Last night a line appeared,Unbidden, unsigned;
It had eight memorable
Syllables. I'll keep you,
...
This is about the green miraculous trees,
And old clocks on stone towers,
And playgrounds full of light
And dark blue uniforms.
...
If writing a poem could bring you
Into existence, I'd write one now,
...
I recognize my father's wooden skin
The sun in the west lights up his bald bones
I see his face and then his broken pair of shoes
His voice comes through, an empty sleeve.
...
Lakes do not happen
Only in geography.
I know one with a Japanese garden
And a limited zoo; it is surrounded
...
He smoked a cherry-wood pipe, knew all about cannas,
And deplored our lack of a genuine fast bowler.
My uncle called his wife Soft Hands.
...
His eyesight failed him,
But in his soldier's hands,
Still held like a sword,
Was the mirror of couplets.
...
The next one will come from the air
It will be an overripe pumpkin
It will be the missing shoe
...
The dog barks and the cat mews,
The moon comes out in the sky,
The birds are mostly settled.
...
A day in 1923.
The reading room is full.
In pin-dropp silence,
Accountants, homoeopaths,
...
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a noted Indian English poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator. He is well known for incorporating a post-modernist style in modern English poetry. Biography Arvind Krishna Mehrotra a popular name in modern English poetry was born the year 1947 in Lahore. He has published four volumes of poetry. Mehrotra had completed his education from Oxford University. Presently the poet has been nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. It is the style of Mehrotra to continually revise a small body of work, polishing, crafting, and aiming at elegance, wit precision and an impersonality which will fix the poem and the personal memories that are its source. Poetry Mehrotras poetry largely falls into two groups. His earliest work is an immediate reaction to his discovery of various modern, post-modernist and earlier avant-garde style and poetics. On the contrary Mehrotra`s present phase is different as it involves a precise recording of external, a making of art from specifics and details, the notating of what he calls, "location". Often the subject matter comes from memories of childhood or from reading history. The technique which has been used by Mehrotra is generally the surrealistic technique. He likes to juxtapose bits and pieces of sensibility as represented by clich‚d language, sentiments and situations. In the poems there has been abundant use of Allahabad because most of his poems are related to the nostalgic moments and reminiscences of Allahabad where he had spent a major portion of his life. Mehrotra`s increasing pre-occupation with personal and local realities is derived from his imagism and he demands that poetry be made of specifics and also express its locations. As a poet Mehrotra also has the capacity to create continuities and connections between language and experience. Mehrotras early poems have several characteristics of post-modernism. The form is highly fragmented and relies on collage and montage with no mythic, formal or symbolic structure to create coherence. As in much post modernist literature it seems to enclose itself with the focus on the text rather than society or history. The poems of Mehrotra show very little feeling of exhaustion and hopelessness which is noticeable in some of the other post-modernist writers. As far as humour of Mehrotra is concerned it was iconoclastic in nature. Mehrotra`s poetry offers a cool, clever, ironic catalogue of received ideas and ready made speech. Some of the notable literary works of Mehrotra includes, "The Exquisite Corpse", "The Sale", "The Roys", "The Book of Common Places and a lot more. Hence it can be concluded saying that Arvind Kishore Mehrotra had incorporated a style in his poems which had ample resemblance with post-modern literary works.)
Inscription
Last night a line appeared,Unbidden, unsigned;
It had eight memorable
Syllables. I'll keep you,
I said, falling asleep.
It's gone now,
And I write this to requite it,
And to mark its passage.
He is a poet of Allahabad, Lahore and Dehradun as he keeps interrelating them. Aaprt from that he is so private and personal. Alalhabad hangs on so much in his poetry. But apart from the locale, he is concerned with life, the experience of it and the flow of time. Sometimes oddities and incongruities are juxtaposed to show them as poetic ingredients.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra as a poet is surreal in his approach and deliberation and to study his poetry is to demarcate and charter the history of surrealist poetry and how he has chosen to delve into such a realm of poesy, a study in impact and influence, how the working of the unconscious and the conscious mind as he juxtaposes, dovetails the jointless things and welds into a whole.
I do not what is it Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's first poem that he wrote it and want to know if did he write after going through the surrealists and their works as to read him is to find that his poetry is a study in surrealism, its treatises and doctrines, testaments and pamphlets and he misses them not, ever ready to pick and uses in. Mehrotra is a poetry-maker as well as a talker of poetry; a diary-noter, a curator and a reader and a keeper of old things.
A.K.Mehrotra As a Poet: A Study In Memory & Reflection, The Surreal Influence On Mehrotra: A Study of His Poetry, The Unconscious Mind & Its Scapes: A Study of His Poetry, Poetry As The Juxtaposition of Poetic Ingredients: A Study of His Poetry, Poetry As The Topography oi Time And Place: A Study of Arvind's Poetry, etc. can be research topics.