GODSONG
by Amit Majmudar
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Amit Majmudar, Thank you for taking the time to connect with our HocTok community. You are a diagnostic nuclear radiologist and a writer of fiction and poetry. From a practical point of view, how do you make it all happen while always producing top quality work? I have streamlined my life to free up time for the important things and cut out everything that isn’t important. I don't do a lot of things that other people do. I don't follow sports, or drink or smoke, or watch television series, or even watch very many movies. I don't go out with friends. My life is basically family, medicine, literature, work out, eat, sleep. If that is all you do with your life, you have more time for any one of those things, and you can devote more attention and energy to them because you aren’t spreading yourself too thin with any single one field of endeavor. I guess I manage by being a remarkably uninteresting person! |
Photo: courtesy of the artist |
You are the first poet laureate of Ohio. What does it entail?
The post of the Laureate is not too terribly demanding—the main requirement is a certain number of public readings per year, and I have more than met my annual quota for both years of my tenure. In addition, I pursued projects like a multidisciplinary dance-poetry collaboration (we filled a theater last year, which is something a poetry reading alone is unlikely to do), and I wrote a state poem for Ohio as well.
Your poetry deals with themes and things that are current and relevant. Most often than not, your sense of humor is easy to detect. But in certain instances, there is a bleakness and sadness that really pierces the heart. For example, let’s read the final lines of your poem titled, Of Age, “The oceans surge, but the boat is up on blocks./ There’s no America to sail to anymore.” Is this what we must all come to grips with or is there still hope?
That line is a little bleak, true! But you can also think of it as an injunction and exhortation—there’s no America to sail to anymore, this is the only place we get, so let’s work to make it better.
Is there hope? Probably.
This country has always been bitterly divided; I don’t know why the media narrative is that we’re somehow more divided than some rosy before. When, exactly, were Americans not at each other’s throats and telling nasty lies about each other? The Civil War? The Vietnam era? Things were far more polarized and violent then than they are now. Even during the Revolutionary War, there was a whole segment of American society, the loyalists, that didn’t want to be independent from Britain.
So yes, there is hope—hope that we will muddle through like we always have, spitting at those bastards on the other side of the divides of the day.
The post of the Laureate is not too terribly demanding—the main requirement is a certain number of public readings per year, and I have more than met my annual quota for both years of my tenure. In addition, I pursued projects like a multidisciplinary dance-poetry collaboration (we filled a theater last year, which is something a poetry reading alone is unlikely to do), and I wrote a state poem for Ohio as well.
Your poetry deals with themes and things that are current and relevant. Most often than not, your sense of humor is easy to detect. But in certain instances, there is a bleakness and sadness that really pierces the heart. For example, let’s read the final lines of your poem titled, Of Age, “The oceans surge, but the boat is up on blocks./ There’s no America to sail to anymore.” Is this what we must all come to grips with or is there still hope?
That line is a little bleak, true! But you can also think of it as an injunction and exhortation—there’s no America to sail to anymore, this is the only place we get, so let’s work to make it better.
Is there hope? Probably.
This country has always been bitterly divided; I don’t know why the media narrative is that we’re somehow more divided than some rosy before. When, exactly, were Americans not at each other’s throats and telling nasty lies about each other? The Civil War? The Vietnam era? Things were far more polarized and violent then than they are now. Even during the Revolutionary War, there was a whole segment of American society, the loyalists, that didn’t want to be independent from Britain.
So yes, there is hope—hope that we will muddle through like we always have, spitting at those bastards on the other side of the divides of the day.
* * *
The Fourth House
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The fourth little pig built his house of books and when the wolf whose name was Grief huffed and puffed and tried to blow that house down, the covers of the sloping roof flew back like so many shingles on so many hinges. The pages ruffled noisily, but that house (built of books born in a hotter kiln than any brick) stood. The wolf Grief clambered up to inspect this page-thatched roof, and once he got up there he fell to reading. He worked his way around the walls, sliding out one book-brick at a time (the loveliest poetry’s frequently written by absolute pigs) until the big bad wolf became the big bad guard dog, pacing the lawn, bifocals on his snout, a librarian with teeth snarling away whole packs of wolves named Grief. |
In Pattern and Snarl, you wrote, “Death pulls a wisp of us – and just like that, it’s freed the snarl.” Is this a way of coming to terms with reality and prioritizing what matters knowing how easily that snarl is freed from death?
