A showcase of verse from seven Indian poets takes over Poetry Cafe at AKLF 2024

While the main stage for the Apeejay Kolkata Literature Festival (AKLF) 2024 was set at Allen Park, not far away on Park Street, the Poetry Cafe at the Alliance Francaise du Bengale was in full flow. On the evening of February 9, a poets’ showcase was organised at the Poetry Cafe by the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL), a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting poetry. The showcase witnessed seven Indian poets share the spotlight and take it in turns to read out their poems, with a tentative time of five minutes devoted to each performance.

The first poet to present their work was Gopal Lahiri, the winner of the first Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature. He is an editor as well as a critic, apart from being a writer and a poet. The first poem he read was titled ‘Amnesia’, which had a powerful tone as he distinguished between “fades, falls, freezes, vanishes”. The second poem was an ode to Kolkata where growing old is used as a metaphor. During Lahiri’s time in South Carolina in the US, he had come across several slave cabins, which was the subject of his next poem. His last poem, ‘Memory of Sky’, was inspired by Mahapatra’s poem, ‘Dawn’.

The second poet in line was Sanjukta Dasgupta, professor and the former dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Calcutta. She is also the president of IPPL. She has received numerous awards and has 21 books to her name. She read out from her ninth book of poems, Ekalavya Speaks, describing how “my poems read me like an open book”. While reading out the titular poem, she acknowledged Rabindranath Tagore as her ‘pathfinder’, underscoring the importance of editing poems and narrating how Tagore had “heavily edited” the English edition of Gitanjali while translating it from Bengali.

Next up was Nishi Pulugurtha, an academic, poet and author with multiple books to her credit. She is also the secretary of IPPL. Pulugurtha utilised her five minutes efficiently, reading out several of her short poems. The first poem, called ‘The Real and the Unreal’, garnered the most attention.

Fourth came poet and author Amit Shankar Saha, who has won the Wordweavers Prize and was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pushcart Prize for his contributions in the field of literature. He offered a wide range of poetry with ‘Album’ shedding light on Gaza and comparing it with the tender skin of a baby, while ‘Mountain Museum’ focused on nature as a metaphor.

The fifth poet for the evening was professor and poet Amita Ray. Her translation of Abanindranath Tagore’s Khirer Putul has been included in the postgraduate curriculum of Burdwan University. One of her poems titled “Epic Curse” proved most popular among the audience at the Poetry Cafe. “It’s based on the mythological character of Ahalya. It reflects on how modern women in society are also cursed like Ahalya,” explained Ray.

The penultimate poet to read out his work was Pushcart Award nominee Sekhar Banerjee. His latest collection of poems is called The Fern-Gatherer’s Association, from which he read out two of his lengthier poems, ‘Opera’ and ‘Rosary’.

Last but not the least to grace the stage was Aneek Chatterjee. He has authored 16 books and was the recipient of the Alfredo Pasilono Memorial Panorama International Literary Award in 2023. He read out three short poems — ‘Pains’, ‘Outsider’ and ‘Lost Spaces’. The first, with its reflections on processing pain as a feeling containing multitudes, resonated the most with the audience.