Orange Madrigals

Preface Orange Madrigals is a collection of hundred co-authored poems. The book brings together a set that contributed to a correspondence between its authors – a correspondence that resulted in creating a soulful persona which is at once their lived life and something absolutely not. The poems form an intimate exchange sometimes; sometimes melt into androgynous monologues, or recreate moments from individual memories and dreams closely considered by the other. They fall alternately like exchanges of a mind with the world through the filter of another mind or as exchanges of a mind to the other impeded by the world. Poetry in our times is understood as a subjective project, very personal. Ever since the canon of Romanticism, the typical poet persona is a mystified individualist. His attitudes, stances, communion with history, and his mythology of the self spontaneously burgeon forth as poems in the troubled, often ostracized or poetic conscience. As for women, creative expressions have been boxed into verbalizations of freedom of sexual choice, and declamations against the abstract of patriarchy, under the historic label ‘women’s writing’. As these equations run their course into the second decade of the twenty first century, they have brought poetry to a tedious fate, distancing readers, and unintentionally making the art a sort of autoerotic indulgence. Orange Madrigals is a collaborative effort whose duplexistential authorship pitches its interests beyond self-examination – it is rather about self-extension, relating and relaying one’s self to another of similar mental life, a eugenics of poetry. Poetry as practiced in this book seeks to build a resistance to the usual shelves of poetry that we feed ourselves upon: its dissolution of author-as-a-solipsist addresses squarely the prevalent personae of poets. It hopes to establish how an individual heart need not be the provenance of poetic thought; how it is very possible for two individuals who can communicate, to communicate poetry so as to make it richer, more meaningful, more worth the while an indulgence. The collection emerges from how we have read life and books, paralleling each other. There is a blurring of ego and personal boundaries where these poems begin. And, as they gather strength and form, the figure of ‘poet’ as such undergoes a transmutation – two thought-lines merge to create a single poetic comprehension. This comprehension is also informed by the shared attitudes towards literature and philosophy, and the tryst with contemporary Indian and world poetry. Actually Orange Madrigals is not a book that was planned as such. The authors had written verse and prose together for the last six years before assembling poems for the book. It started as mutual reading and editing of drafts of poetry, but soon became a give and take of poetic raw materials ranging from dreams and subjective pasts to formats and vocabulary. It was common in the older days to create poetic worlds through creating poetic selves that had little or nothing to do with confessing autobiographical truths. Poetry was a fantastic function then, a metamorphosis of the everyday, a mass that one could approach only with a sense of mystery. As it evolved to modern contexts, identity politics and political persuasions became an overbearing preoccupation to poetic writing, especially in postcolonial poetry. Poems, for the large part, adapted to the environment and became platforms to state the necessities of ethnicity, gender or realpolitik. Though this collection does not take after any great tradition consciously, or furnish nostalgias for any older poetry, including the by-now rooted Indian English poetic canon, it is such that we bear in mind the ‘sense of artistic purpose’ of older works. Usually, poems are better engaged if one understands their purposes, methods, backgrounds to their content, and the secrets behind the authorial will to create. The collection experiments with various types of structures and schools of poetry, including sonnets, free verses, prose poems and slam poems; our materials also vary widely, from traffic junctions to spiritual transcendence. The poems have been exchanged between each other freely. Sometimes lines were borrowed, and sometimes interpretations of experiences. Sometimes poems formed of themselves independently, as if they were of a third voice manifesting with a will of one’s own. They use male and female experiences of the world and the word freely without concentrating on confessional honesties. The book by genesis is dialogical, its conception of authorship and subjectivity open. Every poem is lit by bright conversations between the authors, a giving, a free flight of two intelligences before an utterance. The book as a whole submerges personal expression. Co-authorship is a transgressive play of personalities, one author emboldened by the protective cover of the partner. Sometimes we have struggled to perceive the identity (ies) and voice (s) of our poems. That is what is most spectacular about co-authoring, creating a third person, a third voice that rises on its own, confusing the authors even for themselves. Therefore the best in this set belongs simultaneously to both and neither of us. The book is monovocal: we have removed the origins of individual words, sections, and lines, although they contain traces of the collaborative process – these poems could pass as the creation of a solo consciousness, but they become still richer if read as collaborations. The blending of language or refusal of authorial boundaries contributes to the vagaries of our poetry. Co-authoring is an ethic and aesthetic here a testing of rules, conventions and prejudices.