There are many avant-garde expressions of different kinds but poetry is sadly not one of them, rues acclaimed master of Hindi poetry Ashok Vajpeyi.
"There was a time when poetry was the avant-garde, it was in the forefront. You can think of any number of movements which were started in poetry and some of them later went over to other disciplines from poetry. I don't think that the role of the avant-garde is any longer being played by poetry," he writes in a piece called "Failure of Poetry" in a latest book on his poems titled "A Name for Every Leaf: Selected Poems, 1959-2015".
The poems in the selection, published by HarperCollins, capture the range of styles and concerns of one of Hindi's most well-known writers. Chosen from a body of work spanning several decades, these are translated by Rahul Soni and introduced by poet Arundhathi Subramaniam.
According to Vajpeyi, poetry is a minority activity in most languages in terms of its writers and readers.
"In fact, I don't know but I suspect that there is a slowing down of poetry-writing in most languages: many more people are drawn to fiction. Fiction brings money, fame, poetry brings almost nothing."
"Keki Daruwalla, in the civil service, myself in the civil service, we could not live by poetry alone. Nowhere in the world, poets could earn enough to live a decent life unless there were fellowships, honorary professorships, reading sessions and all that," he said.
The Sahitya Akademi winner also rues that "one of the jobs of poetry has been to re-imagine the world for us and sadly that doesn't happen any more".
Maybe it is being re-imagined by other disciplines more effectively and more directly, he says.
Vajpeyi's piece in the book is a modified version of the annual lecture delivered by him at the Poetry Society of India in 2014.
Poetry, according to him, is also no longer generally of
any social use.
"If you look at the proceedings of the Indian Parliament, which has a good reflection of what is happening in this so-called socio-political world in which we live, once in a while poems are quoted. But they are rather dated. They are not even the best poems of those poets who have composed the quoted lines and they, in any case, come from a period which is actually 50-60 years old," he writes.
But Vajpeyi is optimistic as he says in the dark, a little light seeps through the window as if hope leaving behind everything has come inside.
He says there should not be expectation from poetry as the meaning of a poem is beyond its expectation.
"In poetry, the sense that life is larger than poetry must never weaken - also that poetry cannot possibly contain the whole of life. But poetry, somehow and somewhere, prevents life from conclusion, postpones it, as also its passing away," he writes.
Vajpeyi has 15 books of Hindi poetry to his credit. He has published many volumes of criticism, in both Hindi and English, on poetry, literature, the visual arts and Indian classical music. Book-length translations of his poetry have appeared in French, Polish, German, English, Bengali, Marathi, Odia, Gujrati, Urdu and Rajasthani.
He is also a recipient of the Dayavati Kavi Shekhar Samman (1994) and Kabir Samman (2006) and decorated by the President of Poland with the outstanding national award 'The Officer's Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2004), and by the French government with the award of 'Officier De L'Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres' (2005).
