Nupur Shah

Figure with Landscape and Wind (as painted by Snehal Vadher)

I was

when I looked at you-- when?--

outside with the other worlds

                            —Paul Celan

language is solitude and seepage and

passing through the heart's burningness I too

have studied the slightest air

that giddy atmospheric of light waved

like uncertain curtains

billowing across roomful of mountains

reclining ruggedly against the horizon

I have seen the sky lurch ahead

as if hungry for more

space where there was no space

or an appetite for alive

you call poetry that loudest of whispers

uttered forth by distantly possible birds

where birds of distant possibilities

breath us and break us into alveoli

sized epiphanies

in the darkness of their bright hue

we choose

(from a fiction of feelings)

the word present

presently coming and presently going 

through everything ever present

in the private gravity of our wounds

how they ripple like sulphur 

in the wind where we are

mostly naked barely bandaged

by desire's green leaves we seek

the time that splits us

into man from woman

into a face averted

from the fangs floating underneath

into the difference we redeem

when I loves the other

how everything rises

from the navel of a poem

blowing nuggets of nostalgia

like a cloudream drip by drip

passing over your verses

they have summerred towards me

from your Himalayan heights

to my traffic jammed streets

I have read you in the heart

of a lonely city

all the lines running aslant

saying hello to cigarettes and hello to flowers

all blue on my tongue busy

peeling off language

sucking searing life

down to its rusty rinds

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Statement of Homage 

The first feeling that mazed through my mind when I came across the three poems of Snehal Vadher in POETRY Magazine from which this afterwork is influenced, was the pleasure of paradox.

For example, the gorgeously titled “Figures in a windswept language” (which I deconstructively regenerated to procure my own title) begins with “As if what I wanted to say most/would be lost in the saying,” nothing specific is said, except that what is conveyed is a specific imagery that gives way or rather emerges out of a very vaguely precise feeling.

Beckett, in a manuscript of one of his plays, coined the verb "vaugening": this is the process Vadher's/the reader's emotions undergo in the course of becoming present to his poems, which are all loose, verbal, constructions revolving around a tightly described natural imagery. Hence, the syntax most preferred by him is of the run-on line, which contributes to the mixing up of metaphor and mood that results in an aesthetic that demarcates only to dissolve the border between inside and outside, self and world, natural and constructed.

All this is just to say how a “broken syntax” best expresses the “felt unity” of being.

“Beauty is brief and violent” begins another poem that directly inspired the first line of this afterpoem. Vadher's fluidity of imagery coupled with a directness of declaration masterfully conceals a depth of thought in seeming so natural. This paradox arose as a challenge to me who likes to (needs to) work with a critical/ conceptual framework in order to create a work that may or may not successfully transmit the intelligible thought behind it.

Since Verse of April is a (unique) opportunity to pay off homages, I figured I could weave into this poem the complex issue of influence which is the hidden idea behind this poem. For it is towards the line “I have read you” (in the heart) that the whole poem builds, even as it is writing about the way “you” has been read and is now being converted into the (lyrical) “I;” this is a process that necessarily entails creating a difference, one that is manifested via a movement away even as a coming closer takes place: the central pleasure and paradox of  aftercreation or creating after that I hope to hint at through the epigraph, where Celan speaks for me as much as for the work called a poem which he elsewhere defines as "a lived language."

Snehal Vadher

Snehal Vadher lives in a Himalayan town where he teaches English to schoolchildren.

He has studied Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at universities in the UK.

He was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship for Creative Writing in 2014.

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