The Lion and the Antler - A New Era of Queer Poetry in Urban India

NEW DELHI, March 4, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

'The Lion and the Antler', Queer Poetry by Shaleen Rakesh

With his first collection, The Lion and the Antler, Shaleen creates a poetic universe in which the practice of the sacred is a requirement of daily life. Such a statement points to the very core of Shaleen's goal in poetry

Because of his passion for life flowing from matter, his tendency to treat beings and things as equals, categorizes him as a queer materialist. Then there are times one would even call him a mystic. In fact, there is hardly anything more appropriate to Shaleen's inner experience. For him, the dichotomy between matter/spirit does not exist. The sense of the sacred in all things independent of an anthropomorphic divinity pervades ancient Hindu traditions. Such reminders of religious aphorisms come even closer to the investigations of contemporary science whose findings increasingly abolish the polarity observed/observer just as Shaleen's poetry does, the world being perceived as a system of inseparable interacting and ever moving components for which sheer conceptual thinking cannot fully account. Clearly, Shaleen shares an acute awareness of the fleeting and ever elusive character of any grasp on the ultimate.

Analogies with eastern philosophies naturally come to mind. In my opinion, however, utmost caution should be used in attempting to assimilate Shaleen's lapidary style and "inside/outside" perception of all forms of reality with Zen or Tibetan Buddhism or Hindu scriptures. The coincidence is a matter of innate perception, not the conscious expression of an adhesion to any spiritual tradition in particular. It is a fact, nevertheless, that many of Shaleen's poems do arrest the mind in the same manner as oriental words of wisdom do. The reader experiences a shock of recognition, indicating, but not revealing, a mystery at the heart of the misleadingly obvious. There may lie the essence of Shaleen's humour.

Shaleen's poetry is the opposite of the hermetic. His apparent simplicity, however, is the result of a ceaseless probing into the inner being of things in order to elucidate the identity of all identities and give it a concrete tangible reality. This is why, even when he evokes his lovers, one of the major themes of his work, he never actually describes. Instead he captures the essence of people, of nature, of objects thus achieving an essential function of poetry.

As the poems in The Lion and the Antler confirm, Shaleen acknowledges no hierarchy. His direction has always been towards immanence. A blade of grass, a pebble on the roadside, a flower, a tree, a bird, the sea, the lover - the intermediary to it all - are equally important to his quest for the origin of origins.

Equating the art of poetic creation with the mystic experience of fusion is far from unique to Shaleen. He however, increasingly lives it in his search for what lies behind any form of reality. The Lion and the Antler marks the birth of a new era of queer poetry in India.

About the Publisher:

Worldview Publications is an imprint of the Worldview Collective, an independent and progressive media collective which provides space for artists and writers who challenge the status quo.

Primary Media Contact: Shaleen Rakesh, shaleen_worldview@email.biz, 91-9810856058

SOURCE World View Publications