Poetry In Continuum

When the Poetry Society (India) held its first competition for budding Wordsworths in 1988, they were pleasantly surprised at the response generated: over 300 entries came in. By this year, in the sixth All India Poetry Competition, entries had multiplied considerably: the judges had to work their way through over 8,000 poems.

Part of the enthusiasm could be ascribed to the greed factor unlike the traditional silver plaque n' publishing of the work that most Kavi Sammelans offer, penning the prize-winning poem here could net you either a plane ticket to London or Rs 25,000. So far, two winners have declined the ticket in favour of the moolah.

 

I know of one consortium of tennis-playing teenagers who banded together for the last three years in an attempt to produce a collective epic. It fell apart last year when one youngster pointed out that far from netting them large sums of money, the poems they'd hoped would do the trick had failed even to place, in terms of being published.

I still feel someone should have told the collective before they disbanded that the Poetry Society (India) expected a little more from entrants than limericks that went There was a young lady with a racket/Who put her clothes into a neat packet/While still on court;/The umpire said, Should you ought?/As a stripteaser, you can't really hack it.

Their work is conspicuous by its absence in the Poetry Society's first serious anthology of its members' works, Continuum. The title alone sets it apart from the other Poetry Society publications their annual compilations of the best of that year's competition efforts have become known as the Voices series. It began with Voices in the Making, proceeded logically enough to New Voices, then to a slightly desperate Emerging Voices, followed by an inspired Voices for the Future and finally, last year's no-nonsense Voices in Time.

Continuum, on the other ha-nd, is a solid, one-of-a-kind title. The mind boggles though at possiblepiring Indian poets think blank verse is the only way to go. Those limericks never stood a chance.