I want to talk about the “secret history.” The term itself acknowledges that whether the history is known or not, it has an impact upon our present lives, which is to say the “secret” is worth knowing. It’s not only to better understand our present that we seek to learn the secret history: we also want to give due to past masters who were marginalized by political conditions, colonization, or intended or unintended discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, or national origin. We also want to actively work on constructing (or reconstructing or restoring) our own lost lineages; excavating those lineages also provides a means for the present to affect the future.

At the previous festival, I was asked to give a lecture considering the Asian American canon. This lecture was later published as an essay called, somewhat ominously, “The End of the Canon.” The reason I worried about this canon was that in terms of South Asian American poetry, to narrow the focus a little, that canon has had tenuous beginnings. In the essay, I discussed the early deaths of two important South Asian American poets, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), and Reetika Vazirani, who died just two years later (1962–2003), and after publishing only two books (a third was published posthumously). The third poet I discussed in that essay, Meena Alexander, has also since passed away. 

But of these three poets, none were widely published in the US in the 1970s. Ali’s first US book was published in 1987; his earlier two books were published in Calcutta. Alexander’s first US book was published the following year, 1988. Vazirani is somewhat younger; her books came out in 1997 and 2003. The first widely read and widely published South Asian American poet was, in fact, Shreela Ray.

Ray’s lyrics—often stark, sometimes tart, always sharp—were among the first poems I encountered in English when I was a high school student studying poetry in western New York. The individual poems came to me first in the form of strongly smelling, nearly damp, purple-lettered mimeographed copies in a workshop at the public library taught by a local poet named Elaine Chamberlain, and then later in my high school creative writing class, courtesy of my teacher Mary Richert. It wasn’t until I was researching this lecture that I came to know that Mary Richert knew Shreela Ray quite well, and that the summer after that first early creative writing class, Richert and Ray had gone on an epic cross-country road trip in India.

Shreela Ray was born in Orissa province (now called Odisha) in India in 1942. Born into a Hindu and Christian Indian family, she spent her early childhood in England and India and then moved to the United States for college in 1960, attending the Iowa Writers Workshop to receive an MFA in Creative Writing, and later attending the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She developed relationships with many of the leading luminaries of the time who recognized her talent, among them W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, John Berryman, William Meredith, Isabella Gardner, and Galway Kinnell, as well as Leslie Fiedler and John Logan, with whom she studied at the University of Buffalo; Logan later wrote the introduction to the one-and-only volume of poems she published during her lifetime, Night Conversations with None Other (Dust Books, 1977).

Ray eventually married a fellow student, Hendrik De Leeuw,  and settled in Rochester, New York, where she became part of the burgeoning poetry scene then centered around Al Poulin, a professor at Brockport State College who would go on to found the influential small press BOA Editions and the Brockport Writers Forum in Rochester, New York. She began publishing her work in national venues, including Poetry,in the mid-1960s. Ray’s work was noted for its urbane and cosmopolitan phrasing, its dark wit, and the multiple lineages from which it drew—as much from a contemporary Indian lineage that might include Kamala Das, Adil Jussawalla, and Eunice De Souza as from a more global Anglophone lyric as favored by Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, or Fleur Adcock. And yet at the same time Ray’s poetry felt fully “American”—conversational, funny, loving, with brash bravado and a committed “present tense”-ness reminiscent of second-generation New York School poetry.

Her son Gawain De Leeuw remembers her tenderly. “She could be a bit exhausting in part because she had very iconoclastic, or idiosyncratic, or revolutionary views that she was not shy about revealing. She was the embodiment of Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks before they were who they were. She was someone who was certainly the product of empire, while also a great critic of it, a cosmopolitan who settled for a stable life in a minor town in western New York.” Richert—equally fondly—recalls an energetic and highly opinionated Ray who chainsmoked bidis—handrolled unfiltered Indian cigarettes—and could argue equally passionately about politics, literature, philosophy, and culture, often into the late hours of the night.

