Audience view: Jerry Pinto’s live poetry performance encapsulates his life of words

Author and poet Jerry Pinto opened the 2024 IHC Theatre Festival in New Delhi with a first-of-its-kind solo poetry performance. In a free-wheeling format that took in nostalgia, humour, and thoughts about the spirit and the democratic nature of poetry, Pinto took the audience on a spoken word journey of wonder, mapping the arc of his travel as a poet to the public form of poetry as an art, experience, and lived reality.

Considering poetry to be an invitation, a life force, a breath where we swallow words; a tap at the door to open to enter a shared space, Pinto began with a prayer, where the audience matched his voice note to note. An immersive presentation saw barefooted Pinto shun the stage to don the cape of an anchor, a follower, and a leader at once to break the barrier and hierarchy between the performer and the audience. Moving back and forth in the aisles and front, the poet enthralled a packed hall for moments that generously spilled over their stipulated 45 minutes.

A tribute to words

Pinto’s performance was kinaesthetic and commenced with a tribute to words and his association with them, when as a child “he wanted to wear them, pin them, eat them, and smear them all over”. His deep love for words and poetry was mapped in the performance from childhood’s apathy towards poetry, a journey from cold and distant in alien nursery rhymes to the disillusionment of “behold her solitary in the field…” where no one knew “where Hebrides was…” to “Oft when in my couch I lie…” – all unfamiliar contexts.

All this while goading the audience to reflect, recite, and, inadvertently, re-examine their assumptions about poetry as he painted a landscape of his fascination for poetry, reaching a crescendo with his special attention to the metric beauty of Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice.

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.”

Pinto drew the audiences’ attention to the syllabic utterance and word stress of the feistiness of “Fire” and the coldness of the hissing sound in the unvoiced alveolar fricative /s/ in “iCCCe” and that of the devilish sound of voiced alveolar sibilant /z/ in “desSSSir” in:

“From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.”

A choral drill of poetic lines drenched the audiences in the sounds and sights of a taster’s menu curated by Pinto. Elevating and grounding at the same time.

Poetry without interruption

Deliberating on the theme of how poetry is not a monolith and will always mean different things to different people, he recited the touching lines from a deeply personal poem that speaks of the mental and physical indisposition of his mother. Anecdotal and whimsical and trance-like in parts, it was a back and forth in the past and future as he stitched a narrative of poetry as a part of the everyday.

Recalling a moment at a gym in Mumbai, at the time of the power outage, he asked a fellow gymgoer, Neela Bhagwat, a classical singer, to sing and how she sang the abhang “मुंगी उडाली आकाशी” (Mungi Udali Aakashi) written by Muktabai, a Marathi woman-saint of the Bhakti movement, which led to the idea of his translated collection of poetry. Apt that Pinto employed an abhang as an expression of communitarian experience for this performance. The word abhang comes from a for non and bhanga for ending; in other words, without any flaw or interruption.

The larger theme of poetry as a force in binding communities stayed as an undercurrent in the session as osmosis rather than an overt mention. Pinto included the iconic Marathi saint, Tukaram’s dedication to words, titled आम्हा घरी धन शब्दांचीच रत्ने that translates as “in the world of humanity, words are jewels, wealth.”

The recitation saw the audience stand up and recite in unison. A befitting close to an evening dedicated to poetry – the personal and public arc and impact. A way of life through a poetic lens –inclusive, democratic, and authentic.