Kolatkar’s Jejuri
I’m reading Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri that has been reissued as a classic by New York Review of Books and comes with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. I had first read Jejuri in my first or second year in college, copying down almost each poem in a notebook from the book I had found in the Sahitya Akademi Library near Mandi House. Nothing that I had read before taught me so quickly that seeing meant seeing in language and therefore involved the discovery of metaphor. Here’s a poem from the collection titled “Chaitanya”:
sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanyahe popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods
