Intro: Ayyappa Panicker's poetry, like the person himself, has always
had a sardonic and mysterious glint.

HAD I approached K. Ayyappa Panicker for an interview when he was
awarded the prestigious Saraswathy Samman early this year, he would
have "politely" declined it, saying that all that he wanted to say had
been said in his poems and essays, and that if I wanted to write
anything about his poems and essays, he would have been only happy to
give me free copies of his works. So, to coax him into an "interview",
I deliberately called it a "dialogue". And, as expected, he agreed to
cooperate, on the condition that no personal questions were asked. But
it was by all means an interview that was intended to cover the
various phases of his poetic career, but destined to be incomplete
owing to his sudden illness, and his succumbing to it on August 23, in
Thiruvananthapuram, at the age of 76. The major part of this dialogue
was conducted through email, and, despite the stoic silence on
personal matters, the unfailing punctuality with which he responded to
the questions showed that he enjoyed doing it.

Enigmatic answers

When asked about the language used in his works, Panicker's reply was
as enigmatic as his personality. He said there was a carnivorous glee
in his language. Resistance to the dominant traditions in the poetry
of a language, he elaborated, is a perennial challenge for a poet who
chooses to write in that language. This is because of the peculiar
relation poetry maintains with traditions, unlike other forms of
literature. No poet, as T.S. Eliot observes in "Tradition and the
Individual Talent", "has his complete meaning alone". In poetry,
meaning is more historical and political than subjective and arbitrary
with words having a long lineage of meanings that reveal only when
they are activated in the multiple contexts of how they were used by
the dead poets. At the same time, no poet can express himself
completely remaining within the ambit of the tradition. This is a
dilemma that often puts poets in a creative hibernation. And, one
needs persistent passion for experimentation and innovation to emerge
as an original. All living poets feed on dead poets, he said.

In a way, Panicker was talking retrospectively of himself. He began
writing poetry in the 1950s; a period in Malayalam poetry when poets
were overwhelmed by the influence of the legendarily romantic poet
Changampuzha Krishna Pillai. And, definitely, Panicker's early poems
were no exception. His poetry too had all the ingredients of the
verbal mellifluousness and sensual pliability that easily caught the
adolescent imagination of the period, as in:

O village girl, what is there for you to be so shy?

Sanguine youthfulness plays in the heart now

Looking at us the golden dreams come to sleep with us.

O village girl, what is there for you to be so shy?

But, what made the difference was that while in other poets of his
generation and sometimes even in the generations that came after him,
the Changampuzha influence continued as some sort of a fixation, in
Ayyappa Panicker it was just a beginner's infatuation with sweet
sounding words and prosody. He moved forward from the existing norms
of poetry, experimenting with the language and form, juxtaposing the
distant with the near, and integrating the conventional into the
radical, and finally coming up with the trailblazing poem
"Kurukshetram" in 1960, which inaugurated the modernist era in
Malayalam poetry.

A new idiom

Ayyappa Panicker began writing "Kurukshetram" in 1952. He said there
had been an inherent discontent in him not only with what others were
writing then but with all that he too had been writing till then. "The
atmosphere was saturated with the nauseating stench of decayed poems
coming from within and without", he said recollecting the staleness
experienced in poetic expressions, and suggesting the creative urge
that the time had necessitated.

Panicker took six years to complete this 294-line poem in five
sections. Asked about how the literary establishment reacted to it, he
said the editor of a leading literary journal, himself a prominent
poet of the previous generation, sent it by the return post. "Perhaps,
it might be from this rejection that the poem imbibed its momentum",
he said. True, "Kurukshetram" found its way to the readers by itself,
and even crossed the borders of language

by becoming a 20th century epic in the language.

Significant poem

As K. Satchidanandan, one of the major voices in the post-Panicker
generation in Malayalam says, "`Kurukshetram' is the first poem of
Ayyappa Panicker with a definitive thematic and idiomatic
significance." Though most of its themes, like "value and
valuelessness", "repeated betrayal, failures and hazards in the
country", had fleeting appearances in his earlier poems, it was in
"Kurukshetram" that all of them were organically amalgamated into a
"monologue of momentous hesitations", as in:

See us
caught in the labyrinth of our daily grind,
this crowded market
where we plunge and push and outsmart
to gain each our end —
And here they come,
come to buy and come to sell
themselves they buy and themselves they sell.
(Translated by T. R Doraiswamy.)
Ayyappa Panicker's poetry is a collage of poetic practices and moods.
And, throughout a career that spanned more than six decades, he
remained unpredictable with regard to what he would write next. The
poet who startled the literary orthodoxy with an outright experimental
poem in free verse the other day, would emerge as if from nowhere with
a conventional hymn in traditional metre. The same poet who penned the
saga of his family

("Kudumpapuranam") and the story of the perpetual exodus of mankind
("Gotrayanam"), with epic perfection was just as likely to sweep the
readers off their feet with a four-line cartoon poem that lampooned
the power hungry political contemporaneity.

Behind the smile

There has been always a mysterious smile in Ayyappa Paniker's poetry,
just as there was on his face. A smile that could be interpreted as
sardonic, but also deeply saddened. Was he asking:

Time does not end here, darling,

Let us moan no more.

From what depths wells up even this smile of ours!