(Indian) Verse and the Question of Aesthetics

This is an essay in two halves. I first look at several Indian poets and how they urge the aesthetic dimension to their work. I'll then move onto race and the expectations confronted by poets of colour in the US and the UK. These writers depict alternative complexions—I focus on South Asian brownness—inventively, countering the pressure to perform a stereotyped identity. In explaining this, I'll argue a vision of poetic form, of the aesthetic, and indeed of close reading, that applies to all poems but needs restatement with reference to the postcolonial. Hence the parenthesis: a way, I hope, of respecting specificities, while launching a transnational claim to do with the machinations of form within distinct poems.