me think of Faiz's poem, "Love, don't ask me for that love again" in a sarcastic sense. All this lack of fame & cash will remain, unless of course they are (or can become) good operators and log rollers in the shady groves of American academe.

Hope you are well. -S