Pushing Buttons

King continuedfrom previous page read the fifty pages of lyrics and be unaware of the subtle distant rhymes, the recurrence of words and sounds, the plays on words, the artistic use of images , and the variety ofrhythmic structures. Kolatkar was a major poet by any standard, and for those conscious of form and technique, Jejuri is pure enjoyment , an unselfconscious, quiet display of how to make verse appear natural without becoming prosaic. Readers who mostly know Indian poetry from those writers who live in the US or publish internationally — Vikram Seth, Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Alexander, Jeet Thayil, AK Ramanujan—may be surprised to find such a generally unknown major poet and poem. But that is what Rushdie, Mishra, Chaudhuri, and others have been saying: there are Indian poets working in English as talented as the more famous prose writers. For Chaudhuri, Koladcarprovides an additional point of interest. When Chaudhuri began writing, he examined these Indian poets for their subject matter and for how they used English words to express local experiences. I think he found in Kolatkar a way of writing about and giving significance to, without sentimentalizing , what might oflierwise appear as odds and ends, trivial and ordinary; this is a way offocusing on many areas of Indian life and history ignored by tíiose who, like Rushdie, foreground large themes and colorful language. In persuading the NYRB Classics to publish Jejuri and in writing the introduction, Chaudhuri is perhaps suggesting a line of descent that is likely to be omerwise ignored in the West's notion ofthe postcolonial . It is a helpful coincidence that Chaudhuri's St. Cyril Roadand Other Poems (2005) was recently published in India. The volume includes early verse written before his better-known novels, as well as more recent poems. In the early poems the speaker, a young man, wanders about Bombay noting various ignored bits of history and such odd social facts as Christian minorities continuing to live as in times past. He is like Baudelaire's flâneur; there is no grand narrative, no large theme. These might not appear to be interesting poems unless you give them attention, in which event they become highly concentrated essences or distillations. There is a lineage, then, from the imagism ofPound and Williams to Kolatkar and, eventually, to Chaudhuri's verse and novels. Bruce King is the author o/Modern Indian Poetry in English andThree Indian Poets: Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Moraes, both published by Oxford UP. Pushing Buttons Mark DuCharme Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English Tosa Motokiyu Edited by Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez Combo Books 7 Old West Wrentham Rd. Cumberland, RI 02864 76 pages; paper, $12.00 Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow TenThousandSwords is a book of poetry which masquerades as non-poetry, or vice versa—just as its author masquerades as Other in order to lend borrowed authenticity toward what is, on one level, sheer poetic fraud. The fraud in question (if that is what it is) occurred back in the early 1990s, with the appearance in literary journals of a number of "translations" of poems by an alleged survivor of the United States's nuclear attack on Hiroshima, one Araki Yasusada. Yasusada's poems quickly drew international praise and attention— and even more attention when word got around that they were not the work of this fictional author at all. The Yasusada poems, which have generally been admired by even some of the harshest critics oftheir (real?) author and his project, were subsequently collected in Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks ofAraki Yasusada ( 1 997). Now, some eight years later, comes this slender volume of Yasusada's letters in English, most addressed to a mysterious US correspondent named Richard. The book is constructed, on one level, as a play between exaggerated claims toward the authentic and their deliberate, almost gleeful, undoing. It opens with a facsimile page from the notebooks of Tosa Motokiyu, a pseudonym for the "true" Yasusada author who (if one believes the editors—a big if) passed away in 1996. This is followed by Motokiyu's dedication, which reads in part: "Please find yourselves in the...