THE POETRY OF

PROF. D. V. K. RAGHAVACHARYULU

Dr. K. R. RAO

Reviewing the poetic oeuvre of professor-poets is both a rewarding experience and excruciating adventurism, for these poets work under myriad influences, absorbing them into the vital structure of their poetic corpus, and yet retaining their individual stamp of authenticity and autochthonous pulsation of feeling or imaginative perception. There is almost a cloying or over-elegant fastidiousness which renders their poetry much more cerebral than emotional, more complex than platitudinous, both in the component of their felt experience or in the poetic communication of the shared memory, which at times exhibits verbal redundancy or needless pedantry. Harold Bloom, writing about the anxiety of influence, avers: Poetic influence – when it involves two strong authentic poets – always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misrepresentation.

The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist. But this is not to traduce Prof. DVK’s Poetry which is of highest order nor shore his achievement into poetic rescission. There are a good many poets who readily lend themselves to a highly mannered poetry as exemplified in Eliot and Pound’s poetry, where the influence “takes the form of the transference of personality, a mode of giving away.” One doesn’t know whether such labyrinthine affections, of what Freud calls “family affections” transpired in the case of Prof. DVK, but it is a truism to say that he hasn’t completely steered clear of such extremities, which constrict the work of even those poets who have won international recognition. Professors Ezekiel, AK Ramanujan, Shiv K. Kumar, R. Parthasarathy and Sharat Chandra, to mention only a few, turned to poetry after a successful stint as academics, scholar-critics, as late bloomers. They too failed to extricate themselves from “the anxiety of influence”, for it acted as a corrective, as a simulacrum for all their extensive divagations. Thus poetic “misprision”, what Harold Bloom calls, is inescapable for any poet.

Prof. DVK is not a prolific poet and the total output of his poetry comprises only two collections todate. The Song of the Red Rose and Similies in Haikus. In both of these collections, there is a protean variety in theme, resilience in tone and structure coupled with a rare conceptual aplomb and imagistic brilliance. His themes range from the mere cataloguing of the facticities of the quotidian life to the diefication of Major Man, and almost with an agglutinative temper and a poetic surcease, his poems are rendered into the subtle inflection of a sensibility which absorbs light from both ends and acquires the plasticity of expression and resonance of meaning. Moving around a vast variety of themes and experiences, of a motley crowd of events and scenes, the poet encapsulates them all into his confessional mode, which carves for itself a self-space that integrates all polarities and contradictions into the flexibility of form. An image or a symbol or a myth emanates out of the constant churning of experience on its own, without any trace of slapdash inefficiency or a straining after effect. This is the singular legerdemain which the poet achieves as no other poet, and makes his poetry strident and self-consciously genuine. For instance, take this poem which acquires the aesthetic registering unabtrustvely, without any lavish jamborees.

The sky was

His begging bowel,

And the stars were

Grains of wheat,

As he went hobbling

Homeward. (Homecoming)

The poet seems to wade through a “forest of symbols” and images which enact the feeling with ease and lissomness. The poem retains its selfhood through visual prefigurement, of imagery which acquires the colourations of a liturgy. In another of his poem, “Marathwada Interlude”, the poet allows it acquire the specific notation of its locale even as he endeavours to transmute the feeling so evoked into high-pitched symbolist exercise. The first few lines show that the whole poem is conducted through highly evocative images and symbols, which makes its conceptual enactment altogether different:

In Marathwada

Sunset swished and roared

Like lions and lightning

Leaping down the hills.

And sometime later:

The antique landscape

Of ancestral Aurangabad

Rose like coral reefs.

The whole poem, as in Mehrotra’s poem, assumes the piquancy of interest and conceptual adequacy, without ever allowing it to malappropriate the facticity, which the poem seeks to evoke.

Prof. DVK also writes of the process of making a poem and the way in which a poem subsumes the subjective correlatives into the mode of its visual enactment and ingression. The poet’s wrestle with words is a perpetual beginning and a perpetual “end-game”. The struggle and lacerations of limning a poem on light is ever on, and there is no end of “voyaging”. As the poet writes:

Today

After the great stupor

Life is ready once again

To limn a poem on light. (Is Readiness All)

And again

Occasionally yours.

