Start It Today

If I start it today,

If I start it today,

I will be my audience.

To follow my orders,

To follow my orders,

I will be my leader.

I will be my worship,

Of million hearts, tomorrow….

Today, sleeping within me

In infinite humantown.

By Samij Datta, Poet, Painter, Writer.

For more info on poetry by Samij Datta, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

Reason to Change

If you need to do something, then do something….

Change the curve through which you walk

Change it at all instants

Till you become a  verb within.

Inner city of  ambitious daylight

Is there to start the change

A change to mark a revolution…

First within, then

Before million eyes

Waiting for the moment

To cheer.

By Samij Datta, Poet, Painter, Writer.

For more info on poetry by Samij Datta, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

Mann Ist Mann (2008)

Man is there

To worship man

Man is there

To pray for man

Man is there

To tell man

Mann ist mann.

By Samij Datta, Poet, Painter, Writer.

For more info on poetry by Samij Datta, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

Be Simple

The big things are done in a small way

The complex is truly simple

Air is the water

And the fire is the ether

In our earth of equanimity.

If you stay in the black

Black light of blind vision

You better

Donate the eyes,

The earth gave to you.

If you can’t hear,

The cry of time

If you can’t hear,

The thirst of space….

You better

Die to born again.

Like a flower

Be the natural species

Of simple rhythm.

By Samij Datta, Poet, Writer, Painter.

For more info on poetry by Samij Datta, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

Degas

Degas, a nude soul

Comes at need

To art the old

Mythopoeic line,

Shape, a circle

That craves

Embroidered gene

For natural cycle.

By Samij Datta, Poet, Writer, Fluxist.

For more info on the poems by Samij Datta, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

Archeopterix

Warm blooded, vertebrate-

Flocks within,

Archeopterix…

Is the god of flight.

Antartican heart,

A nest, not cruel

Sings a freedom

Let it fly

Let it fly.

By Samij Datta, Poet, Writer, Fluxist.

For more info on the poems by Samij Datta, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

Crimson (2008)

My shoes can walk

In secret dusk

Rip Van Winkle

Tongue swings, twinkle

Stars clapped by the grey

Altitude of space

When it calls, crimson

Saturn sails

Deep in my heart.

by Samij Datta, Poet, Writer, Fluxist.

Discourse on the poem: In Ecce Home, Nietzsche writes “I would rather be a satyr than a saint”. This role of the comedian or satyr is a mask which other artists, writers followed like Rimbaud, Cocteau, Picasso, Apollinaire and Jim Morrison. The clown image fuses the serenity of Apollo and the frenzy of Dionysus. Here, the poem starts with a comic irony “my shoes can walk/in secret dusk”. Though the intention of the secrecy is not explicit in the above lines but it suggests all the trappings of a masked character like a comedian. The image of Rip Van Winkle, an amiable man who fell into sleep and woke up twenty years later to find that things have changed, is the central clown of the poem. So the irony of the opening lines “my shoes can walk” alludes to the story of a country yokel who revisits his own village after waking up from a fairy tale like sleep. The next line reads like a nursery rhyme with the alliteration of Winkle/twinkle- it is again the disorder of language like Eliot’s “prickly pear, prickly pear/here we go round the prickly pear” where the true symbolic meaning of the ritual lapses into mere a child-like confusion of Lacan’s Mirror stage.  “Stars clapped by the grey/altitude of space” could be a reference to a thunder in the sky caused by heavy grey clouds in the night- a spectacle of an account from Hesoid’s Theogony, where Jupiter overthrew Saturn and other Titans in a fierce battle to reign as the ultimate ruler of the cosmos. So the victory of Zeus/Jupiter resulted in Saturn’s fleeing arrival in Rome to establish the Golden Age of peace and harmony. And his festival Saturnalia, celebrated the carnival where the satyrs danced in revelry, where the role of the master and slave were reversed, where suspension of social rules and codes of conduct were established. This naure/culture dichotomy and tension is what the poem tries to justify as its main objective because the poet says that “Saturn sails deep” in his heart. Instead of being a saint, the poet becomes a satyr or clown like Nietzsche and even alludes to the role of Christ as a clown appearing as a mock-king riding on an ass into Jerusalem wearing purple or crimson robes (“when it calls, crimson”) and laughed at by all in utter humiliation. - Joy Roy Choudhury, Writer, Art Critic, Consultant.

