Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Saturday, November 1--The New Talkies: Bollywood Night


Just want to put the word out that the first-ever Bollywood Benshi night, curated by Konrad Steiner and me, is happening this Saturday, November 1st. For those of you unfamiliar with the "benshi" form, picture writers doing a live performance of an original reinterpretation of a carefully selected film clip (in this case, from Bollywood or India-themed movies) . The result is a terrifically entertaining and poetic event!

The New Talkies: Bollywood Night
Saturday, November 1 at 6:30pm (note the early time)
Bollyhood Cafe
3372 19th Street (near Mission)
San Francisco, CA

Starring:
EMILY ABENDROTH (Philadelphia) - Gunga Din / Lives of a Bengal Lancer
NEELANJANA BANERJEE - Silsila
NADA GORDON (New York) - Navrang
SUMMI KAIPA - Hare Rama Hare Krishna
RODNEY KOENEKE (Portland, OR) - Pyaasa
ANUJ VAIDYA - Purab Aur Paschim

For those of you worried about missing out on Halloween fun, the benshi happens early--and in the later part of the evening, you can choose to get your groove on at Bollyhood Cafe.

http://www.kino21.org/
http://www.bollyhoodcafe.com/

Monday, October 20, 2008

Featured Poet: Ravi Shankar














RAVI SHANKAR






Ravi Shankar is founding editor of the online journal of the arts Drunken Boat, and poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University. He has published or has work forthcoming in such journals as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, AWP Writer's Chronicle, Indiana Review, Catamaran, Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, and The Massachusetts Review. He has also been on panels for the Poets House and the Electronic Literature Organization, has held fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, MacDowell, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and has read at such venues as the National Arts Club, The Ear Inn, and Columbia University. He is currently reviewing poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and has just edited the anthology "Language for a New Century: Poetry from Asia, the Middle East and Beyond" (Norton, 2008).



Q: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written and why.

Though I don’t know – but can imagine - how corrosive abiding in Huffy Henry and Mister Bones for any extended period of time might be, I would love to have written John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. With it’s syntactic leaps and conflation of diction, its bawdy comedy and its body mordancy, the book shimmers with irrepressible song. To be able to write this “unshedding bulky bole-proud blue-green moist thing made by savage & thoughtful surviving Henry,” and “to dream awhile toward the flashing & bursting tree” would be revelatory if I only one could keep the pole charged towards exultation and not terrific gloom.


Q: Describe the place/physical location where you write.

The attic of our house, built in the 1920’s on farmland along the banks of the Connecticut River, was later known as Pine Lane when it was lived in with Richard Sachs, the expert bicycle maker and the room still retains sloping roofs, baseboard heat and has a window that looks out on the small barn we use for our storage now fringed with smatterings of leaves. When I’m really purring along at top speed, I’m “double geeking,” writing, even working on multiple pieces, while researching and querying folk and sending documents back and forth from the Mac laptop where I do most of my writing to the PC to the printer or scanner. When the surfeit of task proves too distracting, I can push back the chair, with music from ITunes to syncopate the view.

On the desk there’s only space enough to fit a modicum of books. The loose volumes accumulated around the desk, which often change, include (clockwise) Issues 7-26 of the Paris Review, Edmond Jabés The Book of Margins, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Jacques Lacan’s Ècrits, The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz and Emily Dickinson, Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Lyric Postmodernisms edited by Reginald Shepherd, Henry Ferrini & Ken Riaf’s DVD Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, an issue of Bomb Magazine and Catamaran, Ellen Susman’s literary encyclopedia of sex, Dirty Words, in which I am “quickie.” The bookshelves behind me are filled with poetry collections and adjacent me with reference volumes, science books, philosophy, collected letters and nonfiction. The remaining books reside downstairs.

Next to the printer, filled with the backsides of bureaucratic papers ready to be repatriated, is a recent photograph of my daughter, Samara, and above her, a glitter painting, an icon really, of (hope! pray! but most of all, get out the vote!) the next president of the United States Barack Obama painted by Aaron Snifit as part of a campaign to raise money for the candidate. I have some other art in the room, a fragile lily pad of an abstraction painted by Rodney Harder, a surreal bust painted by my sister Rajni Shankar-Brown, and a Christ-like figure hanging on a field of spray paint that I bought from a delirious leering savant along the Charles Bridge in the malá strana neighborhood of Prague during my junior year abroad over a decade ago. In case inspiration flags, there’s a bed in the room next door and I generally bring meals up with me when I’m working, staying ensconced in this cozy space until something worth keeping has transpired.