I am struck by the fact that Ray’s poem “A Miniature for Hemant Kumar” may be the first appearance of the Indian landscape in an American poem; and if it isn’t the very first, then it is certainly the first by a writer of South Asian descent herself.

            A MINIATURE FOR HEMANT KUMAR

            The March snow is with us

            between the two stalled maples.

            Its rude white silence glitters.

            I will not come to terms.

            I back up.

            The glass behind me breaks:

            ropes of red onions scatter on the floor,

            but I never take my eyes off

            and retreat.

            Your pure voice, Hemant Kumar,

            that once could drug my peevish self

            and make me move

            once in the sunlight

            once in the evening

            like a dancer—

            keens for an alien.

            Hai Babu,

            I should care

            if the sun warms the fields and Radha’s feet,

            or that spring comes again to Kashi and Brindaban.

The Indian landscape, which waits until the closing motions of the poem to make its brief appearance, is somehow even more poignant for its contrast to the harsh and disruptive winter that the speaker finds herself inhabiting—like an alien—in the early part of the poem. Indeed the venue of the kitchen, with the stove and oven warmth of its comforting and familiar foods and familiar music from the faraway home, might be the most welcoming room in the house for a subcontinental poet suddenly frozen in a Rochester winter, desperate for the Indian spring.

One is tempted to fall back on what may seem like anachronistic postcolonial buzzwords to describe Ray’s critical milieu: liminality, hybridity, subalternity. But the truth of it was that Ray came from an already complicated background—a mixed religious family (no small thing in India, as current events unfolding are tragically demonstrating) and also a mixed-culture/mixed-race/mixed-national marriage. In a poem addressed to her elder (of two) sons, “A Poem for Gawain,” she addresses race, caste, nationality, and gender, in ways that might feel old-fashioned from a 2019 standpoint:

            from A POEM FOR GAWAIN

            I.

            Half-breed

            child

            you are the colour of earth,

            limbs of trees and deep rivers.

            Only in them can you find sanctuary.

            You remind me of my country,

            its divisions, its inalterable destiny;

            the white sands of Puri turning red,

            the Deccan a tableland for scavengers.

            I would like to save you,

            to search for a second home.

            There is none

            because we are the poor

            and the elders of the earth.

            So use my body as a shield 

            and behind its metal sing

            of the dark, so when death comes

            you will think it is the sea.

            And this casket, this body,

            lie on it,

            warm, familiar,

            as though you were in your own room,

            in your own bed.

            II.

            If you should find yourself

            one day

            in love with a Chinese girl

            in a café in Paris,

            do not tell her

            to stay with her own people,

            even tenderly.

            Follow her home,

            stand under her window in the rain

            but on no account give her

            five dollars and send her off

            in a taxi.

            She may have more sense

            and decide to go on living anyway.

            And if you should meet Aristophanes first,

            ask him,

            when a man goes in search

            of his sundered female half,

            must she be of the same race?

In each of these sections of the longer poem, Ray braids together her landscapes and her contexts. Certainly the anxiety around the still-infant son’s future romantic prospects evokes traditional Indian arranged marriages, some of which were fixed in early childhood or even infancy. In this case, the mother is making a space for the child, perhaps space she herself wasn’t given by her own family. Another key gesture is the introduction of the philosophical into what is otherwise a private, domestic poem of a familial relationship. It’s perhaps telling that Ray, iconoclast though she is, does not reference Freud or Sartre in thinking about the sundered self, but rather returns to the original, classical reference.

