“A Form of Howling. A Form of Chanting. A Form of Looking Out for Each Other”

Abstract

This chapter suggests that the prose poem inhabits an important place in contemporary Indian-English poetry which is, as yet, theoretically unexplored. On one hand, it is a bridge between the long and (largely) globally invisible vernacular traditions of poetry and the relatively newer traditions of poetry in the English language; on the other hand, it plays with and effectively challenges the Anglo-American poetic influences it inherits. Such a double-articulation constitutes the politics of the Indian-English prose poem, where both vernacular traditions and contemporary anglicised poetic forms are radically reinterpreted, thus enabling new ways of relating to the nation’s variegated history and, consequently, the shared (political) present it bears upon. With reference to the work of Vivek Narayanan and Nandini Dhar, this chapter examines the poems’ political gestures, both as strategic allegory and as facilitating a movement towards multiplicitious forms of poetic subjectivity, and ultimately towards the beginnings of a “lyric we.”