Indran Amirthanayagam is one of the most remarkable figures roaming the contemporary poetic landscape. Like some of the poets he most admires—Cavafy, Neruda, Hikmet (all mentioned in the poem below)—he is a citizen of the world. Born into the Catholic Tamil community (a minority within a minority) of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960, he left with his family for England when he was eight, seeking refuge from his native land’s ongoing strife as well as care for an autistic brother. He lived in the U.K. for six years, attending grammar and primary school there. When he was fourteen, the family moved again, this time to Honolulu, where his father, also a poet, had been offered a job. In Hawaii, Indran was one year ahead of Barry Obama, whom he knew slightly, at Punahou School. In 1978, he left Hawaii for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After getting his B.A. there, he moved to New York to become, like Lorca, “a poet in New York.” He picked up a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and remained in New York until 1993, when he got a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, having become a U.S. citizen in the late ‘80s.
Indran reading “Fire Department”
His Foreign Service positions have included stints in Argentina, Belgium, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, India, Canada, Peru, and Haiti. This is a man who gets around.
He writes and publishes in English, French, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese (but sadly and ironically, he has forgotten Tamil, his first language). In the DC area, where he has many friends, he runs a reading series at a Haitian restaurant called Port au Prince and has just become editor of the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an online journal. He is indefatigable; he works full time; he writes a poem a day, at a minimum; he travels constantly. In the first half of this year alone, he felt he simply had to go to San Francisco to help celebrate Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday; he caught a train from DC to New Orleans to take part in a literary festival; he brought his 83-year-old mother back to Sri Lanka for the first time in 30 years; he’s made several trips to New York. He may be the most ubiquitous poet on the planet.
He always wears a hat.
His poems (the ones in English, anyway) have a directness, almost a plainness, about them. His work is deeply literary, full of reverence for his fellow poets, but devoid of stylistic pretensions. The poems are like enhanced emails, addressed to his friends and readers, but made resonant and luminous through the work of the imagination.
Gift at the End
I woke up the other day and thought about the best gift
I could offer friends turning a year older on the various
continents—I know people everywhere like you, thanks
to powerful social media—a poem, certainly, electronic
card, phone call, even a visit? Can you imagine boarding
a steel and aluminum plane—wood used only
for some interiors in first class, the metallic bird
driven by a well-rested pilot and a series of computers–
to say hello to you in Rotterdam, or Madras,
or in the port city of Alexandria? But I know only
Cavafy there, through poetry, and in Moscow,
Nazim tootling about in a car, metallic also, not yet
with dynamite under the hood, and Neruda straddling
a horse through the Andres on the way to Argentina,
walking on the beach at Wellawatta with his mongoose.
So how to justify these loose associations, stream
of consciousness running through the World Wide Web
without any brake, no formal mechanism to stopper
imagination and force, at least, the appearance
of form, migration certainly the only truth.
and the need to finish the poem, walk it back home,
stop the beast in the kitchen, give him a treat,
some Wilfred Owen, just days before
the War’s end, shot dead—dulce et decorum est—
or straight to the point, the full stop.
—Indran Amirthanayagam, 10 July 2019