As Gawain De Leeuw pointed out, Ray was political in the extreme. She was strongly influenced by the Third World Liberation movements of the sixties and seventies and was gravely disappointed, and further radicalized, by what she perceived as a global shift toward economic neoliberalism evidenced by Ronald Reagan’s election, the first Gulf War promulgated by George H. W. Bush, and the early years of the center-right Clinton presidency. Ray’s politics were anti-war, anti-imperial, and politically, socially, and economically progressive; in the late 1980s during the First Intifada and through the First Gulf War, she wrote strongly opinionated letters to the editor of the local paper supporting Palestinian sovereignty and statehood. When the National Book Awards jury declined to consider Night Conversations with None Other because Ray was not a US citizen, she wrote a passionate letter to them decrying the decision and pointing out that she had lived in the United States since she was eighteen, she had written the entire book here, in English, had married and raised her family in the United States, and had not returned to India in many long years, and didn’t understand how she or her work could be considered anything other than “American.” The committee was unmoved by her appeal.

This following unpublished poem, “Fern,” by Ray was sent to me in an e-mail by Mary Richert. She claims it is from 1986 and that she loved it so much that she memorized it. There was one phrase in the poem that Richert could not remember the exact words of and so had substituted a phrase she thought replicated the sense of the missing phrase. I have delineated this phrase in brackets. 

Before I share the poem, I want to say that something about this practice of receiving a poem by e-mail that someone else has committed to memory—not having the actual text, I mean—demonstrates this condition of the “secret history”—that texts were oral, committed to memory, repeated; that some texts, Sappho’s for instance, were not preserved fully by history at all, and scraps are all we have left. In this case, I remember the poem—it’s one of the ones that Elaine Chamberlain brought into that long-ago workshop. It was one of the poems that seized my own imagination and that I had tried in the intervening years to find a copy of. I’d misremembered the name of the man in the poem—Mary remembers it as “Gregory” while I had thought it was “Brian.” 

When I wrote to Ray’s sons about the poem to see if there was a written copy I could include in the talk, her younger son, Kabir, wrote to say that he had a box of Ray’s unpublished writings and that Gawain had turned up some chapbooks that their father had put together, but that they didn’t have a copy of this particular poem. Nonetheless, I believe, with what I know and recognize of Ray’s voice, her language, her structures, that Richert has likely remembered the poem very closely.

            FERN

            Light and sweet is the fern in the woods

            and Gregory curled, sleeping by the fire

            How was Khe Sanh possible?

            How, Beirut?

            Weren’t there enough women with [souls on fire]

            and tongues unflagging,

            saying, “No, not this one.

            And not this one, either.”

I had mentioned earlier that Ray drew from multiple lineages, and this poem seems to demonstrate a little bit of that. She sets this very political poem, with its women-centered anti-war sentiment, in a deep woods setting, perhaps a camping trip. Gregory may be alone in the woods, or the nameless narrator may be with him, watching him while he is sleeping—a tender gesture of an intimate, whether friend, parent, or lover. It traffics in a common trope of political poetry—naming of a place or an event, without further elaboration. In original context, the poet may have been writing the poem with specific political intent and milieu, so much so that she could assume that an audience might automatically know the background and import of a place like Khe Sanh. Beirut, while perhaps more known than Khe Sanh as a place, at least historically, to the average American reader, also is more vague in intention: as opposed to the specific event of the Battle of Khe Sanh, the reference to Beirut is somewhat broader.

At any rate, the tactic of merely naming a place takes on different import in the information era: the references send one quickly to the oracle of the internet to seek background, context, and clarification of these geographical and political references. Yet the poem does not hang there in the political sphere—it comes back to the very personal arena: Gregory asleep in the woods. If the poem seems to traffic a little bit in old-school gender politics (the man goes to war, the woman stays behind to protest) and a little bit of Lysistrata morality (the war will end if the women can be strong enough to make it untenable), it is a product of its time.

In my own memory of the poem, there is a touch at the end—the narrator is actually present in the woods and reaches out and touches (in my memory) the man’s head as she is saying the last lines. Accuracy doesn’t much matter. The poem, in Mary Richert’s memory, lives strong. Mary Richert also told me of the great hospitality of the De Leeuw/Ray household in Rochester. Hendrik De Leeuw, Ray’s husband, had constructed a great garden for her—Richert remembers that Shreela tenderly protested everyone always referring to it as “Shreela’s garden,” because Hendrik did all the work—and the house was always full of guests in evening-long dinner parties, in which Ray constantly served and circulated and kept conversations going, like an old-school salon hostess.

