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      October 23, 2016A Recommendation to the CommitteeKarthik Purushothaman

      after the announcement of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature

      Last week, a voice won
      because it was heard.
      Can you have claimed any
      other victory to be yours?
       
      Didn’t the voice, mellow
      rattle your walls without
      need to bellow? Unplugged
      plugged in, from Desolation
       
      to Duquesne, don’t you still
      hear the voice blowing,
      as constant as a bullfrog’s croak
      in the world’s rainiest place?
       
      For real, now the eastern state
      of Meghalaya, India, is no more
      eastern than Woodstock was
      white. So while you complain
       
      from your golf carts, I pray
      one day that the Prize also be
      handed to the black man who
      played the guitar with his teeth
       
      because that to me is poetry.

      from Poets Respond

      Karthik Purushothaman

      “This is my straightest response to the Nobel Committee’s decision to award Bob Dylan the prize, though Dylan himself has yet to respond. As a writer from the Indian subcontinent, I’m ecstatic. Even though Dylan is white, and the last Indian to have earned the prize won it a hundred years ago, the Committee’s decision still speaks for me and my fellow young poets from India, who would cite the likes of Dylan, Leonard Cohen, or Joan Baez as the reason they took up writing poetry. For as long as the prize continues to be awarded, there is no doubt it will remain Eurocentric. Therefore, every decision the committee makes outside the list of ‘usual suspects,’ I consider a victory for the many forms in which literature exists and continues to thrive, in the present day.”

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