Shreela Ray: An Introduction

Abstract

Shreela Ray: An Introduction Kazim Ali (bio) I want to talk about the “secret history.” The term itself acknowledges that whether the history is known or not, it has an impact upon our present lives, which is to say the “secret” is worth knowing. It’s not only to better understand our present that we seek to learn the secret history: we also want to give due to past masters who were marginalized by political conditions, colonization, or intended or unintended discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or national origin. We also want to actively work on constructing (or reconstructing or restoring) our own lost lineages; excavating those lineages also provides a means for the present to affect the future. At the previous festival, I was asked to give a lecture considering the Asian American canon. This lecture was later published as an essay called, somewhat ominously, “The End of the Canon.” The reason I worried about this canon was that in terms of South Asian American poetry, to narrow the focus a little, that canon has had tenuous beginnings. In the essay, I discussed the early deaths of two important South Asian American poets, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) and Reetika Vazirani, who died just two years later (1962–2003) and after publishing only two books (a third was published posthumously). The third poet I discussed in that essay, Meena Alexander, has also since passed away. But of these three poets, none were widely published in the US in the 1970s. Ali’s first US book was published in 1987; his earlier two books were published in Calcutta. Alexander’s first US book was published the following year, 1988. Vazirani is somewhat younger; her books came out in 1997 and 2003. The first widely read and widely published South Asian American poet was, in fact, Shreela Ray. Ray’s lyrics—often stark, sometimes tart, always sharp—were among the first poems I encountered in English when I was a high school student studying poetry in western New York. The individual poems came to me first in the form of strongly smelling, nearly damp, purple-lettered mimeographed copies in a workshop at the public library taught by a local poet named Elaine Chamberlain, and then later in my high school creative writing class, courtesy of my teacher Mary Richert. It wasn’t until I was researching this lecture that I came to know that Mary Richert knew Shreela Ray quite well, and that the summer after that first early creative writing class, Richert and Ray had gone on an epic cross-country road trip in India. Shreela Ray was born in Orissa province (now called Odisha) in India in 1942. Born into a Hindu and Christian Indian family, she spent her early [End Page 103] childhood in England and India and then moved to the United States for college in 1960, attending the Iowa Writers Workshop to receive an MFA in Creative Writing, and later attending the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She developed relationships with many of the leading luminaries of the time who recognized her talent, among them W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, John Berryman, William Meredith, Isabella Gardner, and Galway Kinnell, as well as Leslie Fiedler and John Logan, with whom she studied at the University of Buffalo; Logan later wrote the introduction to the one-and-only volume of poems she published during her lifetime, Night Conversations with None Other (Dust Books, 1977). Ray eventually married a fellow student, Hendrik De Leeuw, and settled in Rochester, New York, where she became part of the burgeoning poetry scene then centered around Al Poulin, a professor at Brockport State College who would go on to found the influential small press BOA Editions and the Brockport Writers Forum in Rochester, New York. She began publishing her work in national venues, including Poetry, in the mid-1960s. Ray’s work was noted for its urbane and cosmopolitan phrasing, its dark wit, and the multiple lineages from which it drew—as much from a contemporary Indian lineage that might include Kamala Das, Adil Jussawalla, and Eunice De Souza as from a more global Anglophone lyric as favored by Seamus Heaney, Derek...