20 feb arts & letters

inside

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Interview: Gillian Clarke

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Facebook and suffering

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Arts & Letters

Saturday, February 20, 2016

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Indian publishing at a glance

Send your submissions to: anl@dhakatribune.com

DT

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Saturday, February 20, 2016

Arts & Letters Interview

‘Poetry in its simplest forms is natural to all’ Gillian Clarke provides answers to questions about life as the Poet Laureate of Wales, and the inspiration of travelling and its effect on poetic practice

n Nathan Hassall

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orn in Cardiff in 1937, Gillian Clarke has been The National Poet of Wales since 2008 and a remarkable figure in British poetry. She is a poet, playwright, editor, lecturer, and translator. Her work -- including Poetry Book Society Recommendations, Letting in the Rumour (1989), The King of Britain’s Daughter (1993) and Five Fields (1998) as well as her TS Elliot Prize shortlisted Ice (2012) -- are emotionally laden with feminism, politics, life events, and are heavily centered around the theme of place.

Clarke is a poet whose cultural upbringing in Wales shines through her work and her contribution to the arts are widely recognised. She received the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award in 2012.

How much does the natural world inspire you?

I live in Ceredigion, 900 feet up, six miles in from the Irish Sea, which is visible between hills. We have 18 acres of land, and live several miles from the nearest village.

This is our life. Being alive is what I write about. Wales has a low-density population, and most of our towns and cities are close to the coast. Even when I lived in Cardiff, we were surrounded by the countryside, in sight of mountains, and the sea visible from everywhere I have lived.

Is poetry an extension of our relationship with the physical forces of nature which govern us in our day-to-day experience?

I am sure that is not true. Poetry is art, and like all art, it is about what human imagination makes of what we see, hear, think, etc. A main characteristic of being human is our pleasure in rhyme and rhythm, and poetry in its simplest forms (nursery rhymes, song lyrics) is natural to all. Its sophisticated forms are refined versions of human language. It’s word: Music.

How important is nationality in defining yourself as a poet as your work can be accessed across the globe by a multitude of cultures?

I am Welsh, and I don’t know a life as anything else. I never think of “defining myself,” and did not call myself a poet. Other people did.

The attention my nation gives to poetry and poets is supportive and

nurturing. My parents (not educated people) had a great love for words, books, stories, and poetry, in both langages. However, being Welsh is just one way of being human. The best writers are true to their culture, and are most universal when they express themselves through their own culture. WH Auden says: “A poet’s hope: To be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.”

Seamus Heaney is a fine example, most Irish, most universal.

Small countries look outward.

Because my work is on the GCSE and A Level syllabus, it reaches wherever English is studied. I receive a steady stream of emails from students all over the world, and I answer them all.

Wales, and be tutored by published writers.

Poetry is an art-form that most people believe they can take on.

If someone pens a piece with a bit of rhyme and structure, there is a small potential they can claim themselves to be a poet. If someone were to sit at a piano and hit the keys without any prior instruction, I do not feel they would fancy themselves as a pianist. Do you feel the intrinsic nature of poetry is such that it allows people of all abilities to call themselves poets?

Do you find that travels away from your homeland -- to countries such as Luxembourg and Bangladesh -- help your poetry go in new directions? Do you find these experiences pave the way for new and varied inspirations?

Travel turned my focus from children, home, and the domestic about 30 years ago. Every new place is fascinating, stimulating.

I am an observer. I write what I know. It’s made me friends in many countries, taught me that the human being is the same everywhere, though coloured by a multitude of cultures, languages, ways of life. I must write from my own version of being human.

In 2008, you became the Poet Laureate of Wales. What new challenges has this given you? Has this brought more pressure on you to write your poetry with Welsh readers in mind?

I like deadlines. That goes back to the weekly school essay! Over the past eight years, I must have written well over a hundred commissioned poems and poems to support something. The commissioned, or requested poem, is a tradition in Welsh culture that goes back to the 6th century. It is a “village” tradition, here in Ceredigion, that poets rise to the occasion, as long as it’s an honourable subject.