For further info on Samij Datta’s poems, artworks, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

 

   

 

Rose (2008)

Rose is a river, a wind

A smell, six miles long

Crazy daughter, alone

With a petal of the world

Few grams of wisdom

Moon over the mind

Sun nowhere, rose

Rose is six miles song.

by Samij Datta, Poet, Writer, Fluxist

The opening two lines “Rose is a river, a wind/A smell, six miles long” poses a problem in the mind of the reader. It is the confusion and chaos of language and meaning that posits this problem than anything else. The image of the “rose” as a signifier comes up with two signifieds suggested by the words- “river” and “wind”. Water and air are fluids and thus presuppose mobility and movement. It could be the instability of meaning in language that the French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has suggested is one way of looking at the lines in the poem. Stable meanings are an approximation in language, we can never say what we precisely mean and we can never mean precisely what we say. It could be that the perfume of rose is swept across a river, six miles long by the wind. So the rose imagery presupposes the Renaissance painting Primavera by Sandro Botticelli where Venus, the goddess of love stands in the centre surrounded by the three Graces and Cupid while Flora the goddess of spring scatters flowers. From the right, Zephyrus, the god of winds, comes forcefully in pursuit of the nymph Chloris and on his way carries as the poems suggests, the smell of rose. Chloris whose Roman equivalent is the Goddess Flora, is a nymph associated with spring, flowers and new growth. In Ovid’s account when she talks, “her lips breathe spring roses”. So the opening rose imagery is finally accounted for but the desolation in “crazy daughter, alone/with a petal of the world” could be either due to a redundancy of a mythic quest or lack of initiation on part of the hero/lover. The final solution is hinted in the line “few grams of wisdom”- the poet resolves to take the perfume of the flower like a substance abuse of taking psychedelic drugs, to walk through the doors of perception. Here wisdom is an experience of such a quest in pursuit of the flower of spring time fertility, birth and regeneration. Aldous Huxley was once prescribed mescalin and under the effect of this drug he wrote the experimental book The Doors of Perception. His conversation with psychiatrist, Humphrey Osmond, could be helpful to understand the deeper implications of the line “few grams of wisdom”.

 

Aldous Huxley: “To Make this trivial world sublime

Tale half a gram of phanerothyme”.

 

Humphrey Osmond: “To fathom hell or soar angelic,

Just take a pinch of psychedelic”.

 

What Huxley or Osmond have meant by the phrases “to make this trivial world sublime” or “to fathom hell or soar angelic” could be achieved by adding “few grams of wisdom” to the experience of the poet. Like Rimbaud, Blake and Jim Morrison, the poet here engages in intoxication of fragrance to dive into the pits of hell and soar above into the clouds of heaven. Its interesting here to mention the line from Jim Morrison’s song The End where he sings “the snake is long seven miles/Ride the snake…”. The river, here, like a snake, is six miles long. Also the need to feed the mind with wisdom is one way of going back to the ritual of paganism to purge the world because the “Sun nowhere, rose”. There is another striking similarity with a song performed by Doors’ rival San Francisco band, The Jefferson Airplane. Written and sung by Grace Slick of the Airplane, the song “White rabbit” ends with the iconic lines “When logic and proportion/Have fallen sloppy dead/And the White Knight is talking backwards/And the Red Queen’s off with her head!/Remember what the doormouse said/Feed your head/Feed your head/Feed your head”. So, the explicit “feed your head”that talks about taking of drugs in the 60s becomes now a ritual intoxication of the smell of rose hinted in “few grams of wisdom”. - Joy Roy Choudhury, Writer, Art Critic, Creative Consultant

For further info on poems by Samij Datta, please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com

  

 

Butterfly (2008)

If you can fly

Do butterfly, do butterfly!

Rain will run

To stop the gun

Fire is impotent, I

Sing sing sing

You butterfly

So you can fly

Fire in air, vapour.

