Apart from the necessary task of revision etc, some other things I find useful to improve the work:

1. Reading more poetry - I attempt to find and read one new poet a week.
2. Memorizing poetry - "the music of what happens" (as Seamus Heaney called it) is better heard when engraved in one's head.
3. Reading, or attempting to read, books on craft (forms, prosody,history,ideas to jump start writing etc) and criticisim, along with essays on related subjects (about poets, aesthetics, history etc)
4. Putting aside a day in the week to the exclusive task of reading and writing.
5. Walking around.
6. Updating lists of subjects I want to write about/on, but for which I don't have the words yet.
7. Finally getting hard hitting or what I term "slash & burn" criticism (The Chinese say, to become a master, one has to eat bitter. Also more recently there was this evocative passage in Marquez's memoir about the music he faced when he unveiled his first short story - his critic friend burnt it in an ash tray. How nice!) is always a good idea.

Enjoy writing.

I picked up Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City" at the bookstore, and found it to be a very well written book. I have read some 100 pages of it, and I shall return to the bookstore to polish off the rest this weekend. On the same note, I found an old copy of 'Natural Capitalism' - I had read parts of this book, all of which is available online, previously - and this gave me further fodder to think on the subject of cities, city planning, closed loop systems etc.

In a chapter titled 'Human Capital' ( www.natcap.org ), the authors report on and about Curitiba, a city in Southeast Brazil, and the remarkable stratergies this city had adopted to deal with all the typical 'third world' megaplois problems - explosive population growth, traffic, pressure on greenspace, water etc.

Further, it was interesting to read this chapter, thinking of Hyderabad, the city I grew up in, and how 'fucked' it is currently. To solve the same problems, notably traffic, the acclaimed technocratic ex Chief Minster, ringed the city with "flyovers". However the last time I visited, in 2004, traffic had overtaken the little effeciency these flyovers created. As my father joked, as we were crawling around, soon a time will come when people will have to heft their vehicles over their heads and walk to get anywhere.

Coming to poetry, I have begun chewing on the tomes you gave me over course of 2004 (thank you again for these), starting with that thick A.K. Ramanujan collection. 'Speaking of Shiva' - his volume of translations of Kannada Shivate poets gave me an idea of taking up, at some distant point of time, the task of bringing over into English poetry, the great Indian epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana. There are some fine prose translations/re-tellings, C. Rajagopalachari's are my favourites.

As I wrote to a friend, in all Indian vernaculars, bringing one of the epics over from Sanskrit is considered to be the foremost literary task - Tulsi Das's Ramayana in Hindi; Nannaya, Tikkana & Errana's Mahabharata in Telugu etc - why shouldn't such a thing attempted in English, given that it too has become another Indian vernacular? I was also thinking of this as I was re-reading, in bits and pieces, Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf, especially the ship burial ending:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief; with hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

I wonder how and where I will find the voice to such a thing for these epics of ours.

Last night I was talking with J, with me asking the questions and she providing the answers, on the subject of viruses, their pathways to attack the body and the cunning deployed by us to vaccinate ourselves against these half animate half inanimate entities/ molecules. A theologically irreverent note here to the Fundoo Christo-pithecans, why are they no references to creation of viruses in the Good Book? Or were they Satan’s spawn? Life, consciousness, or whatever one wants to call it, seems to be quite wonderful even in these little almost invisible things – their evolutionary design, and adaptation over many life cycles to perpetuate themselves via other, and perhaps more evolved, things.

Continuing with the above digression, there seems to be a big furor here, in one of the surrounding red/Republican/JesUS counties, about stickers on science textbooks, which want to warn the innocents that the “monkey to man” theory is just another tall tale, and should be taken as such. What the hell is Genesis? The bloody inerrant truth of course, if only the sinners believe, and save themselves from damnation! However I think the evolved folks should let the fundoos go at this – science after all is the “religion” of doubt, and if someone wants to doubt something let them by all means. In this I am reminded of a one liner attributed to Abe Lincoln (that Abe’s party turned into the saloon of recovering Ku Klux Klan-ers is another miracle of late 20th century US politics!): “don’t jump into a ditch to save a pig, you will only get dirty”.

Continuing with the recounting of last night conversation, I was watching J (she is very pleasant on the bookish eyes) for her unsaid reactions/feelings, as I was quizzing her on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa vis-à-vis the “race” situation. I had just finished reading two books about the Apartheid period, and since I am interested in seeing how human attitudes are contaminated by the discriminations we inherit, I was on the lookout for “typical” Afrikaner (which J is) reactions, now that the power equations have changed in her country.

The most telling thing, as it appeared to my not very discriminating mind of course, was the way things lay demarcated in her mind: the black people and the white people. I wonder if she thinks of me as the “brown”/”colored” man, given that folks of Indian origin were considered less than fully human in her childhood? I think there is a significant thing here that needs to be investigated: how tribes discriminate (via skin color, and in the Indian situation via that tribal badge of caste, etc etc) and how many generations it takes to overcome and crack open these boundaries, if this can be done at all.

I shall end this note here, enough of this “running at the mouth”. But before I end, as I began reading the volume of James Dickey’s letters last night, I shall type up a few of the more luminous passages on the poet’s vocation, craft etc I had underlined here. The following, however, is an excerpt of Dickey’s last lecture, shortly before he died, and in which I found courage last night:

When we get started, I want you to fight this thing through. Fight the thing through that we start through your own consciousness and your own dreams and see where it comes out. That’s the excitement and the fun of it. Deep discovery, deep adventure. It’s the most dangerous game and the best. Flaubert says somewhere that “the life of a poet is a hell of a life. It’s a dog’s life. But it’s the only one worth living.” You suffer more, you are frustrated more. All the things that don’t bother other people. But you also live so much more. You live so much more intensely and so much more vitally and with so much more of a sense of meaning, of consequentiality. Of things mattering instead of nothing mattering. That is what is driving our whole civilization into suicide. The fear that we are living an existence in which nothing matters very much or at all…a sense of non-consequence, a sense of nothing, nothing matters… The poet is free of that. He’s free of it. To the poet everything matters, and it matters a lot, and that’s the realm where we work and once you are there you are hooked……I don’t mean to sell the poet so long or to such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn’t esteem the poet very much. They really don’t understand where we are coming from. They don’t understand the use for us or if there is any use. They don’t really value us very much. We are the masters of a superior sect, not they. Not they. Remember that when you write. You are at the top level and they are down there with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and the general idols of shylock culture we live in. We are the elitists. I don’t mind saying that at all. Quality is what we strive for. The best standards. My grandmother was born in Germany and she used to quote from Goethe a lot and one of her favorite sayings was, “Whoever strives upwards, him we can save”….we must find some way to write as though our hands were the hands of someone miraculously superior to ourselves. That is what we aim for. So when you begin to say things you didn’t know you knew or you had never had any idea that you had any notion that you knew, then maybe you’re getting somewhere you should be as a poet. Not invariably, but it’s possible under those conditions. It’s possible…