StephenGill, Dr.
Email: stephengill@cogeco.ca. Site: www.stephengill.ca
Ansted
Poet Laureate
DELVING INTO BEYOND BORDERS OF A.N. DWIVEDI
Dr. Stephen Gill
Every craft that professor A.N. Dwivedi has touched has
turned into a precious metal of accomplishment.
Some of these crafts include scholarly and creative writing, and some
include teaching and public relations. In addition to his doctorate, awards and
professorship, he has written extensively.
As a professor, he has helped several candidates to obtain their
doctorates. Now they are following the footsteps of their master. As a critic, he can boast of producing more
than one hundred research papers, literary articles, and about twelve books of
literary criticism. As an editor he has
produced books and journals. On top of this, he is supportive.
Though
Professor A.N. Dwivedi deserves detailed treatment in all these areas, it is
the pagoda of his poetry that touches another venerator. As a poet, he has authored four collections
of poems. They all have been admired by poets as well as critics.
His latest
collection, Beyond Borders1, has
forty-one poems. Around nine of them are concerned, in one way or the other,
with poetry and poets, and the rest are concerned mostly with philosophical and
non-philosophical subjects. Noteworthy poems in the first category include
“Thought-Bird”, “Poet”, “The Poetic Process,” ”Scientists Versus Poet” and
poems about Eliot and Auden. Notable poems in the philosophical category,
include “Life-Boat, “”Man’s Mind”, “Life is a Winding Stair,” What are We?”,
“Life’s Journey,” and also “Scientist Versus Poet”. The last poem in this
category is a dialogue in a poetic form-- an exercise that attracts the pen and
attention of only a few.
Professor A.N.
Dwivedi once shared with me that he is primarily a poet and that he wanted to
establish himself as a poet, but he became a literary critic because of the
need of the time. Now his role as a critic has overshadowed his poetry. His
poems about poets and poetry-related subjects are the living proofs of his
aspiration. If there is any subject
that catches this
poet’s attention more than once, apart from the philosophical
subjects, it is about poets and poetry, a subject that breathes right within
his soul. Beyond Borders starts with “Thought- Birds”, where the poet dwells
on the power of imagination that helps to reach even the unreachable zones by
technology and science. Imagination is the creative process that forms mental
images of something that is not present before the senses. A poet or an artist
uses this process
creatively. The poet explains it in the preface to his collection:
A poet is a sensitive creature. His
sensitivity is whetted by the moving scenes or situations shaping around him.
The moving scenes or situations capture his mind forthwith, and he starts
writing about them, not like a historian or a scientist who keep his eyes fixed
on facts or on laboratory observations. The poet is as free as a singing-bird,
distilling the alluring music of his verses everywhere. When his imagination is
on fire, he can reach the gates of Heaven or of Hell..
The poet follows
what he states in the preface. Take the example of the first poem
“Thought-Bird”:
Thought-birds can fly
unto the gates of Heaven
where blessed souls dwell,
conversing in a nasal tone
as the numbers of newcomers swell.”
Observe how the same imagination soars in “A Poet—Who’s He,”
on page two in the last stanza:
He is addicted to
fancy crossing visible borders
of time ‘n’ space,
stuffing him with food
for the human race.
These and
others poems illustrate what the poet states in his preface: “the poet’s feet
are planted on earth, his mind soars higher and higher and explores the regions
untravelled hitherto and culls the honey from the beehives of these regions.”
(Preface, viii). He proves this flight of the imagination of poets in his poem
“Poet”, where “poet’s feet/are planted/on earth,/ but
his/ fertile mind / soars high/ ‘n’ explores/ the treasures/ hidden from/
ordinary eyes.”.. He continues:
He reveals
the regions
unarrived at,
far away
from home
‘n’ hearth;
‘n’ connects
hither ‘n’
farther shores
with mirth.
