Memories

The anthology is a collection of poems, selected for their creative enterprise, from the entries submitted as part of the National Level Intercollegiate Versification Competition 'Agassia 2022' conducted by the Post Graduate Department of English, Sri C Achutha Menon Govt College, Thrissur, Kerala in memory of their dear student Agas Charles Samuel who passed away on January 26, 2020.
Poems-lyrical, imaginative and anti-reductive, have formed the crux of the entries and our approach has been to step outside the more contextual analysis of poetry and view poetry responsively, which is to say, to discuss poems and ideas of poetry as they explore myriad shades of life, not just ‘the life of the mind’ but also as they exist in our own day-to-day existence.
This is where poetry works best, in what Randall Jarrell calls ‘the dailiness of life’ – and what the young poets discussed here have achieved, in the face of personal experiences, rapid change, environmental degradation and the mechanization of almost everything, pointing to a culture in which an appreciation of the everyday, and of the ‘irrational’ beauty provides, not only a counter to overly mechanistic, procedural thinking, but also a basis for what might be described as a sense of belonging, the feeling of being here and now. It suggests that poetry is evocative not only in the sense that poetry is not a minority or elitist art, but is, in some form or another, the central pillar of any nurturing culture. Or, to paraphrase Stephen Spender, the struggle of any society – against external powers, and sometimes with itself – is a struggle for the conditions in which the writing and reading of poetry are not only possible, but also prized.