Sreekanth Kopuri is a poet and a professor of English in Machilipatnam, India. In the special mode of poetry, Kopuri invites the reader into an encounter with his hometown, its tragedies, its sights and smells, its spirituality. Following the poems, Kopuri describes his scholarly interest in silence and Holocaust literature. Finally, in an accompanying essay, Jack Calder reflects on how poems can function as memorials.
Author’s Note:
Machilipatnam, also called Bandar (meaning port), is an ancient and famous town of India which has existed since the 3rd Century BC. ‘Machili’ means Fish. It derives its name from a famous enormous arched entrance of the town built with a whale’s body that washed up after a cyclone. It has a unique maritime history and a culture of classical textile, dance, jewellery, theatre and culinary arts. Kalamkari textile art, Kuchipudi classical dance, Rold Gold, and the local sweets like Bandar Laddu, Badar Mithai and Badar Halwa are world famous even today. The town was a major trading port for the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British. The poet Sreekanth Kopuri lives in a place called Parasu peta or French peta. The French were called Parasus in the Telugu language, as they came from Paris.
The Work
A Train to Machilipatnam
at the Chilakalapudi Railway Station
is about,
now and then,
when my country folk suddenly wait
for the nearing distance as now,
like a chronic patient for discharge
till that rattle bursts
the patient silence into cheers,
bulking with the belongings of hope,
swarming around the ticket counter
like those flies disturbed
by the stones
those wanton boys pelt
in the ditch beside.
The ticket clerk hangs
with his colleagues,
around the hanged up computer,
but no issues,
the train will wait he assures us,
a timeless issue we endure
a custom that lazes around.
The signals sever the drunken bottleneck
of a turbulent stream
that recedes astride
rippling into honks and grumbles
while a cattle-herd barges
waddling under
to the other side
the Shepherd follows suit
jaywalking
the green creepers
at the station’s way in
that patiently age
with the weight of dust
only the apolitical monsoons will wash,
unlike the static words of my poem
that will make nothing happen
save the blue moon happenstances
Local Tea Gossips
at Sathyam Tea, Naidu Baddi Center Machilipatnam
Here, they go for
the first slurps,
the day’s sweet burn at
the Sun’s yawning mouth
over the town’s heart,
float on sunlit stillness
like the local tea-dust
unpacked, in the tea stall
before the boil puffs up
the effusive warmth
from the crusts of milk skin,
the town’s surface wisps above
this Earth’s waking swells,
in stray blinks
of those off-white tones,
that shift and boil
with the fuming hums
from the nights, hidden
within the secret thickness
of milky protein
the urge of embrace stretches
round the clock-like cauldron,
and the hands that circle in it,
to conceive the
fragrant morning touch smoking hot
with a brimming eagerness
time and again, with the
consistence of aromatic flavours
that draw the town’s gossips
in changing tones of local fabric
between the sips and cupfuls,
crunches and biscuits,
puffs and cigarettes,
masks and faces,
entrances and exits
with the Telugufied music,
our every sip tunes and arouses
with the rhythm of emotional outbursts,
even as the tempted flies hide and seek,
amidst the light-hearted
heated exchanges between
the boorish Tweedledums and Tweedledees,
among the gangs of coolies
waiting for the work, and the
bunches of fruit-vending women
who untie their apron knots to
buy a refreshing sip.
Tsunami, December 26, 2004
in the memory of the victims in Machilipatnam
Tides and tremors write history
breaks the heart of the earth
into a natural graveyard along
the shore strands many,
who wait for death,
watch like a great audience
a hungry circle of land
gape open its mouth
wag tongues of flame
crunch scores of corpses
into a smouldering pile of ash
dogs stalk a naked babe
that picks leftovers among ruins
to feed the future.
the boatman slaps his dying wife
shrieks mad, presses belly
to vomit and pump the water
running random for help
fainting on her dead body
Death falls silently in varied forms –
dogs eat a human corpse,
ravens drag away the intestines,
rats pick up bones to
preserve as hard memories, and
ants build hills.
but animals could flee
to a safer place before
we could feel the tremors.
In the twilight of the year
a note of apocalypse
presages with a dirge
leaving behind
only the skeletons
on the sands of time.
Clay Ganesh Birthday
Paras Pet center, Machilipatnam
Radhika wraps the graceful folds
of autumn’s
rippling smile
around her golden texture,
in a saffron sari,
an offering to the
autumn-born naked clay-God
the seasonal sanctity
at the door, steps into
the lush guava orchard, plucks
the ripe dreams smiling
green on the pandal
that bears the season’s mellowing
hope in the parrot-green
elephant apples and the incense
wisps of her burning piety with a
mousy humility, around
which the radiant circles of
her devout hope halo the wisdom the
earth gives as the four-armed
elephantine providence of creation.
Brief Interview
Deva Eveland: Your bio mentions that you do scholarly research on “Contemporary Poetry, Silence, and Holocaust poetry.” Could you talk about your research? I’m especially curious about the “silence” bit. Would this mean silence in the aural sense (the absence of sound), the avoidance of talking about certain things, or something else?
Sreekanth Kopuri: Reading Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry attracted me to the concept of silence and introduced me to scores of tempting silences. These unsettled me to explore the contemporary writers whose poetry sincerely tries to transcend the human domain in a way like what Browning said, “Ah! but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?”
