WEBVTT

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A whole lot of the
poems in this book

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are influenced by what's
called Sangam poetry.

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And the next poems I read are
modeled on that tradition.

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So between 300 BCE
and 300 CE, there

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was a blossoming of literature
in Southern India that

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came to be called Sangam,
which is a word that means

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convergence or coming together.

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One of the two styles of
that poetry is called Akam.

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It's a poetry in which personal
emotions, the nuances of love

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are likened to
landscape in such a way

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that human feeling is
inseparable from the place

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where that feeling takes place.

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It was considered
not only unethical

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to write about your feeling
apart not connected to place

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but impossible to do so.

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The scholar- poet A.K. Ramanujan
translated and introduced

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a lot of that poetry
which might be considered

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now a kind of proto ecopoetry,
a phenomenological poetry

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in which human subjectivity
merges with the world,

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with the landscape.

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Because California where I
live shares the same basic five

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landscapes of
Southern India, I've

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written poems influenced
by the Sangam tradition

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but relocated to California.

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This is called "Wasteland."

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When I first moved to
California, the town just North

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of the town I was living in--

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I was living in Petaluma.

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And the town just north
of me is Santa Rosa.

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And twice, two years in a
row the fires came through

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and burned out a lot of
Santa Rosa, killed people,

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killed animals.

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This is "Wasteland
for Santa Rosa."

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Wasteland is one of
the five landscapes

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that come up in Indian poetry.

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I have heard that there's
another poem called

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"Waste Land" by somebody.

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But mine says "for
Santa Rosa" after it.

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"Green spring grass on the
hills had cured by June.

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And by July, gone
woolly and brown.

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It crackled
underfoot, desiccated.

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Well within the
clamor of live oaks,

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an infestation of tiny
larva clung to the under

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leaves feeding between veins.

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Their frass, that fine dandruff
of excrement and boring dust

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tinkled as it dropped onto
dead leaves below the limbs.

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You could hear it 20
feet away tinkling.

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Across the valley
on Sugarloaf Ridge

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the full moon showed up like
a girl doing cartwheels.

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No one goes on living the
life that isn't there.

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Below a vast column
of smoke, heat flame,

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and wind I rose swaying and
tottering on my erratic vortex

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extemporising my
own extreme weather,

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sucking up acres
of scorched topsoil

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and spinning it outward in
a burning sleet of filth

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and embers that catapulted
me forward with my mouth

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open in every direction at
once so I came for you turning

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the present into
purgatory because I

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need to turn everything to
tragedy before I can see it

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because it must be leavened
with remorse for the feeling

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to rise."

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