I write in English, but have ensured that all my public poems are translated into Welsh by a poet-friend whose first language is Welsh. So, on the Literature Wales website, the poems appear in both languages. I have several poems placed on buildings, walls,

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Travel turned my focus from children, home, and the domestic about 30 years ago. Every new place is fascinating, stimulating. I am an observer. I write what I know

pathways, as part of public places, and I usually use both Welsh and English in their writing.

With social media and online blogs making it simple to share poetry across the globe, do you believe the Age of Information has been beneficial to the poet? Do you think this has saturated the market in a way that devalues the art of poetry?

I don’t use social media, so I don’t see these works. It’s an open space for expression, which is good.

It will have no effect on great poetry, and its enduring value.

The Internet as a tool, an infinite library, is wonderful. As I don’t do Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and delete all invitations to connect, I can choose my correspondents, and my poets.

Some believe that poetic talents are innate or, at least, the potential is. Many fancy themselves as poets. What is your best advice to aspiring poets?

No, it is education, listening, reading, culture, and family that make a poet. Had I been the daughter of painters, maybe I would have been an artist.

In a world where we are bombarded by so much information, what advice would you give young poets who look to get their work out there and noticed?

Advice: Read, and listen. Be alert to language. Forget being “noticed.” A real writer wants to learn and improve, rather than “be noticed.” Submit poems for competitions. Book a week at a poetry course at Tŷ Newydd, our beautiful Writers Centre in North

It is because language belongs to all humans, and a love of rhyme is a child’s natural way forward.

Instead of taking the piano as comparison, take singing. All can sing, though not all are the greatest. If a person wants to write, I salute them, and welcome them aboard.

Write to enjoy it, and don’t expect fame, money, publication.

Poetry, including nursery rhymes, seems to be loved in childhood. Poetry is read at life events such as weddings and funerals, through which they can leave a powerful impact. The emotional nature of poetry is not the issue, but people’s desire to read or listen to poetry outside of these contexts presents a significant problem in poetry’s popularity.

This is an out-of date view. If “poetry’s popularity” is a problem, how come so many Literary/Poetry Festivals in Britain flourish? Why do so many young people contact me, all year round? How are so many readings by the best-known poets sell-out events?

Does modern poetry do enough to connect new readers as well as stimulate the majority of existing readers?

I have no idea. It varies from good amateur to truly great poetry, as all art does. A poet has to write true to herself, himself, and if it is appreciated, that is an extra bonus. My emails from everywhere, those sell-out events, the two-hour queues at Hay Festival signing books, the requests for a poet, special poems for events, buildings, public squares, tell how popular poetry is in Britain. It is a phenomenon, and the envy of many other countries. l Nathan Hassall is a critic for The Luxembourg Review. This interview first appeared on theluxembourgreview.org.

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Arts & Letters

Saturday, February 20, 2016

C u lt u r e

Facebook and suffering Is our socio-political discourse becoming aestheticised by social media?

n Robert Horsfield The measure of suffering is almost moot in a mediated world, and ‘[it] is difficult to think when one is appalled.’

Judith Butler, in a letter from Paris, November 16, 2015

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n Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (yes, the inspiration for Blade Runner) we read about a black box capable of generating communal empathy, condensed in the image of a man traversing a “drab hill” under a “drab sky,” projected into the user’s consciousness. Every person feels exactly what the character of Wilbur Mercer feels as he makes a Sisyphean way up the virtual hill: “He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their many individual existences. They - and he - cared about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the need to ascend.”

Later in the novel, Mercer the person is exposed as a fraud by a TV personality, but Mercerism the religion remains a comfort for the survivors, who are trapped in a society living out its paranoia of decay. Every character in the novel is saturated with concern about not just appearance, but with the authenticity of appearance.

The fallout from nuclear war corrupts human DNA to the point where most are considered no longer of the species, but “specials.” The proliferation of powerful, independently thinking android slaves has developed an industry devoted to killing replicant people.

Even Rick Deckard, the bounty hunter, and his wife, Iran, want an animal when the android they own is a perfect simulation of an organic sheep. The atomisation each individual feels in the novel becomes intensely involved with authenticity and empathy. In a society where empathy itself becomes the test by which one is determined human, it is no wonder, then, that its inhabitants seek liquidation, in order to suspend thought, to feel community.

