No Poem Sasha Parmasad, Yuganta Press, 2017
reviewed by Neel Bhattacharya Saxena
Once in a while, one comes across a volume of poems where every word seems alive. A young poet Sasha Parmasad’s first publication, aptly titled No Poem, is one such book where we hear a primordial sound clothed in experiences that are at once individual and collective. The very first haiku like poem invites us to “Empty the imagination” and bids us “Now write.” In a world where machinations of the mind and language games of every kind abound, including certain kind of poetry, No Poem inaugurates what could be called heart poetry. Yet there is no sentimentality in this young woman’s voice, but a resounding strength emerging out of life’s pulsating beauty.
Perhaps one needs to have experienced at least a momentary dissolution of the self to appreciate poem number three: “Today I died. God opened my chest with His teeth. Sweetness made me weak. I trembled in His grasp. Silence turned me silver. My dark hair, a river at His feet.” Many of us have felt such fleeting sense of total annihilation in the face of the vast expanse of existence but do not know how to express it. Sasha finds herself in such a predicament and yet uncovers words: “I cannot find a single wooden word to fit the foot. Wooden sandals, afloat.”
No Poem resonates with a distant past of India, a landscape fraught with history’s contingencies, reviled and loved, admired and feared, a land full of words about enlightenment. That ancient land oozes out of these pages and subsides in its diasporic expansion. Given the precarious state of all religions that have been tainted with violence of every kind, when the voice in poem 16 wanted to be “a writer, a farmer, a yogi” the “Mother said, “So-called yogis in the Himalayas, they rape women.” The daughter becomes a writer and discovers “’Enlightenment’ is nothing” and exhorts “(Can’t you see?)”. It is “As ‘green’ is nothing, as ‘baby’ is nothing—just concepts like ramparts between you and You. The concepts we hold constrict Life.” Not bothered with concepts, there is an invitation then to be a cookie: “can I be a cookie shaped like myself?”
What some people describe as “religious” experience does not belong to any religion. Shivas, Ramas and Kalis show up as effortlessly in this volume as Rabia, Rumi and Christ. The poet knows, “The Self walks through the world of forms. It is amazed at its multiplicity.” Voice of Rabia, the Sufi mystic of Baghdad, speaks through the words: “Let Life be Life. (The Small children know this.) The Self will dance.” True to the embodied experiences of women, she says “Enlightenment is biological—the combustion of matter that allows Spirit to know itself.” But women’s voices have not been trusted, so we hear, “What they call stigmata is not of Jesus, the man. It’s the body’s memory of how they nailed us—Christ—to different crosses, burned us as witches.” This woman recognizes “I am a walking tree” and discovers the mystery of life in the very mundane everyday reality: “In bustle of traffic and streaking lights, in blur of seasons I am planted.”
Part 2 opens with a o and “Out of Silence s-o-u-n-d- seeds.” Poetry continues to sprout out of nothing: “Kali-vacuum totality powering human cell Sanskrit—living pulse language letters- cosmic silhouettes that I do not know before kiss of nib and page”. The section is up close and personal and addressing an imagined “husband,” the voice bursts out “sometimes you are so clever with words, you miss the point.” “God is so simple God does not exist You are so simple you do not exist. Inshallah Husband.”
It speaks of confused teachers and students who know not the Great Mother. “He wants Divine Mother in human form. She comes, but expectations make him blind.” How we hear the thrilling words: “He is disappointed by her woman-ness, grasp atop the rich earth of Being. He wants Being and all Being, She gives him all Being and a Woman.” Of course, the poignant question remains: “Can he love and honor the woman as he loves and honors the Self?” Paradoxically all her “spiritual teachers have been men,” but they shout, “Make a new world! We can’t do it for you—we are not women” so we hear the sound of clapping that says “this was something I had to discover. I gave them each a kiss, became my own Teacher.”
Like an Emily Dickinson, she utters “I died before I died to mend the broken mirror,” and folds Sasha’s satchel of poems letting out “holy Heaven and Earth on a soiled paper napkin” with a resounding “Nothing.”
Perhaps one needs to have experienced at least a momentary dissolution of the self to appreciate poem number three: “Today I died. God opened my chest with His teeth. Sweetness made me weak. I trembled in His grasp. Silence turned me silver. My dark hair, a river at His feet.” Many of us have felt such fleeting sense of total annihilation in the face of the vast expanse of existence but do not know how to express it. Sasha finds herself in such a predicament and yet uncovers words: “I cannot find a single wooden word to fit the foot. Wooden sandals, afloat.”
No Poem resonates with a distant past of India, a landscape fraught with history’s contingencies, reviled and loved, admired and feared, a land full of words about enlightenment. That ancient land oozes out of these pages and subsides in its diasporic expansion. Given the precarious state of all religions that have been tainted with violence of every kind, when the voice in poem 16 wanted to be “a writer, a farmer, a yogi” the “Mother said, “So-called yogis in the Himalayas, they rape women.” The daughter becomes a writer and discovers “’Enlightenment’ is nothing” and exhorts “(Can’t you see?)”. It is “As ‘green’ is nothing, as ‘baby’ is nothing—just concepts like ramparts between you and You. The concepts we hold constrict Life.” Not bothered with concepts, there is an invitation then to be a cookie: “can I be a cookie shaped like myself?”
What some people describe as “religious” experience does not belong to any religion. Shivas, Ramas and Kalis show up as effortlessly in this volume as Rabia, Rumi and Christ. The poet knows, “The Self walks through the world of forms. It is amazed at its multiplicity.” Voice of Rabia, the Sufi mystic of Baghdad, speaks through the words: “Let Life be Life. (The Small children know this.) The Self will dance.” True to the embodied experiences of women, she says “Enlightenment is biological—the combustion of matter that allows Spirit to know itself.” But women’s voices have not been trusted, so we hear, “What they call stigmata is not of Jesus, the man. It’s the body’s memory of how they nailed us—Christ—to different crosses, burned us as witches.” This woman recognizes “I am a walking tree” and discovers the mystery of life in the very mundane everyday reality: “In bustle of traffic and streaking lights, in blur of seasons I am planted.”
Part 2 opens with a o and “Out of Silence s-o-u-n-d- seeds.” Poetry continues to sprout out of nothing: “Kali-vacuum totality powering human cell Sanskrit—living pulse language letters- cosmic silhouettes that I do not know before kiss of nib and page”. The section is up close and personal and addressing an imagined “husband,” the voice bursts out “sometimes you are so clever with words, you miss the point.” “God is so simple God does not exist You are so simple you do not exist. Inshallah Husband.”
It speaks of confused teachers and students who know not the Great Mother. “He wants Divine Mother in human form. She comes, but expectations make him blind.” How we hear the thrilling words: “He is disappointed by her woman-ness, grasp atop the rich earth of Being. He wants Being and all Being, She gives him all Being and a Woman.” Of course, the poignant question remains: “Can he love and honor the woman as he loves and honors the Self?” Paradoxically all her “spiritual teachers have been men,” but they shout, “Make a new world! We can’t do it for you—we are not women” so we hear the sound of clapping that says “this was something I had to discover. I gave them each a kiss, became my own Teacher.”
Like an Emily Dickinson, she utters “I died before I died to mend the broken mirror,” and folds Sasha’s satchel of poems letting out “holy Heaven and Earth on a soiled paper napkin” with a resounding “Nothing.”
