A Professor Of Poetry

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the first poet from this part of the world tobe nominated for Oxford's Professorship of Poetry, the most high-profile inBritish poetry after the laureateship, and, for many, a more serious positionthan the latter. Former Professors include Matthew Arnold, W H Auden, and SeamusHeaney. Mehrotra’s supporters include some very distinguished writers andscholars from every part of the world, such as Tariq Ali, Amit Chaudhuri, TomPaulin, Charles Taylor, Toby Litt, Wendy Doniger, Adil Jussawalla, Shahid Amin,Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and various others. Charles Taylor, one of the mostconsiderable of living philosophers, has said: 'I see what a boon it would be ifMehrotra were elected professor of poetry. The issues he raises are so centralto language, and so little explored or understood - although often evoked.'

See thispage on the Oxford University website to do with details of theprofessorship and voting. Voting takes place on 16^thMay.

Noted writer Amit Chaudhuri and Peter D McDonald (Fellow at St Hugh’s;author, The Literature Police) explain why they took the initiative innominating Mehrotra

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A few months ago, Peter D McDonald and I decided to nominate Arvind KrishnaMehrotra to Oxford's Professorship of Poetry -- clearly not for nationalisticreasons, or even for reasons to do with prestige, but because of our admirationfor the work of this remarkable poet-critic, and its significance to literarydiscussion today. This is the first time that a poet from this part of the world(India; probably Asia) is being nominated for this very significant position.The 300-year-old post has been held by poets like WH Auden, Paul Muldoon,Matthew Arnold, and Seamus Heaney, and, most recently, by the critic ChristopherRicks. 

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of the leading Indian poets in the Englishlanguage, and one of the finest poets working in any language. Influentialanthologist, translator, and commentator, he is a poet-critic of anexceptionally high order. We believe that Mehrotra has much to say of value - ofurgency - on the matter of multilingualism, creative practice, and translation(in both its literal and figurative sense), issues that are pressingly importantin today's world. He is not an easy 'post-colonial' choice, for he emerges froma rich and occasionally fraught world history of cosmopolitanism; but he isproof - as critic and artist – that cosmopolitanism is not only about Europeaneclecticism, but about a wider, more complex network of languages and histories.

The paragraphs below are taken from the Vintage/ Picador Book of ModernIndian Literature:

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in the year that the nation-state wepresently call 'India' also came into being. According to some, it was a year ofportents, of angels and monsters with peculiar gifts coming into the world. Onewonders how Mehrotra fits in with that creation-myth, born as he was in Lahore,brought into India in the time of Partition in a train when he was a few monthsold, and growing up in Allahabad, a colonial centre of education and culturealready in decline, the son of a dentist. His childhood, unlike Saleem Sinai's,was not immediately prophetic in any way, but was outwardly tranquil, inwardlyagitated by the imagination, and in location suburban, as these lines from hispoem 'Continuities' reveal:

At seven-thirty we are sent home 
From the Cosmopolitan Club,  
My father says, 'No bid,'  
My mother forgets her hand  
In a deck of cards.  
I sit on the railing till midnight  
Above a worn sign  
That advertises a dentist

As a young man, he discovered, with some friends, Corso, Ferlinghetti,Ginsberg, and the French Surrealists, and, negotiating these paradigms, made ithis purpose, in his poetry, to renew and to impart a fresh, sometimesmysterious, sometimes threatening, gleam to the 'worn signs' of which a suburbanexistence in a declining colonial city is composed. His latest book of poems isthe The Transfiguring Places (1998), and he has also produced anexcellent anthology of Indian poetry in English.  

Mehrotra has emerged as a hyphenated mutation, the poet-critic, ofexceptional quality, in a country among whose several unremarked calamities isthe unhappy state of its criticism; in this, at least, he is a miracle. Heteaches us, as in 'TheEmperor Has No Clothes', which began as a riposte to afellow-poet on the subject of A. K Ramanujan's poetry, and developed as a subtleexploration of the issues of bilingualism, translation, and 'Indianness' incontemporary Indian English poetry, that it is possible to write criticism of ahigh order about Indian writing in English without either entirely abandoningthe world of 'English literature', or fully belonging to it, or withoutsituating oneself exclusively in the politics of postcolonial theory.’  

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Also do look at a selection of Mehrotra's poems from 1976 to the 2000s,from the early, surreal 'The Sale', with its unique account of world history asmemory ('French surrealism was one of the ways available to me of escaping theKing's English,' Mehrotra has said) to the other poems with their characteristicbut always unexpected mixture of luminosity, transfiguration, and magicalcompression. There are also selections from the wonderful new poems, aboutvanished historical figures, about reminiscences and transmutations of apost-Independence suburban existence. 

Links: 

• The Emperor Has No Clothes
• Middle Earth

These websites also offer a small selection of some of the poems: 

• www.geocities.com/varnamala/ arvind.html 
• www.geocities.com/kavitayan/ arvindkrishna.html

This link to SmithCollege contains both a biographical note and further links to somepoems, including the excellent ‘Continuities’