In between successive drafts of this essay, just over half of Britain voted to anchor their fates to an unseemly portmanteau and the xenophobic campaign it stood for, even as an orange-haired aspirant from ‘across the pond’ cheered them on. America wasn’t doing noticeably better. The tragedy in Orlando was still raw, the Senate Republicans were busy pretending that automatic weapons were God’s daisy chains and Presidential candidates hopscotched between boxes labelled ‘disappointing’, ‘predictable’ and ‘The Lizard King’. To put it mildly, marooned in the middle of the year of our lord 2016, the world wasn’t at its inclusive best.

Which is why it was a pleasant surprise to discover that the bestselling American comics of the year (as of July) was Marvel’s new Black Panther reboot, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. That a MacArthur Genius Grant winner should write a comic-book seemed remarkable enough. But even more remarkable was the fact that the story of an African prince called T’Challa, who’s also a uniform-clad superhero, sold over a quarter of a million copies within a month of its release (according to The Guardian ). Very soon, Margaret Atwood will have a graphic novel called Angel Catbird to her name; the eponymous superhero is a bird-cat-human hybrid. Meanwhile, comics legend Mike Mignola (the writer-artist behind Hellboy ), a man actually expected to produce graphic novels, has gone on an indefinite hiatus to focus on making watercolour paintings.

So 2016, it seems, is the year of artistic crossovers, and Sudeep Sen’s EroText is a defiantly classy, unclassifiable book that saw it coming. EroText describes itself as a collection of “micro-fictions or prose poems”, filed under the Gaiman-esque sections ‘Desire, Disease, Delusion, Dream, Downpour.’

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? In a prefatory essay called ‘Meditations on the Mapping of EroText ’, Sen writes that the style employed in the book is “a highly wrought stylised mode of micro-fiction that overlaps with aspects of prose-poetry, and poetry that overlaps with aspects of fiction”. He expresses his admiration for “crossover writers” who have “pushed the boundaries of fiction, non-fiction and poetry”. And with EroText , Sen joins this literary crossover club.

In the second piece of the book, called ‘Wishbones, Arias, Memories’, the poet takes us inside the head of a terminally ill man: this is part of a section called Disease, after all. The dying man receives a series of hallucinations, none of which do much to his air of resigned gloom.

Sen writes: “I find myself in a toyshop, the only adult among children. They look at me, sneer at my grown-up state, except now I am more child-like than they are. I came here looking for bones, not bones from the dead, but plastic ones, ones that allow a child to learn the building blocks of life, to construct and set up a model for their life, to feel the tactility of life itself.”

Note the rhythmic, tripartite expansion of ‘life’ here: from the simulacrum of life (“the building blocks of life”) to a particular lifetime (“a model for their life”) to the necessarily abstract “life itself”. This feels a bit like a tihaai , a stylised triplet used by Indian classical musicians to sign off memorably. The three connotations combine strategically and swell, like co-tributaries. Surely, then, this is poetry, a bird swift but graceful, gliding along with its wings spread out?

The child takes the plastic bones and tries to build himself a serviceable model, much like how children take whatever life throws at them gallantly and try to construct a capital-A Authentic Self. They are no more skilled at one than the other. It’s the struggle that counts. Such a complete narrative arc over the course of a few short lines; surely this is micro-fiction, a supersonic airplane, propelling readers away from their comfort zones?

Place your bets, then. Poetry or fiction? Bird or plane? As you realise 20 pages into the book, the satisfaction s in not knowing.

Prose, not prosaic As befits the name of the book, the section titled Desire includes a suite of many-hued pleasures. Sen is also a fine art photographer, so unsurprisingly, ekphrasis (the dramatic description of a piece of visual art) is something that he revels in. And in EroText, his technique is impeccable, eclipsing even the ‘Blue Nude’ series he wrote after the Matisse sequence of the same name in Fractals. In ‘Odissi’, Sen writes about the experience of watching a mesmeric Odissi performance. The life-imitates-art credo of the terminal poet is used to compare the sensual movements of the female dancer. Sen writes:

