People

Amarjit Singh Chandan: A Poet of Many Dimensions

PRESS RELEASE

 

Renowned poet Amarjit Singh Chandan will be awarded the Anād Kāv Sanman for 2009 for his seminal contribution to Punjabi poetry and for bringing Punjabi poetry on the international scene.

The award ceremony will be part of this year's Anād Kāv Tarang Poetry Festival which is being held in New Delhi this year on Sunday, November 22.

This is the only literary award of its kind in South Asia that exclusively celebrates poetic excellence. It is also amongst the biggest awards in terms of money.

The Punjabi poet, Surjit Singh Patar, was the first recipient of this award last year. To honour the memory of the Punjabi poetess Baljit Kaur Tulsi, The Anād Foundation started Anād Kāv Tarang Poetry Festival and Anād Kāv Sanman in 2008. The award, offered to eminent poets, includes a cash prize of Rupees 250,000.00 (approx US $5000.00), a citation, a silver plate and a turban.

The leading English author and art critic John Berger states that Amarjit Singh Chandan's poetry transports its listeners and readers into an arena of timelessness. What he does is to fold time; time in his poems becomes like an arras or a hinged screen. The listener or reader is encircled by a multiplicity of times. His poetic practice assumes that there are more space-time dimensions than the four we habitually recognise.

Each of Amarjit's poems proceeds in its own way and has its own form. Yet in all of them there is an assembly of different space-time dimensions.

According to Christina Linardakis, a well known literary critic from Greece, the pictures of Amarjit's poetry are lacking of anything pretentious. On the contrary, they are surprisingly intimate. They portray our own moments, they capture our thoughts, they express our dreams, the contradictions of our mind.

Nevertheless, his descriptive power is sublimating, the detail of their reference deprives the reader's right of an adroit escape, it holds out his hand disarmingly, it guides him through unusual and familiar paths.

In his poetic speech, Amarjit weaves and unweaves his impressions, the perceptions, the memories of each one of us, weaving in this manner mainly the thread of our own thought and of our own life.

He has published five collections of poetry including Kavitavān, Jarhān, Beejak, Chhanna, Gurhti and Anjal, as well three books of prose in Punjabi, notably Phailsufiān, Hun-Khin (A discussion with Sohan Qadri) and Nishāni.

English versions of Amarjit's poems have appeared in England in a collection Being Here (1995, 1999, 2005) and magazines such as the Poetry Review, Artrage, Bazaar, Brand, Critical Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, Index on Censorship and Atlas (UK), Papirus and Akköy (Turkey), Erismus, Ombrela and Odos Panos (Greece) and Lettre Internationale (Romania) - and Sonata for Four Hands, A Collection of Poems (Arc Publications), prefaced by John Berger.

The ANĀD Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion and preservation of culture, with particular focus on the preservation and perpetuation of the endangered intangible cultural heritage and traditions of South Asia. The ANĀD Foundation's mission is to establish institutions as a means towards facilitating the recovery and enhancement of the intangible (sukham virsā) and tangible (sthūl virsā) heritage of South Asia as a priority.

Among the several aims of the Foundation include conferring ANĀD Sanmān, in the fields of poetry, music, dance, sports, science, technology, art, literature, theatre, cinema and handicrafts, etc. and for life time achievements in fields that the Trust is directly or indirectly concerned with.

The Anād Foundation is organizing the second edition of the festival Anād Kāv Tarang, an evening of poetry reading scheduled to be held on Sunday, November 22, 2009, at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi.

A selection of Amarjit Singh Chandan's 35 poems titled Paintee, designed by Gurvinder Singh and published by ANÄ€D, will also be released on the occasion.

The function will conclude with musical renditions of Amarjit's poetry by Jasbir Jassi, Madan Gopal Singh, Rabbi Shergill, Sunanda Sharma and Bhai Baldeep Singh.

 

November 20, 2009

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