Q: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

A pronged answer since I have a few immediate and few longer term projects in mind. I recently reviewed Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield’s translation of Mirabai (due out in the Contemporary Poetry Review in the winter) and I’m currently working with poet Priya Sarukkai-Chabria on a new translation of Andal which has begun me on the journey towards learning the Pallava script. Tamil is my mother tongue, a language I can access aurally but not textually and another of my projects is the transliterating of certain idiomatic phrases into a contemporary English vernacular. Finally, my subconscious teems with the mythological world brought to life by Amar Chitra Katha comics and in spry, leaping Hanuman and in the illustrated fables from the Panchatantra I’m convinced there’s something in them that entrances me the way fried food might call to someone at a county fair. Eventually, inshallah, those seeds will germinate into lush or spare shapes I can’t yet envision.

Anthology takes Litquake by storm




Tanuja Mehrotra (top left)

Ravi Chandra (middle)

(Bottom) Minal Hajratwala and journalist/radio
show producer Sandip Roy

The first indication that the festival reading was going to be a runaway success was, I suppose, when I arrived early to the sound-check only to find a long line of people already filling the sidewalk outside...

By the time the event got going later that evening, there were people sitting on chairs, tables, other people, while a solid bank of poetry devotees stood patiently in an adjoining room, listening to the reading being piped in from the main stage next door. (The venue staff later estimated that there had been between 100-150 people attending the reading at any one time.)

And the night went from strength to strength. The audience even started applauding during the introductory remarks as we explained our mission behind curating and editing this ground-breaking collection. It's moments like these that make those grueling hours at the editorial desk seem worthwhile...

Our featured poets held the audience in trance as they freewheeled through a host of styles, from Tanuja Mehrotra with her "threaded ghazals", a form she has created blending together two lyric traditions, to Ravi Chandra's juggling of formal verse and syncopations from his days on the slam poetry scene, and Minal Hajratwala's languid explorations of language and sensuality. Highpoints include Tanuja breaking into song at the podium, Minal's tiara, and Ravi's request, at the start of his reading, that audience members join him, fist upraised, in a traditional South Asian chant — "Jai Obama!"

Days later, we're still receiving positive feedback from the event, here in San Francisco. We're delighted to report that two faculty members who were in the audience that night have asked us to present an anthology reading to their respective universities, while also offering to review the collection when it comes out, in their newly established journal of Asian American literature. We've also been inundated with people asking to find out more about the anthology and join our mailing list, while the venue organizers have given us an open invitation to return at any time.

Here's to future readings being as successful as this one!

Thursday, October 9, 2008

FESTIVAL FEATURE

We're coming to the close of the Litquake festival, here in San Francisco, and it's been a hectic week of panels, readings and workshops. Litquake is the West Coast's largest independent literary festival, with over 450 authors taking part this year so we're honored that the anthology has been chosen as one of the features of the final night celebrations (last year's final night was attended by over 1,000 people).

Four of the poets from the anthology (Ravi Chandra, Minal Hajratwala, Tanuja Mehrotra, and myself) will be reading at the Bollyhood Cafe, San Francisco's premier new desi hot spot. We've also invited along some local South Asian American non-poets to join us for the occasion, including the short story writer Moazzam Sheikh, novelist Balaji Venkateswaran, Falu Bakrani, who'll be reading from her book on the cultural politics of the Bhangra/ “Asian Underground” music scenes in Britain, and Minal (again!) reading from her forthcoming non-fiction book about her family: "Leaving India: My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

Congratulations to Minal on her new book! (checkout Minal's website for news on the book and her blog: http://www.minalhajratwala.com/)

Here are more details of the anthology reading at Litquake:

WRITING THE LINES OF OUR HANDS: An Evening with South Asian American authors
Saturday 11 October: 7:15 pm
Bollyhood Cafe (3372 19th St)
between Capp St & Mission St)
San Francisco, CA 94110

If you're in the area, do join us!
LITQUAKE Festival site: http://www.litquake.org/the-festival/lit-crawl-2008/

- Pireeni