G. V. Desani, the legend Options

[Vineet]

i was in a conversation with quintellect on desani (over pm) and i promised to send him this unpublished (it was only published in a periodical -- the illustrated weekly -- once) but then i decided to also post it to the board for readers' viewing and commenting pleasure:

NO REASON, NO RHYME

Come, or Correspond, Ezra Pound

By G.V. DESANI

I will make a pact with you, Ezra Pound!
(Because you made a pact with Walt Whitman and) because,
For no reason at all, and because
To do something abnormal and extraordinary is a psychic necessity
for us poets and artists, and because
This is the declared International-Tourist-Year, you understand.

II

Lacking communication with the great, the images yielded by life
hitherto have been too too ordinary.
See here: the ketchup’s on the shelf, the paraffin’s in the tin, and
The rice’s lost its ‘pearling’ (the grains do not separate as they
did in Dun):
(How do you rhyme it? Dun with Maldoun? Rice with averice? Dig
the rhymes of that lovely bloke O. Nash! ‘Swoon’ with “Rubies
of Rangoon”!
That with ‘Afternoon’, “Daniel Boone” “Lorna Doone” ‘Immune’
“Governor Ruby La Foon”!
And I will give you ‘Moon’, ‘Loon’, Khoon: and here’s a shocker,
How do you rhyme ‘illicit’? With ‘felicit’? qua ‘illicity’ ‘felicity’?
And, finally, how do you rhyme Nash? With cash? hash? mash?
dash? lash? rash?)
Got a touch of rhyming, Pound! But all that too is too normal, too
ordinary!

III

Ordinarily, too, frogs croak, because a neighbour’s in farming, and
he waters it,
Nothing heroic ever happens at all!
No peacock with sapphire fire upon’t ever dances,
As once danced once, with the rose of daybreak around, about,
upon and on all sides of it
(as a sapphire set against a glowing sphere)
And the marble (upon which the peacock alighted for a dance)
was splendoured too by the winter sun
And the glittering river flowed past (coursing towards the sea)
And I had in my palm then the romance of all of Hindusthan, in
the span of an instant!
The East is East and the West…notwithstanding.

IV

This is the Hindusthan International Tourist Year A.D. 1967: but
Spiders spin hereabout as ever they did: lizards race upon the
ceilings,
Squirrels run and rump atop the roof, nois’ing it:
Mice have mastered my meagre miniature coffee-estate cottage,
The boy next door’s chasing the pup Gonder (its name),
Hang it all, Pound!
What’s extraordinary about that! And that!
Something abnormal and extraordinary must be done forthwith,
and communication established between poets, artists, space-
limitation overcomed, distance won!
So, come, Pound! Or correspond!

V

I am set in South India and it’s disconcerting because
I do not know the languages of it (am burdened with the North
Indian Lingo, dialect, et al)
(Yet I left Bengal, my last semi-permanent home, because they
render ‘Malay’ as ‘Maloy’: ‘Jai’ as ‘Joy’ (“Joy Hind!”), and
‘Ajaya’ as Sri ‘Ajoy’)
Here I don’t know what they are saying at all, in
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, lingo, dialect, et al!
Hang it all, Pound! Let’s lean on English, and leave all
language altogether apart and, at all!

VI

Now that T.S. Eliot has gone to heaven, do come (or correspond)
And so help me out of it all, gentle Pound!
To douse this melancholy, this sorry state of things,
This normality, this so ordinarily ordinary affair,

Eh, Pound!

notes
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This post has been edited by Vineet: Mar 24 2007, 02:16 PM