Beyond the confessional

WHEN does a writer discover his own voice and identify it as distinct from that of his ancestors or his compeers? When he swings away from the other voices that drown his own in the early years - perhaps. But when does that happen? What makes him do it? How does he know his difference and difference? We remember that when British/ American poets started the confessional genre, our poets in India jumped on to the bandwagon and started confessing with all their vehemence - outdoing the British/ American confessionalists. That certainly is not the way to identify one's own authentic voice. Temptations are many in the ways of writing poetry.

These speculations were occasioned by the new slim volume brought out by Gopikrishnan Kottoor who has for sometime been engaged in the process of discovering his identity and inventing his own style. Patent, autobiographical, he avoids being sentimental or confessional. The title Father: Wake Us In Passing is one long poem (36 pages in close print) although the poet describes it as "a book of poems". Gopi Krishnan's poetry comes of age in this sustained polyphony of his own voice: what had been kept at bay all these years, his poetry in the making, rushes forth as the floodgates open. The dying father had to beckon the son to claim his own. The opening lines give a hint of this self recognition:

This is not In memoriam

This is not an elegy

Look, I've come.

I've come across the seas for you.

I've cried alone in single rooms

To forget the last frozen look in your eyes

While I climbed the plane

Father wants him to come back. And then the son remembers:

I know you'll want me to come.

Because we have hurt each other the most.

You hurt my flesh

You hurt my heart

You threw me out of the house

With the first smell of whiskey on my breath.

But now father is in hospital. "Pain walks across the curves of your writhing face". He wants his son to come back:

"Son, what is there in America?

Come back."

And then the poem bursts into a splendour of silver and gold. Now it is the son's turn:

Father, in America

The fall is now breathless beauty

The cypresses draw crimson upon their leaves

The boughs bend low

Looking for the beauty of blood

In their own reflections.

Upon the water's edge

Maple leaves fall

With a redness of cheeks around the blaze of strange funerals

Holding mist with a wetness of tears

The dialogue goes on. And as the poem gains in insight, the son recreates the image of the father: a full scale image of the man as father. Child is the father of...

I have set about doing the things

You loved most about me.

About a gift called poetry.

Never wrote like this before

Perhaps never again must

Writing about pain

Is cruel.

Until one learns about the implicit cruelty of pain, one hasn't become mature. It is through the sufferings of the father that the son becomes mature. What a price! But is there another way? Hence, cruel, indeed! But who drives the pen?

I do not want to write these poems

But you don't seem to want to make me stop.

So the little details of the family - mother, sisters and others. Grief is replaced by anger is replaced by bitterness is replaced by pain: they go in circles. Then come the memories of the past - father's college days - only there is no let up in the intensity of the pain or the intensity of the poem. The pain is the poem - as the first of poets Valmiki realised. So everyone prays:

Father, please let go

We loved you so long

We'll always love you

I've come to light your fire

Let me.

But flashes of poetic vision induce thoughts of beauty and silence:

Deep in the mind's sea

You are the lonely boat in distant sail

You are there alone by the rocks

Where the tired gulls

Fall dead

Breaking their feathers

To memoirs.

The son knows he fulfills the father's pet dream and their understanding is the achievement celebrated in the process. Hence, it is no elegy, no lament, but a strange kind of painful celebration. Hence the tryst between father and son becomes the poem caused by the father:

Once upon a time there was no pain.

There was no need to appease gods.

So God made fathers cry out in their hospital beds

For their eldest sons.

At moments such as these

He moved near ones far away

Brought the far ones near

He made man die crying out the name of his beloved

And to add to pain

To bring beauty to pain

As when color flares in fire

He made a son a word carver

And weighed his father

Between death and sleep,

And the son wakes up

In the middle of a dream

Where the father appears

In the shroud of Turin

His hands rise

As in the resurrection

His words blaze across the red skies

Son, turn my sleep

Into your waking

Turn my coma

Into your calm beautiful poem

So it was on Easter Sunday, marking the resurrection propheised by the poem, father was called to heaven, leaving the son to manifest his infinite creative power - installing him into the position of poet. The apotheosis closes the poem:

Slow ashes to ashes

Is perhaps the tryst you made,

Dearest, silent hill,

Where ancient crosses

Sprout and bleed

And down by the rivers of our sorrow

The calm, sleeping hamlet of your face.

AYYAPPA PANIKER

Father: Wake Us in Passing,

Gopi Kottoor, The Poetry Chain, p.36, price not stated.

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