Golchakkar: Open Your Eyes—Poetry’s Response to Climate Change
Contributors to the anthology Open Your Eyes Vinita Agrawal, Gayatri Chawla, Alex Josephy, and Sudeep Sen, joined us in a panel to discuss what it means to use poetry and literature as a response to climate change.
The Chakkar welcomes to our reading series, GOLCHAKKAR. Every month, we will host an online panel discussion of Indian artists in conversation with the world.
Open Your Eyes: Poetry's response to Climate Change - Kiran Bhat in Conversation with Vinita Agrawal, Gayatri Chawla, Sudeep Sen, and Alex Josephy
Because of the digital revolution and increased access to travel, people from all over the world are collaborating, communicating, and interacting in ways never thought before. While India in itself is a land of much cultural diversity and narrative, there are many ways that Indian artists too are stepping outside of the borders of the subcontinent to write fiction, poetry, and creative pieces that challenge the way that we as humans relate to the planet.
Join world traveller, polyglot, and author Kiran Bhat as he interviews various Indian writers who want to take that question in mind: how do we write without borders? How do we write for the sake of the world? For our first event, we profiled Vinita Agrawal, Gayatri Chawla, Alex Josephy, and Sudeep Sen, all contributors for the recently published climate change anthology, Open Your Eyes. We discussed what it means to use poetry and literature as a response to climate change, and we all take time to reflect on what it means to be artists, on this ever-eroding, shrinking, and subsiding world.
Participants
VINITA AGARWAL is an award-winning poet, editor, translator, curator, and author of four books of poetry: Two Full Moons (Bombaykala Books), Words Not Spoken (Brown Critique), The Longest Pleasure (Finishing Line Press) and The Silk Of Hunger (AuthorsPress). She is the joint recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She is the Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. Her poem won a prize for the Moon Anthology on the Moon by TallGrass Writers Guild, Chicago 2017. More recently, her poem won a special mention in the Hawker Prize for best South Asian poetry. She has contributed a monthly column on Asian Poets on the literary blog of the Hamline University, Saint Paul, USA in 2016-17. In September 2020, she edited an anthology on climate change titled Open Your Eyes (pub. Hawakal). She judged the RLFPA poetry contest (International Prize) in 2016 and co judged the Asian Cha’s poetry contest on The Other Side in 2015. She has read at the FILEY Book Fair, Merida, Mexico, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival among others. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She has curated literary events for PEN Mumbai. She can be reached at https://www.vinitawords.com/.
SUDEEP SEN’s prize-winning books include Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Ladakh, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), and Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury). The Whispering Anklets and Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) are forthcoming. He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read his poetry at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.” [http://www.sudeepsen.org]
ALEX JOSEPHY lives in London and Italy. Her collection White Roads was published by Paekakariki Press in 2018, and her pamphlet Other Blackbirds by Cinnamon Press, 2016. Her poems have won awards such as the McLellan Prize and the Battered Moons Prize, and have appeared in magazines and anthologies in England, in Italy and online. Her second collection is due out with Pindrop Press in Spring 2020. Alex was impressed by a speaker at the 2019 poetry festa in Salaiola, a small village in southern Tuscany, who said something like this: “The opposite of destruction is creation - and at the moment we’re surrounded by so much destruction. Perhaps this means that there is a greater need than ever for creativity.”
GAYATRI CHAWLA is a published poet, freelancer and French teacher from Mumbai. Her poems have been published in international anthologies and periodicals like The American Poetry Anthology, The Indian P.E.N., The Journal of the Poetry Society (India), Pea River Journal, The Hans India, The Bombay Review, Madras Courier, Open Road Review, among other places. Her poem “Anagram” won the 2013 Commendation Prize at The All India Poetry Competition (New Delhi, India). She is the author of two poetry books: The Empress (Winner –II of the 2018 US National Poetry Contest by Ræd Leaf Foundation for Poetry & Allied Arts) and Invisible Eye, which was long listed for Cochin Lit Fest Poetry Prize 2018.
KIRAN BHAT is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently travelled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne.
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