[1076] Meeting Poets

Guest poem submitted by Gauri Keshavan, <gkeshavan@>:

Meeting poets I am disconcerted sometimes
by the colour of their socks
the suspicion of a wig
the wasp in the voice
and an air, sometimes, of dankness.

Best to meet in poems:
cool speckled shells
in which one hears
a sad but distant sea.

	-- Eunice de Souza.

The third of "Five London Pieces".

This is my favourite Eunice de Souza poem. She always keeps it simple and
straight, without using too many words. The suggestion is that poetry is
distant from poets as sea shells are from the sea... as if the work of art
creates a distance between itself and the artist...

Gauri.

[Biography]

Eunice de Souza was born in Pune, India in 1940, and educated there. She
received an MA from Marquette University in Wisconsin and a PhD from Bombay
in 1988. She is now a lecturer in English in St Xavier's College, Bombay.
Apart from writing extensively on contemporary literature and culture, she
has written four books for children, and was the co-editor of Statements
(1976), an anthology of Indian prose in English. Her collections of verse
are Fix (1979), Women in Dutch Painting (1988), and Ways of Belonging: New
and Selected Poems (1990); the last of these was a Poetry Book Society
Recommendation.

[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1076.html

From: vidya anjali <vidyanjali_1980@>

this is really very true. Poets are awkward people indeed, who live their lives immersed in pain. but their poetry is beautiful and therefore unlike them. Like the sea that you hear in the shell, a poet's voice is a refined voice, distanced from reality which is just too harsh to bear, like a bitter pill coated with sweet honey to make it easy to consume... 

  Vidya Venkat.



		
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