Can we find something similar afoot in the structure of social media? Or, to ask a different question, how did Facebook approach the question of Paris?

After November 13, it handily

Every post on Facebook is at permanent risk of subornation to demagoguery

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This social currency, combined with the very real one operating within the real Facebook, the economically-minded Facebook, means every post comes with the pressure to micromanage every statement, to preface every comment, to marketise the self, and makes a politician of every user

shilled the Tricolore as a cathartic wash for every user’s profile picture. In many cases this may as well have been a Pavlovian exercise in cynicism, because immediately every person’s wall became a popinjay for thoughts and counter thoughts on a platform whose raison d’être is a unit-byunit commodification of human experience.

As it is for the first French Revolution, it is still too early to sell Facebook as the ultimate arbiter of mass sentiment but so far it has displayed an intention to dictate public terms. As if under the poet’s anxiety of influence anyone wishing to display empathy for the hurt must pass through a wall of disingenuousness to prove their

sentiment’s authentic bent, to pass off as sufficiently human.

The Guardian US writer and researcher Jamiles Larter described the average person commenting on the media coverage as the tragedy hipster, in pointing out that people used the mass murders in Ankara and Beirut not to spread awareness but to belittle another’s grievance, in much the same way that the #blacklivesmatter movement faces opposition from American conservative groups’ #alllivesmatter.

The charge helps articulate some of the concerns towards the traditional media and its approach of a postcolonial world, but doesn’t confront the problem that we risk approaching a scenario in

which our socio-political discourse becomes aestheticised, and we ourselves anaesthetised.

Kurt Vonnegut’s narrator in Slaughterhouse Five feels powerless when his accounts of the Dresden bombings receive calm but brutal comparison with Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the Tokyo fire bombings. In response, he can only say: “I know, I know. I know,” to preserve the value in his trauma. The trauma becomes asocial, the experience is muted, as it cannot be expressed or valued.

With something like social media this risk is not just magnified.

When thought is divorced from the local experience of the individual, thought loses its penetrative quality, as it ascends into a vague

statement of a possible fact to which it is impossible to relate.

Moreover, each post open to likes, comments, and shares, is at permanent risk of subornation to demagoguery. This social currency, combined with the very real one operating within the real Facebook, the economically-minded Facebook, means every post comes with the pressure to micromanage every statement, to preface every comment, to marketise the self, and makes a politician of every user.

The technology promising the largest communal space in history has emerged as the most powerful method for the standardisation of consciousness.

Important cohorts have already come to depend upon outlets such as Facebook for communication.

The risks inherent in a social media operating within an eroding base for liberty, within a hegemony driven towards peeling away Enlightenment values even from its hitherto prized European stock, may present themselves for a brief time on its communal pages. But only briefly. l Robert Horsfield has worked at the NHS. He is based in Leeds, UK.

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Saturday, February 20, 2016

P u blishi n g

Indian publishing at a glance India can be a great place for ambitious authors to try and get published

n Shazia Omar

Speaking Tigers

Manas Saikia, Managing Director

Harper Collins Publishers India

Q: What sort of books are you interested in publishing?

A: Fiction and popular non-fiction.

Q: What sort of books are you interested in publishing?

A: Good, old-fashioned literature.

However, we have 13 imprints which cover various types of books such as sports books, children’s books, self-help books, and business books.

Q: What was your best-selling book last year?

A: We are a new publishing house, we will launch our first book next month.

Karthika VK , Publisher and Chief Editor

Q: What was your best-selling book last year?

A: Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja Chouhan.

Q: How many titles do you publish per year?

A: 180, including both English and Hindi.

Q: Are you interested in publishing Bangladeshi authors?

A: Sure!

Q: Do you distribute your books in Bangladesh?

A: We try to, but the taxes are so high. We also partnered with The Daily Star to attempt to overcome some of the barriers.

Q: How many titles do you publish per year?

A: We do not know yet. It will depend on what we get.

Q: Are you interested in publishing Bangladeshi authors?

A: Yes, if they are good.

Q: Do you distribute your books in Bangladesh?

A: No, the import barriers are too high in the form of taxes and the pirated book trade that is supported by those taxes!