One guest at these salons was the poet Cornelius Eady, who as a young man was a student of Ray’s at Empire State College and for a time lived at the house. Ray “had a great impact on the way I look at what you should be doing with your students,” Eady said. “You go for a sense of community—like-minded people sitting around being really passionate about the things they really care about.” Later he wrote, referring to the organization supporting African American poets that he built with Toi Derricotte, that Ray’s house, “was one of the strands of the DNA that built Cave Canem.” To me, standing here in the Library of Congress, at a festival celebrating Asian American Literature (co-sponsored by Kundiman, an organization devoted to supporting Asian American writers, inspired itself by Cave Canem), it feels very important and powerful to bring to you the name and the life and the poetry of Shreela Ray. If, according to one of its founders, she was part of the DNA that built Cave Canem, then she is a foremother to Kundiman as well.

Ray wrote at a moment when younger poets were mostly abandoning traditional prosody and traditional forms, though she herself occasionally introduced sonic patterns from her Anglo-Indian education. Consider these lines from “A Miniature for Hemant Kumar”: 

            Your pure voice, Hemant Kumar,

            that once could drug my peevish self

            and make me move

            once in the sunlight

            once in the evening

            like a dancer—

            keens for an alien.

The three heavy stresses of the first line in this excerpt slow down the line to the address but are followed by the quickly moving iambic tetrameter of the following line, which is in turn slowed down by three more heavy stresses in the following line. The following four lines use dimeter to great effect. Ray was mostly writing free verse but she knew her music.

The poem “Night in April” is a wonderful example of Ray’s mixing of modes, of her drawing from multiple national and aesthetic streams to create a lyric of extraordinary loveliness:

            NIGHT IN APRIL

            The voice of the April wind addresses

            the unmarriagable awake

            in the real sleep of the body.

            The windows are open

            and the sleepy violets of the blood

            stir towards the dark outside;

            that final nakedness

            in the silhouettes of doorways

            and branches ascending and descending.

            To stay would mean for always

            I would remain to weigh and measure.

            Let your breath enflame a second

            marriage for that end. As for me

            there is some other livelihood

            when the essences of things call me “sister”!

            Before I draw back my wings and fall

            into the keel of birdlike flowers

            by god I will make a garden of this place.

Here the plainspoken, as in the lyrics of Kamala Das and Eunice De Souza, becomes radical. For Ray to speak directly and plainly of emotions that would have been considered “unfeminine,”—emotions like ambition, displeasure, anger, or dissatisfaction—would place her within a context of women writers of the seventies and eighties who were breaking paths in terms of content and form.

Silence governs Ray’s body of work as well. Not just the unsaid that makes her spare poems so powerful, but the silence that followed her one-and-only book. Ray had a family to raise and students to teach, true enough, and that is a condition that was shared by other women writers of the time, writers like Jean Valentine, Jane Cooper, Marie Ponsot, and Carolyn Forché, to name a few others who were contemporaneous with Ray and also had periods of silence when they were not publishing. But there was also, of course, the silence that followed her death in 1994 at the young age of fifty-two. 

There are easy answers of course: Ray was a woman, a woman of color, a poet writing in a complex context of a global literary heritage that may not have been easily understood by the American poetry readership at the time. But only four years later Agha Shahid Ali published one of his most accomplished collections, The Country Without a Post Office, and a few years after that Meena Alexander broke into the literary mainstream with Illiterate Heart,her first volume of poetry with a major US publisher. Was it Ray’s politics that contributed to her marginalization? Perhaps. But Ray was a poet who had been championed by such giants as Kinnell, Auden, and Berryman. She had attended Iowa, the premiere institution for creative writing at the time. Frost lunched with her at Bread Loaf. She was published in Poetry as early as 1966. If Ray could disappear, then who else stands a chance?

