Desi Books Ep 60 w/ Amish Trivedi – Desi Books
(available at Anchor.fm, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, Breaker, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Overcast)
Hello and welcome to Episode 60 of Desi Books—news and views about desi literature from the world over. I’m your host, Jenny Bhatt. Thank you for tuning in.
Today, in the #DesiReads segment, we have Amish Trivedi reading from his latest poetry collection, FuturePanic.
#DESIREADS WITH AMISH TRIVEDI — INTRODUCTION
Amish Trivedi is the author of three books. FuturePanic is his latest poetry collection. His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, New American Writing, Kenyon Online, Typo and other places. His music reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, and his poetry reviews can be found in Jacket2, Sink Review, and others. He is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Delaware, has an MFA in poetry from Brown, and a PhD in English and critical theory from Illinois State University.
Futurepanic is a Four Quartets for the millennial set. Infused with the nervous energies of the past half decade, when living with macro-tragedy and dread have become more ingrained in day-to-day functioning than ever, Trivedi’s third book of poetry employs a deliberate and plaintive lyric mode across five unfolding sections to wrestle with how much of the psyche one can let untether before the self faces annihilation. The poet confronts the gathering terrors that creep forth from simultaneously pondering vast, heady concepts like time and futurity in conjunction with more localized, proximate concerns like whether one will face the looming specter of a mass shooting the next time one goes to a box store, concert, movie theater, grocery store, school, or other public space. In FuturePanic, Trivedi questions whether the collective grief and guilt of our shared transgressions and fears are all-consuming or if we can use humanity’s boundless potential for creativity to rouse an alternative we’ve never known enough of to embrace fully—a moment’s peace
Amish Trivedi’s FuturePanic is his third book of poetry and is a Four Quartets for the millenial set. A reading by the poet in #DesiReads @DesiBooks
Tweet
The transcript of this excerpt is also up on the Desi Books website.
And now, here’s Amish Trivedi.
DESIREADS WITH AMISH TRIVEDI
[Excerpted with permission from Futurepanic by Amish Trivedi. Copyright © 2021 Amish Trivedi.]
from “Constructor”
There will be no time
when there is nothing left
to measure it, bystanders in space
where everything gets
erased. Time will be in chaos
until it isn’t, a negation of
understanding of the universe. Space is a negation
of being, time a negation of space, nothingness
a negation of time, consciousness a negation
of nothingness. My panic
is not a nanomachine that can’t stop itself—
it’s a human with a gun
that won’t.
My panic is not a bug or bot
that replicates— it’s a human
with nothing to replicate for. And my panic
is not the sun expanding
and boiling away our seas— it’s that we’re doing it
ourselves and to every other being
and we can’t stop ourselves from want.
That much I remember. And memory is a fetish relived
until it cannot be, until it fades or gets blown out
the back of the head.
It’s not the roads but f-stops
between them. The things that terrify only breed
in moonlight, preferring
to linger when the irradiation
halts. I grow fast
but always sideways,
getting meaner as night wears on. We’re
drifting into oncoming traffic
but the lights keep me
from saying it.
Not everyone can be shot,
but that stops no one
from trying. The scene
tricks me into revealing
a before self
when I need to hide it
most: this is the undoing
of a society that will not hold
for other moments, pretending
it lives where
conceptions of time
have faded out. There is no stopping
because there is nothing else
to do: the
crisis point is coming and
fibers are debriding and
only the spectacle will do.
Unveiled with an eye
closed. This is not
the path but the way
of unbeing, of altering. Alternating,
abandon. An island
that stills the waves. Even the most jaded
feel a spike, the vein tapped and running. I
am obfuscation
in the guise of a language that
I cannot help but translate. These are my wings,
my umlauts.
A saturation suspended
in the interlung space,
an infiltration
that does not go unnoticed
in the codex
of undoing. How the water
remains settles the only mystery
in a scene dedicated to the waxing
epistasis of language. The time nightmare
is even more inventive
when the subject never awakens into
the unending terror before them.
The mountain— the sins
that burden
are unapparent, untraceable
back to exact action. A bed of arrows
emerges from vision,
a world opens
and all spectrums of urbeing
observed. Too late: the clouds
are coming over and
darkness is all that eludes, unwilling
to hold back. Entrenched
in a war with no weapons or
disdain for one another, I will
climb until the air is too thin to
assuage my grief.
Deeply in love with
a life that’s not mine,
time’s saturation belies the
flickering nature of
grief. Raw the wound
that unties the fingers
from one another:
the next nail is
available for transplant. The spectre
imagination breeds with
buries everything else
undeniably. The future
holds a space I
cannot have, only
fetishize and imagine
as mine.
All options seem to be
forms of denial wrapped in
language I’ve never
controlled.
A song that is my brain
screaming to me,
the unconscious’s attempt
at playing back a memory tied
to new terror. Without known
antecedent, there is imagined
generation, the well that
sprays again. Forgetting
the things we hear
because there is
so much of it,
we cannot recall or
record: what was
true before is only
a fog that sheds
itself to grow
new.
” . . .Forgetting
Tweet
the things we hear
because there is
so much of it,
we cannot recall or
record: what was
true before is only
a fog . . .”
~Amish Trivedi from FuturePanic, his latest poetry collection #DesiReads @DesiBooks
Not worried
for me but I am
that, too. The sense
that every idea’s
been had, all roads
on a map already
driven, I plan for
anything other than survival.
Dreams become a second acquired
self when the first cannot
sustain.
I had to
want to live but I am
prisoner in a house
that never got built.
Can’t even bring myself
to ask myself to bear
myself. I have refined my
bystanding, matured it.
