2015: Inaugural Edition, Austin, TX, USA
The first festival/collective in 2015 drew to its fold a group of poets, Saleem Peeradina, Pramila Venkateswaran, Ravi Shankar, Sasha Parmasad and Varsha Saraiya-Shah. It was sponsored by the South Asian community and the mainstream alike. Our main fiscal sponsors were Austin Poets International (that hosts the big Austin Poetry Festival), the Austin Community College, and support in spirit and kind from the Cultural Arts Division, City of Austin. The Turkish Dialog Institute hosted a reading with impeccable hospitality as an outstanding gesture of peace building. A bevy of friends, restaurants, aunties and uncles in the South Asian community offered homes to stay, meals, marketing materials and made fiscal donations. Our venue was Casa de Luz with its Zen-like ambience and organic restaurant so healthy, thus leaving us in want of spice. The gastronomically tame food was more than compensated by the poetic spread from ten poets, some celebrated, some upcoming, each introduced with limericks by a pair of witty youth MCs. Saleem Peeradina presented a paper on the Mumbai poets—a pivotal chapter in Indian English Writing that marked the modernist evolution of the writing in the 70s. Anis Shivani’s paper struck a cavalier note with why he did not think he is a South Asian poet. Pramila Venkateswaran presented the need to increase the number of South Asian poets in prominent American journals. Our guest of honor was the eminent 78-year-old Parsi poet Keki Daruwalla of New Delhi. He won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987 for his book "Landscapes". Phinder Dulai the Indo-Canadian poet moved us greatly with a reading on the tragic Komagata Maru incident, supported by a rich mine of historical photographs. The cultural segment was an eclectic mix of a young violin virtuoso, Kai Cole, the Indian classical dance school, Natyalaya, improvisational poet, Thom the world poet (a sobriquet self-bestowed) and guitarist Darrell Mayers, photographer Rama Tiru, and the Syrian multilingual vocalist, Julie Slim. Matwaala’s beginning was true to its spirit of community across borders and inclusivity.
2015 participating poets are Usha Akella, Pramila Venkateswaran, Keki N. Daruwalla, Phinder Dulai, Ravi Shankar, Saleem Peeradina, Debangana Banerjee, Archana Vemulapalli, Shubh Bala Schleisser, Varsha Sariaya Shah and Divya Rajan
2015 participating poets are Usha Akella, Pramila Venkateswaran, Keki N. Daruwalla, Phinder Dulai, Ravi Shankar, Saleem Peeradina, Debangana Banerjee, Archana Vemulapalli, Shubh Bala Schleisser, Varsha Sariaya Shah and Divya Rajan
About 2015 festival by Saleem Peeradina: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/road/matwaalas-magical-festival-austin-texas-saleem-peeradina
Poet-of-Honor: Keki Daruwalla
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Suddenly the Tree
The hive slept like Argus its thousand eyes covered with bees. The light as it fell through the neem tree was a marine light, in which yellow moths set sail from one perforated shadow to another. The hive was mystic, a drugged mantra with its dark syllables asleep. As the afternoon wore on the honey-thieves came and smoked the bees out and carved out a honey-laden crescent for themselves and left a lump of pocked wax behind. The bees roamed the house, too bewildered to sting the children. At night they slept, clinging to the tree fork, now scarred with burns. Sparrows and squirrels, a bird with a black crest and a red half-moon for an eyelid bickered over the waxed remains the next day. Then with a drone of straining engines the bees rose like a swarm of passions from a dying heart, and left. [From 'The Glass-Blower: Selected Poems'] |
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