“I can only trace imaginary lines with my human hands on the stage’s black canvas, trace the ever-shifting female form, her heaving breathlessness that matches the subtlest half-taals and bols. Architectural love and body love are one for me — my love for stone and love for the female body are one and the same. There are no hierarchies for me — if temple art is elevated, the dancer’s art is sublime; if idols are timeless, the dancer is immortal—”

One of the reasons why Sen’s ekphrastic pieces are as good as they are is that they tend to immerse the reader in a subjective experience: the primacy of a personal response to art is underlined, as opposed to poets whose engagement with the (generally canonical) works feels like lip service, as if they hope to illuminate their writings with somebody else’s afterglow. In EroText , of course, the ekphrasis refuses to be pinned down under ‘poem’ or ‘fiction’ (even the admittedly trendy nomenclature ‘micro-fiction’).

In the essay ‘Performing Writing’, Della Pollock wrote: “For me, performative writing is not a genre or a fixed form (as a textual model might suggest) but a way of describing what some good writing does. (…) Like performances, however, it is also an analytic, a way of framing and underscoring aspects of writing/life. Holding “performative writing” to set shapes and meanings would be (1) to undermine its analytic flexibility, and (2) to betray the possibilities of performativity with the limitations of referentiality.”

Crossover masters We see, therefore, that the question of whether something is a ‘prose poem’ or not is unimportant compared to the matter of preserving its performativity, the extra-textual elements in a piece of writing.

In the introduction to Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems (1972), Borges is at his lucid best. He writes: “I suspect that poetry differs from prose not, as many have claimed, through their dissimilar word patterns, but by the fact that each is read in a different way. A passage read as though addressed to the reason is prose; read as though addressed to the imagination, it might be poetry. I cannot say whether my work is poetry or not; I can only say that my appeal is to the imagination.” And writers like Sen are aware that human imagination does not rely on words alone: a snippet of a film, a song or a dance performance may set off a synaptic chain that enhances a poem/micro-fiction’s appeal manifold.

Returning to the essay ‘Meditations on the Mapping of EroText ’, we see that Sen has explicitly linked the ancestry of this book to “the European and Oriental miniaturists: stylists like Gustave Flaubert, Andre Gide, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Kazuo Ishiguro and Pico Iyer.” Later in the same essay, he talks about EroText being an example of the ‘crossover’ zone between prose and poetry.

Sen enunciates: “In literature, there is a whole wide area of beautifully articulated penumbra where the best practitioners of this particular crossover art operate. It is a space where the conventional definitions of genre evaporate, expand, merge and morph into non-conventional literary pieces that act as ‘well-built art objects’ — artefacts that are tactile, textured and three-dimensional even on a flat printed page — narratives that may not necessarily have a linear plot; or even a beginning, middle and an end.”

And who are the denizens of this penumbra that Sen speaks of? Ben Lerner would be one, for my money. His novel Leaving the Atocha Station is, without doubt, one of the great books of the 21st century so far, written in an inimitable, hyper-alert style that is sure to spawn a legion of imitators. He has written three formidable books of poetry, each one stylistically and tonally distinct ( The Lichtenburg Figures , a sonnet sequence, is particularly brilliant). He even found time to write a seminal essay called ‘The Hatred of Poetry’: it included the following line for the ages: “Many more people agree that they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is.”

The British writer Adam Foulds is another: his long narrative poem The Broken Word , described by the critic Peter Kemp as a “verse novella”, is a remarkable meditation on the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising, seen through the eyes of a white settler. When you read the book, you can understand why Kemp chose this particular neologism: for all its control of rhythm and atmosphere, the book has the pizzazz of a short, sharp crime novel. Such a twinning of talents is rare indeed. Foulds’ novel The Quickening Maze , about the short, tragic life of poet John Clare, was every bit as enthralling as The Broken Word.

There are others who ought to be considered as worthy denizens of the penumbra: giants like John Berger and Anne Carson (whose book Autobiography of Red is perhaps the most compelling argument for poetry and fiction not being separate categories, strictly speaking), who dazzle with whatever form they choose to filter their writings through. EroText is Sen’s entry ticket into this hallowed company, a unique book that, above all, rewards close reading.

Related Topics