on reading premchand in the time of elections

& elections being the zamindar's daughter's shaadi where the landless for a few weeks feel invited, fed, participative, give their blessings & good will & marvel at the spectacle from their haunches-

& so a bad cross-colonial pun- & so the devil take the Hind(most) Hindu(')s swa-raj

to be immortal, yes-

but, as, imprinted on shadow
on wave

lovers' graffiti on temple rock-

awe-some mirroring

suicide bombers in baghdad; mad kids who shoot 10 people & kill themselves in the developed world

in cyberia

more than ever?, to be be deleted is forever
trolling the servers of past millenia
what nostalgia for palm-leaf-

amrika is

the first place whose appeal is its own self transcendence of place- not the lunar flights, but the kabuki, the ghana drumming-it is the place at its most existent when it is hospitable, opened-

where would one be

without the mutual imagination & mutual flight of america/ (south?)india -

terrorists by any other name-

in the 19c they had the luxury of calling themselves- anarchists, socialists etc-broadly, the "working classes", affiliated to it. if you were frustrated in the bureaucrazy stircrazy, pre eminently the military, you became "right" wing. the 3rd world contribution was "nationalism"; but nationalism by any other name... every cause, barring a gandhiism (an exceptional case/country) spills much blood & ink. now too, stir the pot, terrorists are, arguably, morally uncomfortably, repudiably, forces for 'anarchy" (confused, though it sometimes coincides with "social justice" rhetoric) sometimes preferable (i.e, historically more plausible) than tyranny/feeling of extreme poverty of power, which anger, stirring the pot, makes it part coincide with the social justice- any cause large enough, & perhaps violent enough, has both social justice & its opposite, this capitalist need to keep the wheels of history racing-

rebecca/cecil's generous introduction of me in the reading

It’s my pleasure to be introducing Nikhil Govind tonight. I met Nikhil last semester when we were both taking Cecil Giscombe’s poetry workshop. Cecil can’t be here tonight but he sends his greetings from the Midwest. Although he’s sorry to be missing the reading, he was fortunate to be able to hear and meet A.B. Spellman at his Luggage Store Gallery reading in San Francisco, and to have been able to work with Nikhil Govind in a graduate Seminar. Cecil has asked me to read the following warning:

I’d warn the audience that Nikhil Govind’s vision is dark; and I’d warn you too that his work is comic. The writing has other wondrous parts as well but this morning I’m thinking of those two elements and the way that they intertwine in the poems. In the most dire of the poems are lines that ring with the kind of wry dismissiveness that make us laugh (or almost laugh) against our will; likewise the comically absurd moments in Nikhil Govind’s poems are edged with a recognition of doom. He sighs, exquisitely, “new pain of an old love, new name for an old pain, new nerve for an old pain.”

I’d suggest that we take Cecil’s warning to heart; Nikhil’s poetry is uncomfortable. It blurs the distinction between affirmation and despair. Nikhil writes: “It is duty to misconceive, to abort/ to recite/ the cadence of the ocean.”

In Nikhil’s poetry death and suffering are what they are…a big deal & no big deal. When he’s not ruminating on the “seam of death” or describing “blood phlegmed yellow” he’s inhabiting the poetical, the flowery, or even approaching the ornamental. He gives reign to the aesthetic and to the flatness or the unlikely-ness of poetry’s success.

His poems are not about development, they do not cohere. Rather, Nikhil finds images and phrases that resist synthesis. If the images do hang together it is insofar as they suggest a mood. Nikhil’s poems give up poetry’s claim to self-importance…it is not the poems themselves that are important…it is their afterlife, the way emotion and sound linger.

Nikhil grew up in India and came to the U.S. in 2004. He is a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s South Asia department where he’s writing a dissertation on Hindi modernist poetry.

Nikhil’s poetry almost has a place …but if it is in the Himalayas[ IF YOU CAN ROLL YOUR EYES A LITTLE!-], he is quick to remind us that it is the Himalayas of NOW. If his poetry has a language…perhaps it is the English language, but English as the self-conscious confrontation of the written and the spoken—where the sound of speech creeps into print, where status itself gets loose, and we recognize the implications of hearing.

Please welcome Nikhil…

poems read in holloway series

FIRST POEM

this thread of continuous stream,

mountain monastery’s hymn-air timbres the temple bell’s chafe

straits, unbelittled, stretched out sky-ness



hunting the self of the self


I feed these marigolds to the ocean, flower and wood for pyres, the smudge of distance



my duty is to misconceive, to abort
to recite
the cadence of the ocean





migrating words read the wave-wrinkles like an ancient script- & understand


every weakness—and sacrifice—is unaccompanied


this the icon’s last dawn-


not a clean fish-gasp of death but

the thief-step of the hours, rebirths


the seam of death and deaths-






SECOND POEM
the buddha-suicides



each of a hundred and one buddha-names on grains of rice,


sugar for the dead,




each time rebuilt each time destroyed bone by bone


(-this temple’s wood is made of bone-)


you cannot find god with candles in a cave,



the ghost is a renunciant of the grave, the idol of the nave-



a forest in a grain of rice, camphor in a fold of palm-


(who is this that vowed destruction- this king or that other one, or that other one’s son)



did one forget to tell you that the war was over/ before you were born.



one the mute corpse, the other the loquacity of meaning-



bodies of your fore-mothers hang upside down in the square near the temple


so obscure must be this idol’s gifts-





for everything happened first here long ago many times over&over


alone in the night’s rain in the bullock cart in a landscape moving unappeasing/
into





where there was a tribe & order & way of life now there are grain merchants with a giant
plaque commemorating the tribe and the way of life & order



as one goes further into the watercolor’s mountains one gets nearer the goats of the valley

where the gray rain toils with the conversation and the chanting-

mnemonic-mnemonic of rain water patter, the
inner of the this too-intimate hour
where what is unsaid is more -

prints of camphored flame, verse breathed on fire



across the temple’s inner court the old man in the bus behind me has the whites of trachoma across his eyes. /


he closes them & counts the rain










THIRD POEM

no more buddhas-

sitting upside down speeding down-
ward underwater deep in emerald, miniature
legs scissoring a blemished dream-grain
shearing the liquour-ous surface, scattering, fishworm eyes these
six arms limp, unwaving, aniconic, brain lost in some damp interior
gut no myth nor metaphor nor language no
art can save this undeft,
clumsy enlightenment, this wakening
































FOURTH POEM

kettledrums and wrestler elephant and elephant keeper

tighten your waistband fasten your curly locks

(voice deep from the throat of clouds)

“I will send you to the home of death”

sovereign of elephants, seized (him) by his trunk

--- slipping the hold darting between pillars of feet


the elephant smells the sweat, he slips free
grasping him by his tail as an eagle a snake dodging
left-right midst twirl of hips as boy with calf

then suddenly forward Wham on the head

and still more feints and more and hits.



by. now. furious gashed
elephant
a final gore with its tusklips blood phlegmed yellow each separate tooth

goaded.

but he lifts him by the trunk hurls him to the ground stepping like a lion he tears the tusk


& then also breaks the skull of the elephant keeper.

holding tusk as ripened fingernail aloft as trophy he enters,
rut and further elephant fluid on his muscle

lotus-faced







FIFTH POEM

this skull collapses in the palms to golddust


this word is not worth the breath it consumes.


only a handful of earth is needed

to cover this corpse ( & there are mountains all around)

empty desert cisterns lie piled high in mangle


(I dig graves for one, two, seven … but how many?)



(6 months naked in the desert, walking behind the horses)


(in abandoned railway quays and yards, closeted with the gun’s machine fire)
empire is yet warm in its ash