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…