Q: What’s one of your favorite books, one you wish you had published?

A: Difficult to say.

Vitasta Publishing

Renu Kaul Verma, Managing Director

Q: What’s one of your favorite books, one you wish you had published?

A: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

Q: What sort of books are you interested in publishing?

A: Fiction/non-fiction with social relevance

Niyogi Books

Q: What was your best-selling book last year?

A: India’s Biggest Cover Up by Anuj Dhar -- 15,000 copies.

Bikash Niyogi, Managing Director Q: What sort of books are you interested in publishing?

A: All kinds, especially illustrated books.

Q: What was your best-selling book last year?

A: A book on Indian tea.

Q: How many titles do you publish per year?

A: 65 Q: Are you interested in publishing Bangladeshi authors?

A: Yes. Q: Do you distribute your books in Bangladesh?

A: No. Q: What’s one of your favorite books, one you wish you had published?

A: Any of the Booker Prize winners.

Q: How many titles do you publish per year?

A: 40-50.

Q: Are you interested in publishing Bangladeshi authors?

A: Yes! Q: Do you distribute your books in Bangladesh?

A: Not yet.

Q: What’s one of your favorite books, one you wish you had published?

A: I like books with a message!

Hachette India

Poulomi Chatterjee, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Q: What sort of books are you

interested in publishing?

A: Strong commercial fiction and narrative non-fiction.

Q: What was your best-selling book last year?

A: Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography – Playing It My Way. Q: How many titles do you publish per year?

A: 40.

Q: Are you interested in publishing Bangladeshi authors?

A: Yes. Q: Do you distribute your books in Bangladesh?

A: Yes. Q: What’s one of your favorite books, one you wish you had published?

A: Hard to say.

Westland

Sudha Sadhanand, Managing Editor Q: What sort of books are you interested in publishing?

A: Fiction or non-fiction with social relevance, a book with a message.

Q: What was your best-selling book last year?

A: India’s Biggest Cover Up – Anuj Dhar – sold 15,000 copies.

Q: How many titles do you publish per year?

A: 40-50.

Q: Are you interested in publishing Bangladeshi authors?

A: Yes! Q: Do you distribute your books in Bangladesh?

A: Not yet Q: What’s one of your favorite books, one you wish you had published?

A: Amish Tripathi. He sent me his book and I didn’t take it and now he’s a best-seller!

Zubaan

Urvashi Butalia, Publisher Q: What sort of books are you interested in publishing?

A: Books by women, about women, fiction, narrative nonfiction, academic books, general books, autobiography, biography, memoir, novels, stories, and books for young adults and children Q: What was your best-selling book last year?

A: Last year our bestselling book was a book by a man! Devdutt Pattanaik’s book Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You is a collection of tales from myth and legend that have to do with queer characters in our epics, etc. This book was a title we originated, and rather like your book, we did it as part of our joint list with Penguin.

It sold very well indeed.

Q: How many titles do you publish per year?

A: We try to do around 35, we don’t always succeed, often money is the problem, sometimes it’s time and sometimes it’s human resources.

We’re short on all of these.

Q: Are you interested in publishing Bangladeshi authors?

A: Yes, of course and we have quite a few: Shazia Omar, Shireen Akhtar, Hameeda Hossain, Sara Hossain, Dina Siddiqui, Shireen Haq, Meghna Guha Thakurta, Amena Mohsin and many others.

Both fiction and non-fiction and we’re looking to do many more.

Q: Do you distribute your books in Bangladesh?

A: Yes, through our distributors, but we don’t always get as many books there as we would like to. We don’t have any control over this, and basically it’s the bookshop and the distributor who makes the call.

Q: What’s one of your favorite books, one you wish you had published?

A: This is a difficult question to put to a publisher. Of course there are hundreds, and of course no publisher will ever admit that she is envious of books others have done.

But I can think of many ... and I’m not going to say how many!

The thing is, you feel envious for not having published those books, but you are also grateful they’ve been published and are available.

So it’s a sort of odd situation.

I’m a reader too so am really glad those books are around, and the publisher in me wishes they’d been published by me.

Shazia Omar is an activist for the extreme poor and Head of ProgressTracker at mPower Social.