There are certain words which always linger in the corridors of my memory. I was particularly influenced by some words from the Book of Psalms, “everything is fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139-14), and those of Wordsworth,
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can. (“Tables Turned”)
These always made me focus on the parts of poetry that searched for the enigmatic areas too silent for the noise of our rational understanding. I always learned to “meditate on the meanings but not the mirror” (Vyaktavyaktam, a Telugu poem), or as Einstein said, “Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better.”
With this preoccupation when I was moving forward into contemporary literature, it was my acquaintance with Jayanta Mahapatra that touched me with a better sensibility of Contemporaneity. The unique thing in his poetry is how scores of silences in various forms like ‘shadows’, ‘birds”, “fallow fields” and many more are seen everywhere on the surface. They are a consequence of a confrontation with the complexities of life drawing us towards the periphery between the known and the unknown. His search often ends in deepening obscurity withdrawing into silence: “And each day I keep looking for the light / shadows find excuses to keep.” Some of his lines remain with me as torch bearers.
The silence which I write in my poetry or which I research has nothing to do with the aural perspective. It is not something opposite to sound. Though language is a conveyance to the truth, it always fails at a point. This breaking point, I feel, is the periphery between the known and the unknown. The contemporary conditions of life demand a grave need for an appropriate art form to represent its painful voice at both local and global levels. Human feelings are lost in what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse. The modern man is alienated into a cyberspace. Faith in religion is shattered, seeking contingent alternatives. The immense silence in which the secret of every pain lies and those transcendental ‘Laws of Motion’ beyond the human grasp should be meticulously explored with a serious device beyond word. Never has a society heard more noise than now. The technique should sustain the experience.
Critical Accompaniment
On Memorials in Poetry
The memorial, in architecture, is long-familiar to those who live in cities. There are the monumental slabs for victims of war, the obelisks and arcs of victories or victors; even our street-names usually conspire to remember someone or other. The forms are as various as the events of history. Literature, by contrast, maintains a much cleaner division of labor. Memorials are almost exclusively the province of two forms: political rhetoric and poetry. The services of political rhetoric are well understood. But what about poetry?
Sreekanth Kopuri’s four poems offer a good study of the form. Though only one explicitly memorializes—“Tsunami, December 26, 2004”—the style remains uniform throughout. Some observations:
Kopuri’s verbs are almost always in the simple present. The “rattle bursts,” the “boil puffs,” the “boatman slaps,” “Rhadika wraps.” Even metaphorical descriptions, often of movement, are delivered in simple present, “the town’s surface wisps.” There is a tendency to stack parallel descriptions, each action pictured as taking place simultaneously, such that their effects, when mentioned, come as a surprise:
Gape open its mouth
Wag tongues of flame
Crunch scores of corpses
Into a smoldering pile of ash
One smacks headfirst against the preposition here, wakening suddenly into the world of cause and effect. This is because Kopuri’s poems proceed, for the most part, in timeless space, and are peopled by archetypes, not individuals. “Wanton boys,” “country folk,” “tea gossips.” Even the apparent individuals are subsumed into general symbols, as with Radhika, who moves gracefully through an infinite autumn, the festival time of Ganesh Chaturthi.
The memorial work of the poem is precisely this purification into timelessness. We seem to catch each passerby just at the moment of their distinctiveness; just as the “fruit-vending women … untie their apron knots.” There is a tenderness, almost a nostalgia here that unfits the poems for elegy. Though the grotesque and violent intrudes—vomit, intestines, bones—it is just as quickly reintegrated into the sublime surface. We are left with “hard memories,” as Kopuri so elegantly terms them; skeletons which, though we may find them contemplatively disturbing, are hardly objects of visceral disgust.
The effect is one of quiet acceptance; sensations thought as much as felt. Perhaps Kopuri himself describes it best, when he says:
The static words of my poem
That will make nothing happen
Save the blue moon happenstances
One imagines a small shrine or temple; not one of those cathedrals whose majesty overawes us, but a quiet place, whose slightly stagnant air, barely disturbed by our entrance, smells of antiquity.
—Jack Calder
Sreekanth Kopuri, PhD, is an Indian poet, current poetry editor of Kitchen Sink Magazine, Alumni Writer in Residence, Athens, and a Professor of English from Machilipatnam, India. He had his schooling from Nirmala High School, Masters from Venkateswara University, Graduation from Nagarjuna University. He has recited his poetry at University of Oxford, John Hopkins University, University of Florida, Wilkes University, Heinrich Heine University, University of Gdanski and many others. His poems have appeared in Arkansas Review, Christian Century, A Honest Ulsterman, Chicago Memory House, Heartland Review, Tulsa Review, Expanded Field, A New Ulster, The Rational Creature, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry Centre San Jose, Underground Writers Association, Atherton Review, Word Fountain, Synaeresis, Wend Poetry, Vayavya, Ann Arbor Review, to mention a few, and are forthcoming in many others. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book of the year 2022 & finalist for the Eyelands Books Award Greece, 2019. He is the recipient of the Immanuel Kant Award for his collection of poems on Silence 2020. He’s an independent research scholar in Contemporary Poetry, Silence, and Holocaust poetry. He lives in his hometown Machilipatnam with his mother.