| About Books Interviews & Poems Calendar | |||||
| Interview & Poems | |||||
AN INTERVIEW WITH MEENA ALEXANDER in the Kenyon Review By Ruth Maxey Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan. When she was eighteen she went to study in England. She now lives in New York City, where she is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her eight volumes of poetry include the collections, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, and Raw Silk (2004). Much of her work is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer’s subjectivity, and with the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders, while a number of her recent poems, such as “Late, There Was an Island” and “Triptych in a Time of War,” deal with the aftermath of the traumatic events of September 11, 2001. Alexander has produced the acclaimed autobiography Fault Lines (1993), chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993, and revised in 2003 to incorporate significant new material. She has also published two novels, Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997); a book of poems and essays, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996); and two academic studies, which include Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989). She is currently at work on a new collection of poems and a volume of notes and essays on poetry, migration, and memory. This interview took place at the Graduate Center, City University of New York on February 25 and 28, 2005. [read the full interview] Other interviews and articles: |
|||||
Illiterate Heart I. I was Marlowe and Kurtz and still more So it was I began, unsure of the words Or one in white flannels II. How did I come to this script? Those children wore starched knicker O white as milk I imagined them dead all winter The books sat between Gandhi's Experiments He told us that the people of Jerusalem III. What beats in my heart? Who can tell? Letters grew fins and tails. My body flew apart : then utter stillness as a white sheet Black milk of childhood drunk
IV. At noon I burrowed through Nights I raced into the garden. What burnt in the mirror aa i ii u uu au um aha ka kh Uproar of sense, harsh tutelage: A child mouthing words I will never enter that house I swore , And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly, V. In dreams I was a child babbling Grown women combing black hair O the body in parts, a child in a village church Or older now To be able to fail. Yes, The movement towards self definition. Can this make music in your head? These lines took decades to etch free, Someone I learn to recognise, |
|---|
Fragments I start to write fragments (Who lives in my mind? I want to write: I felt it, though it did not come Could sense come in feverish script Or was that the wrong way around? hard as I tried to figure it through: thrust out of the main trunk the slash in it bright gentian, |
|---|
Rites of Sense In twilight as she lies on a mat She lies on a mat, a poor thing beached, Beyond her spine I catch a candle glisten. All night my voice laced through dreams What words of passage to that unlit place? Amma, I am dreaming myself into your body. Will you lay your cheek against mine? You washed me once, gave me suck, Taught me to fire a copper pan, stitch my woman's breath |
|---|
Bengali Market Dear Mr. Gandhi Ten years later entering Bengali market Can you describe this? I saw him then, your grandson a sign: Dr. Gandhi’s Clinic. that gentleman gets my mail and I his. Later he sought me out in dreams. Listen my sweet, for half of each year, In our country there are two million dead All day I hear the scissor bird cry Now our boys and girls take My hands like yours are stained |
|---|
Raw Silk l. Raw silk In another life I crouched on the stone floor reading poetry cette paisible rumeur-la that sort of the thing guns, grenades, blisters of smoke Through the bars of a white washed school room Far from Kerala amma fed me tales -- grandmother coaxed mulberries silkworms coiled under the skin of leaves the courtyard was a sea of blood. the wedding sari with its brocade was wrapped in muslin ll. Child, its bad enough to be in a desert land How could I say that in the sandstorm Rimbaud setting fire to a felucca, syllables run amuk, as red dates clustered hence poems I committed to memory I wept in sorrow I could scarcely bear a girl child pinned to a bed and smoke rose from an island in the Nile Should I cast it all away Could I have uttered what I didn’t know -- it is the color of colostrum. O inwardness its own reward Amma there are silkworms above your head and mine doffs her veil and sets a crown When I open the drawer I touch smoke, |
|---|
Letters to Gandhi Slow Dancing Dear Mr. Gandhi How did you feel when they shut and the wounded clung outside? What lips, what soles O so many questions sir, Its hard to hear you, even syllables have skin. and you have crawled therein. I see you at the rim of heaven face seared by a moon the archipelago of light Dear Mr. Gandhi in the the dark |
|---|
August 14, 2004
I have never been to Krakow, It was a green day when you died and hard the telling of it, The west is a knot of thundershowers, Instead of honey bees, bullets swarm. On a dresser made of mahogany Red earth in pouring rain, Was it wet in Krakow when you died? Through coast lines gashed by mist Torment of the ant and ox, You kept note of it all, Cotton from India, crystal from Lithuania, Gold fish, icon of the journeying soul, Ferocious toil with pitchfork and spade. You cannot answer now. You turn away from the window pane, Hour by hour as you come close to your death Man or woman I cannot tell, Reads in a slow, clear but quavering voice, Crystalline disturbance of the liquid atmosphere Reads in the tongues of men and of angels, Zone of limestone, chestnut and linden Book of the migrant soul, |
|---|
Closing the Kamasutra In another country at the river’s edge |
|---|
Love in the Afternoon 1. Late in the afternoon, two days running Backlit clouds hump into hills Waves mimic a house -- Wild flag flung over nothing, *** In a back room two children She with hair drawn back He, tender cheeked Fit to brush her lips. A calling card returned, sans address *** Two floating frames Petals of the dark lotus Sucked from a weaver’s hands, 2. These are declensions of dream, merely In our middle years we drop Will slit wrists hunger for skin? By finger and phantom thumb Release a rare sweetness, *** In a house made of sand Goes down the veranda steps Her lips moist with voiceless syllables. Bold vernacular Our goings out and comings hither 3. Late in the afternoon, two days running Trailing behind In underground light I see Beatrice, child who swallows Her short skirt cut of cotton Stuck between her thighs *** Seeing her, the poet fainted. On seeing a nine year old girl What does this tell *** When they picked him up As if the sky had torn a hole And I heard him cry: Facing my love New York City, June 2005 Published in, American Poet, Volume 29, Fall 2005 |
|---|