I wrote those lines quite a while ago, but I suspect that line was getting at the tenuousness of life and the seemingly effortless way in which the complicated, irregular weave of life can be undone, both its pattern and its snarl, by death.
Do you usually write your poetry in response to an experience or set of events or are there other reasons you sit to write your poetry?
Anything can trigger me into a poem. I have no method and no default inspiration or setting or theme. Often the nidus or seed crystal of the poem can be nothing more than a sound I want to play with.
Your translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Godsong, comes out soon. Is there a backstory as to why you undertook a project of this magnitude?
I guess the backstory is the fact that I’ve always thought a lot about religion for some reason. It’s a little anomalous in the context of my upbringing and career and social circle and all that, as I wasn’t exactly surrounded by devout or religiously minded people. I think that my religiosity surged as a contrarian impulse—that is, if everybody around me had been pious and trying to force-feed me the Gita, I wouldn’t have done it, and I’d be religiously indifferent today, or maybe even an atheist or agnostic.
But instead no one cared about religion, and twenty-five years later, I’m publishing a big book of translation and commentary on a religious scripture.
However, I realize, as I read over that answer, that I am in a sense tailoring my answer to the questioner. If I knew you were a believing Hindu like myself, and that I could rely on a common metaphysical language and set of assumptions with you, I would have answered that question completely differently (and perhaps more honestly): I would say that I undertook Godsong because of momentum from my past lives, that I was compelled to do it because I must continue in this life a religious self-development initiated several births ago. But that explanation can only sound loopy or unbelievable or overblown to someone outside the religion. It wasn't the answer I led with; but that doesn't mean it isn't the answer I actually believe.
I wrote those lines quite a while ago, but I suspect that line was getting at the tenuousness of life and the seemingly effortless way in which the complicated, irregular weave of life can be undone, both its pattern and its snarl, by death.
Do you usually write your poetry in response to an experience or set of events or are there other reasons you sit to write your poetry?
Anything can trigger me into a poem. I have no method and no default inspiration or setting or theme. Often the nidus or seed crystal of the poem can be nothing more than a sound I want to play with.
Your translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Godsong, comes out soon. Is there a backstory as to why you undertook a project of this magnitude?
I guess the backstory is the fact that I’ve always thought a lot about religion for some reason. It’s a little anomalous in the context of my upbringing and career and social circle and all that, as I wasn’t exactly surrounded by devout or religiously minded people. I think that my religiosity surged as a contrarian impulse—that is, if everybody around me had been pious and trying to force-feed me the Gita, I wouldn’t have done it, and I’d be religiously indifferent today, or maybe even an atheist or agnostic.
But instead no one cared about religion, and twenty-five years later, I’m publishing a big book of translation and commentary on a religious scripture.
However, I realize, as I read over that answer, that I am in a sense tailoring my answer to the questioner. If I knew you were a believing Hindu like myself, and that I could rely on a common metaphysical language and set of assumptions with you, I would have answered that question completely differently (and perhaps more honestly): I would say that I undertook Godsong because of momentum from my past lives, that I was compelled to do it because I must continue in this life a religious self-development initiated several births ago. But that explanation can only sound loopy or unbelievable or overblown to someone outside the religion. It wasn't the answer I led with; but that doesn't mean it isn't the answer I actually believe.