But rarely mine,

The life of words

Is more syntax

Than meaning. (Occasionally Yours.)

In “A Poet’s Promise”, he writes:

Hating the approximate

Makes you abstract,

And tyrant fact

Wearing the spectre of things

The poet is aware of the fact that he has no promises to make and keep away from woods and heraldic snows. But he would turn fiction into metaphor, no matter what the residue may be.

The poet is equally adept in handling weightier themes, like most of his poetic compatriots, who daub their poetic mosaic with gems of recapitulated brilliance. There is nonetheless no recourse to surrealistic pantomime, no detours to abstractionism. The feeling, flowing through the conduits of perception, is tensile and succulantly brilliant. For example, in the poem “The Second Going”, he writes:

A moment comes when

You can do nothing.

And sometime later:

Our drift

Is the sea’s drift

Swallowing the river;

Our drift is

The earth’s drift

Swallowing the sun;

Our drift is time’s drift

Swallowing the word.

The poet contemplates “nirvanana”, a regression into the primordial “Nil”, which presages the second going. The poem, with its ordinations and conceptual ordering becomes the tableau viviant, and retains its ingrained gravitas. In his poem, “Wisdom was Tedious”, the poet observes:

Wisdom was tedious then,

When in that oval sunrise

Spreading on those golden sands,

Every atom was radical light.

It is nonetheleess no escape into the “Lake Isle of Inrusfree”, but a kind of epiphany, which is symbolicaily prefigured in “the drift to radical light.”

It is significant to note that Prof. DVK’s poetry is mercifully aloof from the scatalogical syndrome, from the voyeuristic innuendoes, which ordinates the feelings of most of the post-modernist poets like Shiv K. Kumar, Ezekiel or even Mahapatra. There is no attempt at importing the exotica, and when he occasionally writes a poem on man-woman relationship, it assumes the form of a symbiotic or a mutuality of love, which is reciprocated in abundance. “Between You and Me”, the poet desires this kind of Platonic love, which is alembicated in choice phrases.

Between you and me

Thought stood forlorn

And lone, like silence

Mocking the shapes of speech.

In “Memories of Marina”, the poet describes the teen-aged nymphet:

The teen-age nymphet

Stands invitingly

On mosquito legs

Jiggling in her jeans’

Drawing praise and abuse

From toughs and beachcombers.

This is a kind of modern debasement of love when the sanctimony of love gets reduced into a mere sexual act, a perverse reduction into the quenching of lust, which is another version’ of Eliot’s perversion of love as it gets localised in his clebrated poem, The Waste Land.

It is not alogical to conclude that Prof. DVK fails to wrench himself from the academician’s idees fixe, which is a prominent feature of most of the contemporary Indian poets writing in English. And even in the choice of themes, he exhibits a tendency to fall back upon his academic training. Some of the titles of his poems bear testimony to this fact and reveal that he has fashioned for himself a peculiar niche by drawing upon the deposits of this memory, by transhuming the “usable past” to act as the mediating ground between his experience and expression. Poems such as “The Divine Mother”, “Savitri”, “A View from the Void”, “Music of Deeper Self”, “Sailing to Utopia”, are all drawn from the palimsest of memories, myths, legends, “the soul-stuff”, which Prof. P. Lal and Raghavendra Rao rebelled against, way back in 1950. Hence I have called such poetry “the poetry of misprision”, adopting Harold Bloom’s phrase. It is true that poets create their precursors but to heavily lean on the past, as does Eliot, does serve no purpose. But this is not to truncate Prof, DVK’s poetry which shows the timbre of potential both in theme and form. One hopes that he had weaned himself away from the creative cataclysm of his predecessors. As long as such influences work, one cannot perhaps refuse to accept Harold Bloom’s conclusions, when he says:

“Poetry is the anxiety of influence, is misprision, is a disciplined perverseness, misinterpretation, misalliance.”

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