Angular Desire

Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation. A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list. But his recently-published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and with publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex, and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly-independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation, and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism. He was influenced by Williams; he resisted (though at Stanford) the formal discipline of Yvor Winters. Touched by Stevens, he also read the European modernists and learned from them. His poetry marks a clear break with the established Indian lineage of British literary influences. Acknowledging the awkwardness of the language, Vidyan Ravinthiran cherishes ‘a voice that isn’t wholly and perpetually self-secure’ in the poems.

Graziano Krätli is a translator, editor, and author who works as a librarian at Yale University. Vidyan Ravinthiran is an Associate Professor at Harvard University, and the author of two books of poetry. Srinivas Rayaprol’s correspondence with William Carlos Williams has been published as Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 (2018), edited by Graziano Krätli.