* * *
Book of Hours
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To Blackfoot, Sanskrit, Cherokee, and Latin (languages that, dead, survive) you have to listen in suspense order of because the words variable is. This disorder wasn’t always foreign. English stayed flexible, lexically game until the railroads standardized the time. Before the daily dilly-dally went all clockstep, people had the freedom to wait for sentences to finish. Therefore were they with their inversions so generous. As in, ‘There but for the grace of God go’ (wait for it) ‘I’: The subject following the verb, the doer following the doing: passive even in the act of going, that is, passing, passing, past…. It makes more sense when you remember that their sense of time was mostly misted-over echoes over shifty hills of church bells that might or might not be (no way to tell) the death knell of the very friar whose job it was at the top of the hour to pull the rope. As late as way back when, the literacy rate for clocks was just below the literacy rate for books, at negative something percent. Young parents in the past, you’ll notice, are always tucking into coffins babies. What we would call a midlife crisis used to be that ripeness at the end of life when Gabriel appeared and told you to recite. The order of events just shambled past Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition even though that phrase was still a couple world wars in the future then. Which one of us first person singulars could recognize that endlessly preponed, pre-penicillin world suffering from its chronic time disorder? When they used to sweat the future they sweated it without deodorant, so hold your breath and thank your lucky hours we have no place now in their grammar. They serve their sentences without us, forever present in the prison tense. Be patient, friend. We, too, will do our time. |
Industrial Diamond
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I was brought up by a woman
Hard like an industrial diamond, Flawed and carbonado, Shot right through with shadow, Her heart the hard-willed drill bit She cored the rocks before us with. Never a showy Koh-i-Noor, She had it in her to endure, A diamond coarse and fierce and dark With loverough hands, with hands that marked The son she sanded down with words Into a man not half as hard as her. No one can gem-cut what was born to cut. Blades and saws are where they’re set, These stones that cut the hardest things Like the pride of a boy of seventeen. I cut this circle in the glass between. I sing her name and set her in this ring. |
* * *
Dothead is your latest published book of poetry. Was this work initiated as an all-inclusive negation of numerous misconceptions and erroneous definitions you’ve experienced?
Not at all! Identity politics shows up in the title poem and almost nowhere else. In other poems, I inhabit other identities (“appropriate” them, you could say) and write poems that “take place” in various historical, cultural, and religious contexts. There are poems about World War I and James Bond and the Book of Genesis in there. It’s not all about me or my society at all. It’s actually a very impersonal book.
What are some of your most treasured memories of living life as part of two distinct yet rich and beautiful cultures?
I don’t process my life as divided between two cultures. Rather my life is, culturally, a mishmash of multiple eras and civilizations, which often have nothing to do with me. Much of my literary background is Old European, for example. I’m a Hindu, but my allusions are frequently Biblical.
How do you deal with mayhem throughout the year?
The end of the year is the same as the beginning or middle of the year for me. My day job doesn’t get busier or less busy during particular times of the year. It actually depends on the specific block of hours I’m scheduled to work on a given day; certain shifts (overnight shift, late evening shift) are busier, demanding more work per individual radiologist.
What makes you hopeful about what’s to come?
The belief, perhaps mistaken, that North Korea’s dictator is pursuing long-range nukes for the typical reason—to deter a war, not provoke one—that is, out of self-preservation, not a deathwish.
The fact that the dollar remains, for now, the global reserve currency; it gives the whole world a certain vested interest in our perpetuation.
The belief, perhaps mistaken, that America, while likely to change for the worse in small ways, is for various economic and social reasons unlikely to undergo a drastic and bloody upheaval like Czarist Russia or the French ancien regime, economic inequality notwithstanding.
The belief, perhaps mistaken, that much of the perceived fractiousness of our society is in fact the media-magnified tantrum-throwing of a 10% fanatical minority at either extreme of the political spectrum (unfortunately, those same fanatical minorities determine the outcomes of both political primaries)—that the bulk of Americans, 80% let’s say, are actually quite sane about things and simply want to go to work and raise their kids in a safe environment, and aren’t seething with race hatred or class resentment or partisan aggro.
On a purely personal level, I have hope about the future because my family is full of loving-kindness and nobility. We’re not going to live forever, and I know losses will come as my parents and my wife’s parents age; chance and disaster, too, cannot be counted out; but while we’re here, all the generations on both sides of my extended family, from grandparents to grandchildren, get along very well and love each other deeply. That is an inestimable advantage and blessing.
I chose very well in the person I married, and so did my own sister and my wife’s sister, so our whole, extended family is simply devoid of toxic or nasty personalities. That gives me hope that even if something happens to me personally, God forbid, my family will be supported and taken care of by a larger network. You can buy life insurance, but you can’t buy that. You have to be blessed to have that.