Poetry A Journey from Irony to the Oblique Approach 

The story of the modern poets writing in English is strange, as for the tendencies and inclinations they show it in their poetry and poetic publications bought out through some evolutionary process and to some extent if put we the matter they are famous from their first works. A.K. Ramanujan too is no exception to that and this can happen only in the realm of Indian English poetry. If Nissim Ezekiel is a poet of etiquette, good manners, politeness, delicacy, urban culture, city-bred living, modern life and living, Keki N. Daruwalla of the forgotten lore of Persia and Zarathustra, describing it from Lahore to Gujarat to the U.P. clutching along sociological, psychological and literary devices, A.K. Ramanujan is a poet of family, society, heredity, genealogy, house and social relationship. Sociology, linguistics, study of vernaculars and anthropology take the canvas from him. The readers expect for some romantic strain which is but not in a plenty in him. To read him is to be drawn into house matters which it is difficult to settle.

While taking up Two Poets: A.K. Ramanujan (Relations) and Keki N. Daruwalla (Apparitions) under On Books portion, Nissim Ezekiel writes:

“Ramanujan’s poetics sustains a fine tension between the traditional and the contemporary. He has not surrendered to either but is master of both, keeping his careful distance from them.” - (Nissim Ezekiel, Selected Prose, Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi, 1992, p.153)  

Poetry to Ramanujan is striders moving, second sight given or taken; poetry is relations, family matters and relations thought about; Ramlila enacted; folkloristics discussed.

To read A.K. Ramanujan is to come to know that he would about samskaras, South Indian rites and rituals, his academic journey from India to the States and his teaching of in the department of South Asian languages and culture rather than English and American literatures and from his writings he does not seem to be an expert of that, but of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and so on. A South Indian he talks of the South. As a poet, he appears to be a folklorist rather than a teacher of English. Barring the Southern culture and ethos, has he not anything to tell? His is an astrologer’s poetry; a palmist’s; a cosmologist’s; a horoscope-maker’s. It is better if we read R.K. Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day and Father’s Help while interpreting his poems. An astrologer; a horoscope-maker; a matchmaker from South India is in essence A.K. Ramanujan, whether you believe it or not. Somewhere he astonishes us with when he talks of the Naga Panchami.

In the words of K.R.S. Iyengar,

“When A.K. Ramanujan’s The Striders (1966) was published by the Oxford University Press and won further recognition as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, he stabilized his position as one of the most talented of the ‘new’ poets. He has also Englished with great simplicity and force some of the vachanas from Kannada and some of the love lyrics from the Kurunthohai (Fifteen Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology, 1965).” - (K.R.S. Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1987, p.671)    

“His more recent Relations: Poems (1972) is an even maturer achievement, and is something of a bridge spanning childhood and age, and India and America.” - (Ibid, p.672)

His poetic journey is from hasya to vyangya to vakrokti, from humor to satire, jibe and irony to the oblique approach of which he is but an expert, a master persona dabbling in. His is poetry of overtones and undertones. A poet, Ramanujan is an ironist first and foremost and to create humor is his forte. Family matter is the purview of his viewing, the range of deliberation, homely stuffs. A reading of his poetry shows him Southerner rather than Indian and universal. He had been in America, but there is nothing as that of Americanness and Americanism in his poetry; even the diaspora dais. Why did he go to foreign if he had to talk of Southern vernaculars, why did he to the States if he had to be horoscope-seer, a palmist, an astrologer, a soothsayer; a ritualist, a folklorist? As a poet of South India and Southern conventional matters, he is basically of Kannada and Kannada things rather than Malayalam and Telugu in particular though Tamil may hinge upon him for whatsoever reason. It will be better had Ramanujan been a professor of folklore and folk studies rather than English. A professor of translation studies and vernaculars he should have held positions in this way rather than English chairs and positions.  

Second Sight as a collection is inclusive of the poems as such, Elements of Composition, Ecology, No Amnesiac King, In the Zoo, Questions, Fear, Astronomer, Death and the Good Citizen, The Watchers, Snakes and Ladders, Pleasure, A Poor Man’s Riches 1, On the Death of a Poem, A Poor Man’s Riches 2, A Minor Sacrifice, Alien, Saturdays, Zoo Gardens Revisited, Son to Father to Son, Drafts, At Forty, He too Was a Light Sleeper once, Highway Stripper, Middle Age, Extended Family, The Difference, Dancers in a Hospital, Moulting, Some People, Connect!, Looking and Finding, Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees, Looking for the Centre, Chicago Zen, Waterfalls in  a Bank and Second Sight.

