Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose by Srinivas Rayaprol ed. by Graziano Krätli and Vidyan Ravinthiran (review)

"Poets were lonely people, I had heard, and was I not the loneliest of the lonely?"

—Srinivas Rayaprol, "Preface to Selected Poems" (145)

Our knowledge of the relationship between the poet Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams was expanded dramatically by the publication in 2018 of Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and Williams Carlos Williams, 1949–1958,¹ edited by Graziano Krätli, who is now co-editor with Vidyan Ravinthiran of a volume of Rayaprol's work titled Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose. Taken together, the two volumes reveal Rayaprol's achievement as a writer who came of age with Indian Independence and who stayed his course as an Anglophone poet throughout a career ending with his death in 1998. In his afterword to Angular Desire, Krätli offers a concise guide to the cultural and personal situation of Rayaprol in this milieu, including a critical appraisal in which he describes him, not disparagingly, as one "whose work appears to be marked, since very early, by a peculiar sense of melancholy indulgence, a deep-seated sense of disappointment, narcissistic discontent, and the recurring idea of failure as a form of success, or vice versa" ("Landscapes of the Heart" 182). If one or another of these qualities might name one aspect of the work of any number of twentieth-century poets, the occurrence of all four in one figure would seem to create a heavy, almost fatal, burden. Remarkably, on the evidence of the poems collected here, some of which were at least partially revealed as draft versions enclosed in letters to Williams in the previous volume, they continue to be of interest more than 70 years after Rayaprol presented himself to Williams as a barely fledged poet.

Rayaprol's mode of engagement with English and American poetry—notably, but not exclusively, modernist poetry—brings to the fore the aspect of a poem as an imitation of some other presumably more original utterance, the tension between quotation and originality, and the play between desire for creative aspiration and history as a damper to aspiration, disclosure, and deception. For Rayaprol, these tensions, especially the latter, are amplified by the fact that his expressed erotic desire is homosexually oriented, while the love of family—parents, wife, and children—is equally present in his affective world. Returning from a sojourn in the United States during graduate school and early professional preparation as an engineer, he imagines a freedom of erotic desire located elsewhere, in the cosmopolitan cities of New York and San Francisco. In contrast, his familiar and familial world is grounded in Secunderabad, a place he tenderly declares "mediocre" ("City of Mine," Angular Desire 113) and filled with "ordinary people […] with desires that are never fulfilled, cities never visited, and fun never had" (116). This array of absences seems, paradoxically, to make his heart grow fonder even as he remembers desires excited elsewhere. In "Heart Condition" (1984) an essay with an obviously doubly intended title, he reflects retrospectively on divisions, doublings, and perhaps sometimes feigned deceptions of his life over the past 40 years of his adult life:

But you were a poet. A half-poet and a half-engineer. So you look for a name. The secret life of Srinivas Rayaprol. An engineer by day and a poet by night. A unique combination and almost unbearable. You continue to write and publish in magazines like NEUROTICA, SYMBOLICA, GRAFFITI. You look for the odd ones. Homosexuality is a good bet. Necropolis. That's a lovely word. Once you wrote a poem called AUTOMATA, a raucologue of the DEAD. A way with the unrhyme. Gauche as they come. You smell roses and liken them to armpits. Delicious lusts. Voila: a poet is in the embryonic womb. Life is beginning to take shape. Break thy moorings and dare in...