Threads

by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya, Bhanu Kapil

This creative-critical pamphlet is a shared experiment, combining poetry, personal correspondence, the lyric essay and scholarly research, and is co-written by three vital voices in experimental poetry. The pamphlet began life as an essay by Sandeep Parmar, 'Lyric Violence, the Nomadic Subject and the Fourth Space', written partly in dialogue with Bhanu Kapil, exploring the lyric self 'as a way towards', a 'fluid, fluxive' alternative for the racialised subject from the entrenched – and predominantly white – conventions of lyric poetry. Parmar offers 'new coordinates of being' in writing, which are then picked up and rewoven by Nisha Ramayya as she proposes a Tantric poetics, and Bhanu Kapil closes the sequences with an original prose sonnet considering textiles, diasporic time, race and creative writing.

All profits of this publication will be donated to the Manuel Bravo Project, Leeds, a charity providing legal assistance to asylum seekers. Donate to the project here.

Genres: Poetry

67 pages, Pamphlet

First published July 23, 2018

Reviews

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

'At the poetry reading, I make my way to the overstuffed, velvet, navy blue couch at the back. It is wonderful to be with the other brown poets in the city I am visiting, five or six in a group of about a hundred scholars or writers who attended the event, but this is short-lived; a well-known lyric poet whisks me off to her home near the airport. I am not sure how this happens. At one point, the poet starts talking about her wonderful marriage, her husband’s professional success, the one graduate workshop in creative writing she teaches each week; how well her kids are doing, the new book she is writing about magic and herbs. She then describes how she used her $50,000 arts foundation grant. She tells me how her eldest son is doing a pre-college summer intensive and how she doesn’t feel her writing has been reviewed sufficiently or received enough acclaim. Then, she brings out some ‘overnight oatmeal’ her husband has refrigerated in tiny mason jars, adding unsweetened coconut, dates and currants. It’s too much for me to now be involved with this nourishing health food in a home environment that is redolent with inherited wealth and secure routines. I like the poet, she’s super nice, but I can’t cope with the unbroken trust – in poetry, in the economics of a household, in family life – that circulates through every part of what she is telling me. I put my head down on the wicker table on her New England screened-in porch, and weep. ‘Excuse me for a minute,’ I say, ‘I am just going to have a quick cry. This won’t take long. I am exhausted. Please forgive me.’ The next morning, in line at the airport, I am pulled aside. My bags are searched. ‘Ma’am,’ says the officer, holding up one of the glass pots of damp, gorgeous, healthy, delicious porridge that the kind, white poet packed in my overnight bag without telling me, a thoughtful gesture or surprise, a real spoon taped to the side and also a quote by C.D. Wright, that is intended, I think, to present the life of a poet as something that will see you through to the very end, ‘you can’t take this through. This is a liquid.’ Somehow, I am able to argue that it is not and very soon am eating the gift at Gate 23.'

(from 'Avert the Icy Feeling' by Bhanu Kapil, p59-60)