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Poet Shankar in the city
Acclaimed Asian American poet Ravi Shankar interacted with Nepali poets and audiences at an interaction programme held in his honour on FridayShankar is the founding editor of Drunken Boat, a popular electronic journal of the arts, and he has worked as a writer or editor on seven books and chapbooks of poetry.
Shankar read from his well-received books Instrumentality and Deepening Groove and also from his upcoming anthology Eternal Snow. The poems he recited were both rooted in history and of the contemporary kind: the reading featured works such as a translation of the eighth century Tamil poet saint, Aandal, along with others such as his poem about a Palestinian boy in the midst of a ravaging war.
The contents of his poems were also varied: from epic subjects like the world’s chaos, as evidenced by his poems likes Tragedy Of War, to his personal hatred for the banana, which is the subject of his poem On Why I Hate Bananas.
The event was organised by White Lotus Book Shop and moderated by Yuyutsu Sharma, an influential poet and translator himself, who has in the past translated Nepali poems for Shankar’s previous books and the journal Drunken Boat.
During the programme, Shankar said that he was planning to include a special segment of Nepali literature in Drunken Boat, and towards that end he’s collaborating with Sharma in translating Nepali works into English. Shankar said that they want to introduce moving pieces of Nepali literature to the greater global audience.
Shankar said that he stuck primarily to poetry because he simply couldn’t help writing poems. “In a poem every word counts. It’s like a miniature bomb that explodes,” he said.
He went on to talk about the impressions that Kathmandu had made on him, and he said he was amazed by the religious harmony among the people and the humility of the city’s dwellers. “I’ve already thought of a metaphor for the city: the door is always open,” he said.
Accompanying him at the reading were a few Nepali poets, such as Shailendra Sakar, Sukracharya, Gopal Nepal and Tirtha Chandra Yatri, who recited their poems in Nepali. Ravi Shankar was particularly effusive about Sukracharya’s rhythmic and metered poem about Kathmandu.
Shankar’s works have won him much acclaim in the West. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited WW Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond, which was hailed as “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. In 2010, he won the National poetry Review Prize for Deepening Groove. He has won the Pushcart Prize and has been featured in various prestigious publications like The New York Times.