It’s been seven years since poet icon Nissim Ezekiel’s death. He passed away on January 9, 2004. As India gears up for the landmark Jaipur Literary Festival later this month, mixed opinions about the state of Indian poetry in English
‘My agent tells me that I have a name | An audience waits, he says, for what I say.’ That was Dom Moraes in 1965, from a collection of poetry titled John Nobody. It was a time when poets did have an audience. Not an impassioned one perhaps, or a particularly large one, but an audience nonetheless.
Can that be said for the times we live in? Times that have, in the early years of our millennium, borne witness to the demise of Moraes, G S Sharat Chandra, Agha Shahid Ali, Arun Kolatkar, Kamala Das and Dilip Chitre?….