Water, ether, is shy

Will you please cry

Sweet, butterfly.

 

- by Samij Datta, Poet, Writer, Fluxist.

Discourse on the poem: The images of flight and voyage are two basic motifs evident in the works of rebel poets and singers like Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. Rimbaud’s flight is like the endless wanderings of the clown from village to village. It has much in common with the mendicants or bauls/fakirs of India who travel from one place to another like a pack of vagabond gipsies. In the poem, the poet-visionary invokes the butterfly- a soft insect with beautiful delicate wings like Icarus. The next couple of lines bring a message of peace, fertility and regeneration. Its like a completion of a vegetation cycle: “rain will run/to stop the gun” thus reconstructing the desolate landscape of Eliot’s The Wasteland by putting an end to wars and internecine strifes. It also recalls the Flower Power Movement of the early 60s in America and the constant pressure it put on the government to withdraw troops from the Vietnam war. When the guns will finally stop rattling both in the external world and in the conscience of the human mind, one can truly repair the land of promise. The lines preclude Eliot’s last three words in his poem “Shantih, shantih, shantih” because the fire that Prometheus stole for the use of mankind has been rendered “impotent” by failing to understand the true implication of its ritual. The poet wants to sing a song of praise to the butterfly, its his muse like the nightingale of John Keats. “Fire in air, vapour./ Water, ether, is shy”- symbolizes the nature cycle that restores the land from being wasted. The “butterfly” image is strikingly similar to Jim Morrison’s lyric “Before I sink into the big sleep,/I want to hear, I want to hear/The scream of the butterfly” in When the Music’s Over. When the music is over, the lights are turned off as the fire is impotent. Here the rains “run to stop the gun”. The explicit phallic imagery like the jutting out of semen in the act of copulation and fertilisation in “the rain will run” finally fuses the discipline with chaos to create the art of poetics. - Joy Roy Choudhury, Writer, Art Critic, Consultant.

 

For more info on poems written by Samij Datta, Please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com or call at +44 75073806595 (UK)/+91 9830067159 (India).

or you can post at ArtVantage, 5 St Catherines Rd, Broxbourne, EN10 7LG, UK

Clown (2008)

                                                                                          

Champagne and reefer

Looking down a hole

Seismic shift of cycle crow

Oh! I find

A crack in the earth.

Give me a bottle

Full of lime

And a length of time

Lazy lazy lazy

Rings are loud, mamma

Reefer call me a clown.

- by Samij Datta, Poet, Writer, Fluxist

Discourse on the poem: The opening line “Champagne and reefer” comes from a Muddy Waters’ blues song of the same recorded in 1981 in the King Bee album. There you have the lines “Yeah bring me champagne when I’m thirsty/Bring me reefer when I want to get high.” The phrase “looking down a hole” is like Freudian journey where the child/poet-shaman revisits his past wounds, nightmares and neurosis. “A crack in the earth” reiterates the inflicted wound of a generation that have indulged far too long in the nonfertility image of the American poet Hart Crane’s picture of a modern, industrialized city in his The Bridge (1930). The shaman-poet like Jim Morrison of the Doors wants to perform a purification ritual reminiscent of the pagan gods by drinking a “bottle full of lime” (the cleaning action of lime). Like Bacchus, he is the new-age god whose drinking will awake the Ourboros, the sacred feminine serpent that chases its own tail- an archetypal image of time and the cycles of time that contains within itself the past, present and future (eschatological time than teleological). This is the ritual mask worn by the poet-shaman when he is performing in front of an audience. This guise of a clown hides inside him the twin powers that Nietzsche talks about in his The Death of Tragedy- the Apollonian serenity, discipline and the Bacchic orgy and chaotic ecstasy.

- Joy Roy Choudhury, Writer, Art Critic, Creative Consultant.

For more info on poems written by Samij Datta, Please contact Joy Roy Choudhury at artvantage.uk@gmail.com or call at +44 75073806595 (UK)/+91 9830067159 (India).

or you can post at ArtVantage, 5 St Catherines Rd, Broxbourne, EN10 7LG, UK