It is also
obvious that the poetry of A.N. Dwivedi is colored with Indian thoughts. “Life
is a Winding Stair”, “What are We?” “Life’s Journey”, “The Two Shores” and
“Life-Boat” belong to this category.
These and several other poems have allusion to Indian thoughts. They
refer to “the abode of Indra,” “Maya,” “Lord Baman”, “Rama,” “Kali” and
“Shiva”. Indian trees and rivers, such
as neem, goolar,
The thoughts
of the poet are primarily rooted in Indian scriptures. “The
This way of
thinking can be traced in the book of Ecclesiastes of King Solomon who lived
about five thousand years ago. King Solomon says: “I have seen all things that are done under
the sun, and behold all is vanity and vexation of
spirit”. The poet of Beyond Borders
and the poet of Ecclesiastes share
the view that life is ephemeral and all is illusion.
Khalil Gibran
also says something along the same lines, though in a different way: “Mankind
is like verses written/Upon the surface of the rills.”2 (35, The Procession). Elsewhere he says
“Man is like the foam of the sea that floats upon the surface of the water.
When the wind blows, it vanishes, as it had never been. Thus are our lives
blown away by Death.”3
The philosophy
that Professor A.N. Dwivedi touches in Beyond Borders is
embedded in the culture of
The poet
points out in “Nature’s Crops” on page sixteen:
Men come ‘n’ go
In Maya’s grand show;
They float in the air
Like shots from a
bow.
Maya,
a Hindi word, suggests that everything around is an illusion. In other words,
nothing is real. The goal of a human should be to realize this falsehood in
order to merge with the divine power that is real. The state of falsehood is
compared usually with the state in the dream. New World Encyclopedia traces this element also in Sikhism:
Sikhs conceive this world to be no more
manifest than a dream. The Guru Granth Sahib states that, as in a dream, there
is nothing in the physical world that anyone can truly identify as their own.
Even though dreams may feel genuinely tangible, the dreamer cannot affirm them
as dreams until they awaken. Thus, human beings must seek God in order to
escape the grasp of maya. In this way, the Sikh formulation of maya is
comparable with that of Vedanta.
In
addition to a Vedantic element, there is another strong
element that Dr. Nilanshu Agarwal
traces in the poetry of Professor A.N. Dwivedi. This
strong element is the use of words in pairs. Dr. Agarwal
mentions “this dirty ‘n’ stinking bug”,
“leaders ‘n’ statesmen”, “swords ‘n’ daggers” and “cities ‘n’ towns”.
Like in
his former collections, Professor A.N. Dwivedi uses
this device in Beyond Border. In “Thought-Bird”, he uses fly ‘n’
flutter, free ‘n’ unchecked; in “Beyond
Borders”, he uses time ‘n’ space; in “The Poetic Process” images ‘n’ symbols;
in “Communication”, chaotic ‘n’ hollow; in “Images”, signs ‘n’ tokens, and this
list goes on. He uses this device, as he explains to Dr. Agarwal,
his interviewer, for the sake of emphasis.5
Professor A.N.
Dwivedi has written widely
on foreign writers. His
doctoral dissertation was on a foreign poet and it was written in a language
that was also foreign. He writes and teaches the literature of this foreign
language at a post-graduate level. He is capable now to weave a rainbow of his
creativity. His thoughts are rooted in the centuries-old philosophical system of
Works Cited
1Beyond
Borders (a collection of
poems) by A.N. Dwivedi. Adhyayan Publishers &
Disctributors,
2The Procession (poems) by Khalil Gibran. The Wisdom Library,
3The Words of the Master by Kahlil Gibran in A
Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran.
4Beyond Border by A.N. Dwivedi. Book Review by Patricia Prime. The Stephen Gill Gazette (online)
5 “An Epistolary Interview with the Scholar Poet A. N. Dwivedi” by Dr. Nilanshu
Kumar Agarwal.
The Stephen Gill Gazette (online).