Ecology as a poem twitches us for an explanation and expression and how to say it that? The poet after an interval returns home, sees the champak flower trees in bloom, so filled with flowering blooms, pollen scattering, an aura spread around, bubbling with fragrance emitted and beauty writ large, but he feeling it disturbed to see his mother affected by migraine on the one hand while on the other the mind full of suggestion and compelling advice as for cutting the trees and clearing them off, but something holds him back from and he reverts back to, finally deciding to keep them uncut and as usual as because we get flowers in a plenty for worship and the household members like to be with for wedding-time use and beauty sake. 

Let us see how he takes to,
The day after the first rain,
for years, I would come home
in a rage,

for I could see from a mile away
our three Red Champak trees
had done it again,

had burst into flower and given Mother
her first blinding migraine 
of the season   
- (A.K. Ramanujan, Second Sight, Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi, 1986, p.14) 

The poet tells about the poetic process, how a poem is made, how the materials are utilized and how we miss it in catching it when fired by the fever and frenzy of writing, feeling the inner compulsion to express, but for some they grapple with lines to bring them out strugglingly. 

Here we may choose a small poem named On the Death of a Poem:

“Images consult
one
another

a conscience-
stricken
jury,

and come
slowly
to a sentence.” 
- (Ibid, p.33)

To read Ramanujan is to tell a different story of poetic narration which but know we not. But the poems which have come down to us do not entertain us. They do not seem to be poems, but as prose exercises. Most of the poems which he has written tell of peculiar stories. What is he? A traditionalist or an experimentalist, we do not know, as he keeps indulging in family matters. It is really very difficult to tell. Sometimes he turns to Zen Buddhism, sometimes the striders take his mindscape. Ramanujan is not a poet, but a family man of family matters and we are here in such a realm of poetry as for hear his typical talks which never intend to end.

The Striders as a collection published in 1966 contains in The Striders, Snakes, The Opposable Thumb, Breaded Fish, On a Delhi Sundial, A Leaky Tap After a Sister’s Wedding, Two Styles in Love, Still Life, This Pair, On the Very Possible Jaundice of an Unborn Daughter, Still Another for Mother, Lines to a Granny, A Rather Foolish Sentiment, Looking for a Cousin on a Swing, I Could Have Rested, On Memory, Instead of a Farewell, Sell-Portrait, The Rickshaw-Wallah, Which Reminds Me, Sometimes, Chess Under Trees, No Man Is an Island and so on.

Relations published in 1971 incorporates in It Does not Follow, but When in the Street, Man and Woman in Camera and Out, A Wobbly Top, Of Mothers, among other things, THE HINDOO: he doesn’t hurt a fly or a spider either, Time and Time Again, Love Poem for a Wife, 1, Routine Day Sonnet, Army Ants, One, Two, Maybe Three, Arguments against Suicide, One More After Reading Homer, Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day, etc.

The poems included in The Black Hen have appeared after his death and these have been collected from his different computers.

The Black Hen published in 1995 is inclusive of poems such as, The Black Hen, Foundlings in the Yukon, Dream in an Old Language, Shadows, At Zero, Salamanders, Traces, Fire, Birthdays, Fog, One More on a Deathless Theme, August, Three dreams, It, Not knowing, On Not Learning From Animals, Blind Spots, Love 1: what she said, Sonnet, Mythologies 1, Love 2: what he said, groping, Turning Around, Love 3: what he said, remembering, etc.   

Excerpts from a Father’s Wisdom taken from The Striders contain in some small poems in as usual form as they take on their course. Fatherly advice and wisdom help him in getting over.

Despair
Just comb your hair.
You shouldn’t worry about Despair.   
Despair is a strange disease.
I think it happens even to trees.   

Day and Night
Only the day is up-to-date,
Even in ancient times,
night           
was ancient.
- (A.K. Ramanujan, The Collected Poems of A.K.Ramanjuan, Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi, 1995, p.41)

Let s take another poem from the same title:

Poverty is not easy to bear,
The body is not easy to wear.
So beware, I say to my children
unborn, lest they choose to be unborn.
- (Ibid, p.42)