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Building on the work of G.M. Muktibodh (1917-1964), the foremost Indian Marxist poet and thinker of the twentieth century, Aditya Bahl assembles a startling new poetics that fuses Marx and Mira, the Indian epic and the workers’ inquiry, the Avant-Garde and the Third World.
Let chance be the fulfillment of chant, Aditya Bahl vows in Mukt. Bahl’s presciently braided poetry intertwines, without reconciling, conflicting politics, cultures, and traditions, creating, if not openness, then its possibilities. This is restless, exploratory work that pushes against the aesthetic horizon of de/reformation.
– Charles Bernstein
Every page of Aditya Bahl’s Mukt bristles with a newly forged relation. I can’t wait to see it finished, I can’t bear to see it end.
– Vivek Narayanan
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Notoriously committed to the long poem, Muktibodh often professed that his poems refused to end, and that his shorter poems are actually incomplete. Bahl takes one of these shorter poems and “translates” it into a long – very long, unfinished – poem in the English language. Mukt unfolds each phrase of Muktibodh’s poem into lines that range from lyric response to homophonic translation, along the way incorporating archival histories, reportage, workers’ newspapers, oral epics, and fragments from Bahl’s diary.
The result is an astonishing blast of visual and sonic virtuosity that clears vital new ground for political aesthetics in contemporary poetry.
Aditya Bahl is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including NAME/AMEN (Timglaset, Malmö, 2019). He has written essays about literature and politics for New Left Review, The Nation, The New Inquiry, Himal Southasian, and other publications. He is a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, and serves as associate editor for English Literary History.