Dilip Simeon's blog

If biology was the soil of fascism, history and aesthetics were the manure.. Percy Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” No poet sought acknowledgment more enthusiastically than Ezra Pound. No poet legislated so ambitiously or disastrously, either. Pound was the impresario of Modernism. He stripped the Victorian padding from the verse of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, launched magazines and the Imagist movement, and published the first chapters of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” He was also a fascist and fanatical anti-Semite who propagandized on the radio for Mussolini’s regime. After the war, Pound’s friends and fans, Eliot among them, convinced the American authorities that he was not bad, just mad. He was lucky not to be executed as a traitor. Lauren Arrington’s “Poets of Rapallo” is a fascinating, intricate study of Pound’s first steps on the road to perdition, and the cast of fellow travelers, Yeats among them, who went part of the way with him and then covered their...

NB : An excellent review of an excellent book. Purushottam Agrawal has done us a public service. DS Kabir, the famous religious poet of Varanasi, lived from roughly 1440 CE to 1518 CE. He first became well-known outside of India in 1915 when Rabindranath Tagore published an English translation of 100 songs, or bhajans, att­ri­buted to Kabir. Tagore’s translation was based on a collection prepared by the scholar Kshitimohan Sen from various sources. More recent academic studies of Kabir essentially begin with the analysis of his religious ideas made by P D Barthwal and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi in the 1930s and the 1940s. These studies helped initiate a search for old manuscripts containing collections of Kabir’s songs ( pad  or  shabda ) and couplets ( sakhi ) in early Hindi, with the idea that these texts were more likely to be compositions by the historical Kabir, or at least gave a better idea of ideas ass­oci­ated with Kabir.  Kabir, Kabir: The Life ...

The Waterboys: This is the sea These things you keep You better throw them away You wanna turn your back On your careless days Once you were tethered Now you are free Once you were tethered Now you are free Well that was the river! This is the sea Now if you're coming undone Maybe been alone too long Or just you've been suffering from A few too many Plans that have gone wrong And you're trying to remember How easy your life used to be And you're trying to remember 1973 Well that was the river! This is the sea Now you say you've got trouble You say you've got pain You say you've got nothing left to believe in Nothing to hold on to Nothing but chains You're trying to make sense Of something that you just can't see You're trying to make sense And you know that you once held the key But that was the river! This is the sea Now I can see you wavering As you're trying to decide You've got a war in your head And it's tearing you up inside For...

I cannot say that I know you well But you can't lie to me with all these books that you sell I'm not trying to follow you to the end of the world I'm just trying to leave something behind Words have come from men and mouse Oh, but I can't help thinking that I have heard the wrong crowd When all the water is gone my job will be too So I'm trying to leave something behind Oh, money is free but love costs more than our bread And the ceiling is hard to reach Oh, the future ahead is broken and red And I'm trying to leave something behind This whole world is a foreign land We swallow the moon, but we do not know our own hand Oh, we're running with the case, but we ain't got the gold Yet we're trying to leave something behind My friends, I believe we are at the wrong fight And I can not read what I did not write I've been to his house, but the master is gone Yet we're trying to leave something behind Now there is a beast who has taken my brain You c...

Brian Eno: Spinning Away Up on a hill, as the day dissolves With my pencil turning moments into line High above in the violet sky A silent silver plane - it draws a golden chain One by one, all the stars appear As the great winds of the planet spiral in Spinning away, like the night sky at Arles In the million insect storm, the constellations form On a hill, under a raven sky I have no idea exactly what I've drawn Some kind of change, some kind of spinning away With every single line moving further out in time And now as the pale moon rides (in the stars) Her form in my pale blue lines (in the stars) And there, as the world rolls round (in the stars) I draw, but the lines move round (in the stars) There, as the great wheels blaze (in the stars) I draw, but my drawing fades (in the stars) And now, as the old sun dies (in the stars) I draw, and the four winds sigh (in the stars) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-INeMspNSQ0 Gulzar : आहिस्ता चल ज़िन्दगी आहिस्ता चल ज़िन्दगी कई क़र्ज़ चुकाना...

The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this,   is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe.   No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round https://poetryarchive.org/poem/moment/ More poetry/posts on poetry My Friend

In a strongly-worded statement, more than  170  Gujarat cultural personalities, activists and academics have strongly protested against “threats" issued against Gujarati writers in the Gujarat Sahitya Academi journal “Shabdsrushti” through an anonymous writeup under the titled “No, This Is Not a Poem, It Is Misuse of a ‘Poem’ for Anarchy…” Supposedly an editorial, published, ironically on page 89 of the journal, says the statement, seeks to accuse the writers seeking to criticise the government handling of the pandemic as “anti-national literary Naxals” and "attempts to create an atmosphere of hostility" towards them. It is said to have been  written  by Gujarat Sahitya Akademi chief Vishnu Pandya, a known Narendra Modi protege, in response to sharply critical poems by Parul Khakhar, hailing from from the Saurashtra region.  Shav Vahini Ganga (Hindi Punjabi English) शव वाहिनी गंगा While one Khakhar's poems, Shav Vahini Ganga  says, “Saheb, the Ganga carr...

ना भूलना तुम ना भूलना तुम , 2021 की पहली अप्रैल की सुबह , या उसके पहले की कोई सुबह , वसंत ऋतु की मंद ख़ुशबुएँ , जब , एक नहीं , करोड़ों आंखें एक साथ खुलीं थीं। और सबने अशुभ का कोई मंज़र देखा था ! मन में कुछ खौफ़ सा लगा था।   ना भूलना तुम , कि तुम्हारी खिड़की की चौखट पर आकर बैठे थे तीन कौए , और तीन बार की थी कांव कांव उन्होंने चेतावनी की , विवेक और करुणा का परिचय दिया था।   ना भूलना तुम , कि वह मूर्ख प्रहसन का दिन नहीं था , वह क़यामत के आग़ाज़ की सुबह थी। कोरोना भयानक वेग से फैल रहा था। जनमानस की कोशिकाओं में संक्रमण का भूचाल मचा था !   ना भूलना तुम , कि रहनुमा के हृदय में उस रोज़ लेशमात्र संशय नहीं था। क्योंकि उसे सब कुछ पता था ! वह प्रभुता के अभियान में जुटा था। वह किसी यशगान पर खिलखिलाकर हंसा था। आश्चर्य कतई नहीं था। सेंट्रल विस्टा के नवयुग में कौऔं का प्रवेश वर्जित था।   ना भूलना तु...