Poetry Is For Those Who Wouldn’t Read It

Nilmani Phookan is considered Assam’s most distinguished living poet. Born in the village of Dergaon in 1933, he started writing poetry in the early 1950s. Inspired by the example of his precursors, Hem Barua, Amulya Barua and Maheswar Neog, he and his other contemporaries, Navakanta Barua and Ajit Barua, took to free verse, exploring and extending the possibilities of Assamese modernism. He has written thirteen volumes of poetry, and has won ten regional and national awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1981 and the Padmashri from the Government of India in 1990. He joined the Arya Vidyapeeth College in Guwahati as a lecturer in 1964 and worked there until his retirement in 1992.

Phookan has been described as a “sage-like presence” in Assamese literature. It is possible to see why. His canvas is vast, his imagination mythopoeic, his voice bardic, his concerns ranging from the political to the cosmic, from the contemporary to the primeval. The landscapes he evokes are epic and elemental: he speaks of fire and water, planet and star, forest and desert, man and rock, time and space, war and peace, life and death. And yet, you find not merely a sage’s reflective detachment here, but urgency as well as anguish and a deep sense of loss. Most importantly, to my mind, the unapologetic preoccupation with the cosmic and existential does not lead to grandiosity or a resort to misty abstractions. For even while the poetry invokes generalities, it does not ignore the scorching particular that has always been such an integral part of the poet’s province. This is poetry that can speak of “the meaning of death/ and the vacuity of living” and “the mothers of five hundred million sick and starving children”, but it can also memorialise another more fragile moment: “the yellow butterflies with wings spread on barbed wires”.

(Written by Arundhathi Subramaniam, in "www.poetryinternationalweb.org)

Here you can read a poem of this "living legend" poet of North-East India, which is my one of the favourite poems.

Poetry Is For Those Who Wouldn’t Read It

by Nilmani Phookan

A poet had stated

poetry is for those who wouldn’t read it

for the wounds in their hearts

for their fingers where thorns are embedded

for the anguish and the joy

of the living and the dead

for the outcry that trundles

down the road day and night

for the desert sun

for the meaning of death

and the vacuity of living

for the dark stones cursed by ruins

for the red patch between the lusty lips of maidens

for the yellow butterflies with wings spread on barbed wires

for the insects, the snails and the moss

for the bird flying lonely down the afternoon sky

for the anxiety in fire and water

for the mothers of five hundred million sick and starving children

for the fear of the moon turning red as blood

for each stilled moment

for the world that keeps turning

for one kiss from you

that man of dust will become dust again,

for that old saying.