Until I know the fall,
I will not accept that
gravity pulls on me.
I am false witness to
my own catastrophes. Tell
me after I am out
of air.
“Spree”
Crisis is stop-time— auxon—
parts move and replicate
without propulsion. The clanking
replicator, artificial self, remainder
of misprision
from long before. If
you can see me,
I can see you too. Listen—
I speak
as clearly as I can. This silence is unnecessary,
as is action: we are the auxon
of a play so many acts in
that our curtain is falling.
Panic is other people—
My fear isn’t dying—
it’s that whatever life is
isn’t much
in a universe that goes on
undefinable.
The mechanism fires
until it does not. Heart rate increases until
it stops: tree or wall or river
is to car. The moments of urgency. The heart beats
until it’s stopped. A panic overtakes, seizes up,
pressure chokes. Veins constrict,
shred. Blood flow restricted
is more force, destruction arriving, pre-
configured in a history of crises. When
working correctly, the stress subsides, pressure equalizes.
A slight panic is the first
rupture.
But if crisis never stops. But if crisis
never resolves itself. But if crisis is all
there is. There are no resolutions,
only more crises coming on. Sometimes
things are born in fire,
are of the ashes.
“But if crisis never stops. But if crisis
Tweet
never resolves itself. But if crisis is all
there is . . .”
~Amish Trivedi from FuturePanic, his latest poetry collection #DesiReads @DesiBooks
To obsess over time is a fetish— to whisper into it, another. The future
is a fetish that oppresses
and when there is no future, the present
oppresses instead. When the present oppresses, the past
is idealized, its entries
into memory a fetish. I am tickled by memory
as the past cannot see
what is not there: the absence
of the spectre of the future.
I am being
buried alive. I
didn’t know
that we die
in pieces.
The body revolts against its housing
the science of my lenses and nails.
In my sexual fantasies, I’m a capitalist.
A desire to be interred in chalk, in a math
of revolutions, another reason to remain, abjure artifacts.
The reasons for being quiet diminish us.
The future is oppressive
in two ways: when there is no future
and when the future
is overwhelmingly certain, if
parallax or intangible.
Whatever hides beyond crisis is crisis
and panic and panic a panic which will not stop
until the moment lapses, until what is beyond the future
becomes known, acknowledged.
The leaves are falling but I am
not afraid because I know
they will be cover me— there will be
no discovery or recovery.
Everything about everyone else
is about me too. I cannot
believe the world exists when I
close my eyes
or leave a room. By being in
my sight, you are indentured
because I can’t unsee—
I speak below a whisper
until my voice
is heard.
My toes curl at the thought
of the world going on without me
so I make sure it won’t.
The marks across
an expressionless face—
eyes that search
for a remnant thread: being
is trying to avoid all the reasons
for undoing the stitches that
tie the tarp down and keep it
from drowning everyone else
who wanted to just stay dry.
Relapse again or beg
to see the edges of the frame, even
if an image floats off
underneath.
The mind returns to shock
because it is the only rush
that living provides
anymore.
The way out was lost
in the abstraction
of speech, which only
distances to avoid rebuilding. There
were last steps but anyone
who knows what they are
gets voted out.
Spectacle is the medium through
which everything is experienced. I
cannot offer more because everything
outside was stripped away and that
is all I ever was.
Absence leaves a remainder,
ditches or the deluge coming
into place so that nothing
is sustainable in a future
that’s not for me. A beacon
stands where remainder
exists, miles off shore and lighting
the sea brightly. Everything
is a fabrication, a manipulation
that does not scatter when
light refracts off of it. In the distance
crying, somewhere in the background
of an epiphany that makes it
possible to
dither. I am
culpable in a heist
where I am also
the alibi.
Fearing panic remains
unimagined and a typical day sustains
itself through malaise. Ideology
is the perception of a still sea
where there never was
any water at all. Everything
is nothing
until it overtakes me,
making me swerve into traffic
that’s been building for miles. The headlights
are calling and I’m strapped down
tight. The crash
is my fetish and I will not
pull away.
There’s a signal from across
the yard that says to
acknowledge silence. There
is always an excuse to burn
everything down. Do not tease
with a flag, unfurl. Fly it so
the names stay engraved and
the corrupted memory pure. The
dark wood ceases, injecting meaning
into itself, being. Off
center, tangential forces
which believe only in their own
authority. There’s too much
nihilism to make anything work and
not enough to invent denial. Trapped
in ideology because anything else
is certain to form chaos within.
The lines are arbitrary, there to
keep you from crossing
into a traffic of your own.
Amish Trivedi’s FuturePanic is his third book of poetry and is a Four Quartets for the millenial set. A reading by the poet in #DesiReads @DesiBooks
Tweet
You’ve been listening to episode 60 of Desi Books—news and views about desi literature from the world over. I’m your host, Jenny Bhatt. Thank you for tuning in. Today’s #DesiReads segment was with Amish Trivedi reading from his latest poetry collection, FuturePanic.
Episode 61 will be up shortly. Follow on Twitter @desibooks, Instagram @desi.books, Facebook @desibooksfb. Tag the accounts if you have requests or suggestions. Please go to the website, desibooks.co, if you’d like to sign up for the free, weekly newsletter. And please share this via social media to support the poet and help raise the tide of South Asian literature. Thank you.
Stay healthy, keep reading, and write well.
NOTE: If you like the work being done at Desi Books, you can leave some appreciative feedback and sign up for the free, weekly newsletter. And please share this with other readers who might be interested. Remember: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats.™
Join the Conversation
Desi Books 