I want to know, then, how and why are people remembered? Whose work survives? What are the mechanisms and processes by which such memory and survival is curated? Certainly this lecture, and the publication of it, are part of that. But you as the audience and reader have further responsibility to promote and read and share the poets you love, to write about them, to teach their work.

The related question, the one we are normally silent about, perhaps by the very terms of the discussion is: who is forgotten? And why? I do think it is very important to remember that if left to the current structures—the publishers, whether commercial or small and independent, the academy, the nonprofit fellowship world—the only voices that will survive death are those that can make or raise money. And if we want the art to be more than that then we as individuals will have to take responsibility.

Shreela Ray operated in a gift economy. Opening her home to all, serving dinner, hosting literary salons—which Eady remembers as being more important to him as a young writer than any publication or offer of employment. It’s been a privilege to talk about her work and recite some of her poems to you. 

I will close with one last poem by Shreela Ray, called “Absence and Others on Main Street,” also from her book Night Conversations with None Other.

            ABSENCE AND OTHERS ON MAIN STREET

            These . . .

            from a well-stocked earth,

            flies, footprints, crow’s feet

            the greater half of man and how many

            creatures dead in the arms of time.

            The only sun and I at noon

            go mad, so tomorrow when the sun rises

            this devious and cat blood

            will be modified by its ninth death.

            There are those who will always be after

            pale centres of pistil, white stamen, yes,

            in the ethical climate of these hemispheres.

            But how far the wind carries

            the dust of wild weeds:

            capsules of poppy burst

            and send here, there.

            And what is the lord’s plan

            in the hip of the dark solitary rose?

            And you know the way back.

            Tarmac and planes overhead.

            Flowers.

            One belongs to convolvulus and one

            compositae and one I

            should know best, the inadequate

            flowers.

            The Scholiast

            wrote of you Sappho as having been

            very ugly, small and dark

            but like the nightingale with deformed wings

            enfolding a tiny body.

            Sappho, a song before you drown

            for the ferryman, a song

            even for the girl who walks

            in the scent of violets.

            As for me—

            there is always a boy

            in the hyacinth 

            and because one summer in Vermont

            I stood among the bulrushes

            in the water

            and suddenly the sun

            pared me to the skin.

            I felt the green world

            like a HE

            trip me with one blade

            I gathered twelve rushes,

            as if the twelve tribes of man

            were in my arms,

            singing in me.

            Why is it wrong to ache for the sea?

            Supposing the sun would say

            “I am not bright enough,”

            and sink fast?

            You sleep in the eye of another summer,

            whom time foraged and saved and proved

            a friend. I speak and raise

            the black rib of the phone

            turning seashell in my hand,

            and the shell in the ear awakes

            and listens and moves at the sound

            of the gentlest sea, far off.

            I dread afterwards—

            you would look on me

            twisted and rotten

            on a New England shore

            and say

            “Is this your sea?

            The evergreen?

            The way arms should hold?

            Answer me.

            Even the waters turn you back.”

            In sleep the indwelling sunflower is brightest.

            The coquina is washed by the sea,

            until he comes on gravel, his bruised

            leg ascending the stair, his frayed

            sleeve wiping his forehead.

            Nothing is the same as before.

---

Notes

The text of the poems is drawn from Night Conversations with None Other, American Dust Series #6, DustBooks, Paradise, CA, ©1977 by Shreela Ray, with the exception of “Fern,” transcribed by Mary Richert and sent to Kazim Ali. All poems are reprinted with the kind permission of Gawain De Leeuw and Kabir De Leeuw.

Shreela Ray used standard British English spellings and this has been reproduced. Her punctuation, in particular her usage of commas, is irregular and has been reproduced here uncorrected and as it appeared in original publication.

Other information from e-mails to Kazim Ali from Cornelius Eady, Gawain De Leeuw, and Kabir De Leeuw, and a phone conversation with Mary Richert.

Kazim Ali’s edition of Shreela Ray’s selected poems, prose, and letters will appear from the Unsung Masters Series in 2021. 

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