Indian English Poetry An Evolving Literature Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Indian English poetry is an evolving literature,
Is evolving,
Has not,
Will take time to evolve
And the poets we read here
Are evolving poets,
There was a time
When we used to read dead poets,
But after posthumous awards
We have changed over
To reading them
In their life
So that we know
From them
The sources of their poetry
Which after writing
Many forget it
As for what occasions it
This or that
Hurt his sentiment
Or inspired him
As the whiff of thought and idea,
Imagery or reflection,
Image or motif,
Passing through the valleys wild,
The cloud of myth and mysticism
Shrouding in mist and fog.

Evolving as for
That they do not have books,
But booklets,
Not even good manuscripts
And even if some have
They are not able to publish,
Bring them out,
Which but God knows,
Who has or who has not,
Generally one or two-poem writers
Turn into poets or poetesses,
Not to say of one book,
One book or two-book writers
Into established poets
Seconded by journal editing.

The practitioners were minor voices,
Writers of slender anthologies,
Rhymers, commoners,
Non-poets,
Poetasters and non-poets,
But what to be done with,
Indian English poetry
Not English poetry,
But Indian poetry in English,
A motley of crowds,
The ragged men as poets,
The patriots
Of Gregory
And the Ram bhaktas hanuman not,
But Gandhian freedom fighters
In topi and lathi
Meaning Indian, Hindustani poetry
In English, Indian things,
Indian things in English.

When were the poets
Introduced in courses
On a massive scale,
Who was the first Sahitya Akademi prize recipient
For poetry,
When was it,
Say you,
How can all the poets,
The birds of feather flock together,
The poets published from
Writers' Workshop, Calcutta,
Even those who had ten to twenty pages
Too turned into
And it is a fact
As most of the modern poets of today
Had no more than fifteen to thirty pages
In total somehow.

Even poems of Gitanjali were not
In higher classes,
For what,
For taking them as one of
Indian thought and culture
And loose sentimentality
Carried from Bengali literature
As translated things and objects,
Portions from Savitri
We also thought them not
Of including
Rather than Milton's Paradise Lost
Which Aurobindo emulated he not,
Sarojini too lapsed into
Loose sentimentality and copious jottings
Rather than sounding English
Sounded they Indian
And we had to read English,
Something English.

The poets not, practitioners wrote
In the absence of tradition,
Ethos and history,
Formed a group,
Mutually appreciated each other,
Brought together with,
Self-published, self-styled poets,
The no-men of poetry
Coming as no-men,
Going as no-men,
Writing in the absence
Of an established tradition,
Making a way into,
Staking a claim over.