Book Review | In Thrall of the Image: Poetry in Influencer-ese
Here is a book that offers a pleasant difficult definition problem in the first place: Meera Ganapathi is the author of a few children’s books and the editor of literary publication SoupHe released his first collection for adults. How to forget The Book of “Short Steps and Long Walks” is subtitled; In some places, it looks like a diaristic patchwork, which is torn to walk as self -discovery. In others, poetry, substitute and observer intersect and prose with images from various places called the author’s home. In each of these inputs-and the hundred proportional pages of the book, there are more than 50-service, desire and the area between the movement of the walking material in a city, and on the broken area with various features of the time.
In describing this like this, although he never uses the term ganapathi, the author is wider, largely to the European ‘Flaneuse’ tradition: women who observe and idle urban landscapes and disrupt gender hierarchies in the process. Flanging in this book, Ganapathi, is especially rich descriptive, and reveals the dream, tactile pleasures of the cities he occupy. Nevertheless, these images may often feel, adorned with familiar persecution of internet writing, trite and excessively used.
I do not want to say ‘don’t write internet’ in a cynical way. There are forms of writing on the Internet, and both of them have writing forms that constantly expand our live, form and language feeling. There are a few moments when Ganapathi’s writings rise to meet them: just to get one example, a character’s voice melts like “Iodex – black, clean and Balmy”.
However, very often, both prose and poetry seem to seduce the image. Ganapathi has a gift for the preparation of clean, beautiful, uncomplicated urban life that emerges like temporary parts – a familiar but willing comfort: an Instagram horseman: Why walk for a morning/walk for time/birds, dairy men, door bells and/school children are filled in waiting cars… In this book, the city’s dirt passes, the troubles are instant and insignificant. Open Soup‘Website Ganapathi describes one of the motivations behind the site as olmak creating a relaxing corner on the Internet ;; These poems, which are built in a similar way, are these poems that seem quite conscious to a reader and their settlement skills.
The temporary images of the upper-middle class nostalgia whispering with the reader in the asmr sound of the internet were sterilized. As in the poem, such a list of desires survives the problem of criticism or conflict that I want my child to know and what I want to do when I was a child, and instead reshaping the relationship between the poet and the reader under the umbrella of ‘relative’.
In doing so, this distraction and inward pieces centrifugal for the fascination of the reader’s curiosity. Even though they are nice to look, they slip very easily from memory.
How to forget
By Meera Ganapathi
Harpercollins
p. 120; RS 599
