poetry – Page 7 – Sharanya Manivannan

A Reading At IIT-Madras

I have a small poetry reading at IIT-Madras today, open to the public – do drop by if you can. It’s at 6pm; MRC, 4th Floor, Central Library.

Exile, Memory, Verse: A Reading In Chennai With Dipika Mukherjee

This may be the most challenging reading I’ll be doing in years. Full details here.

A Poem In Marco Polo Arts Magazine

The newly relaunched Marco Polo Arts Magazine, formerly known as Marco Polo Quarterly, carries a poem of mine, “Splitting The Siamese“.

A Few Reviews

A few articles about the reading at Spaces last week.

Here’s one in The New Indian Express – the scan, and the text link.

Here’s a very thoughtful one at myLaw.net.

Thank you, everybody, who came or sent good wishes.

A Reading of New Work, In Chennai

Sharanya Manivannan’s first book of poetry, Witchcraft, was released in 2008. It was acclaimed in The Straits Times as “sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife”. Since then, Sharanya has been working on two different manuscripts of poems. Bulletproof Offering, explores the impossible loves of Sita and Lucifer, the earth and the earthbound angel. Cadaver Exquisito takes as its central motifs dismemberment, grief and the sights, smells and scenes of the city of Chennai.

While some of the poems in these manuscripts have found homes in journals including Drunken Boat, Pratilipi, Dark Sky Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown and Superstition Review, many are yet unpublished — and most have never been shared with an audience.

You are warmly invited to an intimate evening of listening to new poems by Sharanya Manivannan.

A Poem In Red Poppy Review

A poem, “Assignation”, has just been published in Red Poppy Review. You can read it here.

A Poem In Red River Review

A poem, “Manqué”, in Red River Review. You can read it here.

A Prose Poem in The Medulla Review and Short Fiction in Monkeybicycle

Strangely enough, two sort-of-surreal prose pieces of mine — written a couple of years apart — have been published on the same day.

“The Pepper Vine“, a prose-poem from the years of hallucinatory dreaming, appears in the Prosetry issue of The Medulla Review.

And here in Monkeybicycle is some short fiction: “Take The Weather With You“, a surrealist revenge fantasy.

When You Chose Me

I found this beautiful poem just as it was about to be retired from the Poetry Daily archive. I found it just when I needed it. And because I have always been better at saying to the world what I cannot say quietly, I share it with you.

When you chose me

By Pedro Salinas
translated from the Spanish by Willis Barnstone

When you chose me—
love chose—
I came out of the great anonymity
from everyone, from nothing.
Till then
I was never taller than
the sierras of the world.
I never sank deeper
than the maximum
depths marked out
on maritime charts.
And my gladness was
sad, as small watches are
without a wrist to fasten to,
without a winding crown, stopped.
But when you said: you,
to me, yes, to me singled out,
I was higher than stars,
deeper than coral.
And my joy
began to spin, caught
in your being, in your pulse.
You gave me possession of myself
when you gave your self to me.
I lived. I live. How long?
I know you will back out.
When you go
I will go back to a deaf
world that does not distinguish
gram or drop
in weight or water.
I’ll be one more—like the rest—
when you are lost.
I’ll lose my name,
my age, my gestures, all
lost in me, from me.
Gone back to the immense bone heap
of those who have not died
and now have nothing
to die for in life.

Tag Archives: poetry