[New-Poetry] Vikram Seth on the Almanac

[Anny Ballardini]

WEDNESDAY, 20 JUNE, 2007
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Poem: "Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile..." by Vikram Seth, from All You Who Sleep Tonight. © Phoenix The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 1990. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

"Sit, drink Your coffee here; your work can wait awhile..." 

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.


Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Vikram Seth, (books by this author) born in Calcutta, India (1952). In 1975, he moved to the United States to get a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford, but he took poetry classes on the side. He wrote his dissertation on the economics of Chinese villages, and then got a grant to travel to China. He spent two years there, and in the summer of 1982, he decided to walk and hitchhike from China back to his birthplace in India, traveling through Tibet and Nepal along the way. He carried a journal with him and wrote down his thoughts throughout the journey. 

When he got back to the United States, he sent his travel journal to a publisher, and it became the first book that publisher had accepted out of the slush pile in more than a decade. The book was called From Heaven Lake (1983), and it got great reviews.

Seth went on to publish several collections of poetry. He was reading a lot of book-length poems at the time, such as Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and it occurred to him that no one had ever written a book-length poem about contemporary American life. So he wrote an epic rhymed poem about California yuppies called The Golden Gate. It tells the story of the computer engineers working in Silicon Valley, developing the early version of the personal computer. He sent the finished product to every poetry publisher in America, but they all turned him down. He almost gave up hope, but a fiction editor happened to pick up the manuscript. Seth hadn't even thought of trying to sell the book as a novel, but that's how it got published in 1986, as a novel in verse.

Seth moved back to Calcutta, India, to live with his parents in the late 1980s. He wanted to write something that would capture the sweep of history from India's independence up to present day, so he invented four Indian families and told what happened to each of them in the wake of India's independence. After several years of writing, he sent the manuscript to his agent. It was 5,000 pages long. His editor helped him trim it down to about 1,500 pages, but the novel, A Suitable Boy (1993), became the longest single-volume work of fiction in English since 1747. It became a best-seller in India, England, and the United States. 




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Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
Friedrich Nietzsche 
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