Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 09:32:36 -0500
Subject: Agha Shahid Ali, poet, passes away


One of America's best-known poets and a friend of many SAJAers (South Asian 
journalist Association), AGHA SHAHID ALI passed away on Saturday morning. Just 
last month, his latest book of poetry was a finalist for the National Book 
Award.

As many of you know, Shahid was scheduled to teach the long-form writing
workshop with author Amitav Ghosh at the SAJA Convention in NY last June
(even though he was ill, he was determined to keep his commitment - but,
sadly, was unable to join us).

Below you will find several items about Shahid.

1. An obit by fellow poet and SAJAer JEET THAYIL from Rediff.com.

2. A tribute by author and former SAJA speaker KAMILA SHAMSIE.
More on Kamila: http://www.saja.org/shamsie.html

3. A tribute by writer Rukun Advani.

The last two items are from a growing Shahid section at Tehelka.com:
http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/literary_default.htm

Below you will also find information about prelim plans to honor Shahid's
memory.

{sree-AT-sree.net}

Rediff.com
Dec. 9, 2001

'Kashmiri-American' poet Agha Shahid Ali passes away
By Jeet Thayil in New York

The distinguished Kashmir-born American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose most
recent book of poems Rooms Are Never Finished (WW Norton) was a finalist
for the 2001 National Book Awards, passed away in the early hours of
December 8.

Shahid, as his numerous acquaintances knew him, died at home surrounded by
friends and family. He had been in a coma for two weeks, following a long
battle against brain cancer, said nursing staff.

"His death was very peaceful," said Nurse Patricia Bruno. "He died at home
and there were a lot of people around him, a lot of family."

Nurse Bruno was the weekend on-call supervisor at VNA Hospice during the
time of Shahid's death. She saw him at around 10 pm on December 7 and then
again at 2.30 am, when she pronounced him dead.

His funeral is scheduled to be held on December 10 in Northampton,
Massachusetts.

Shahid's family requested that no flowers be sent to the funeral home.
Instead they asked that contributions be made out to the Visiting Nurses
Association Hospice Alliance of Hampshire County.

Born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949, Shahid grew up in Kashmir. He was
educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and later at Delhi
University.

He considered himself "a triple exile" from Kashmir, India and the United
States, but he described himself as a "Kashmiri-American."

He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984
and an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1985.

He was the author of seven collections of poetry, The Country Without a
Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A
Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages
(1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and
Other Poems (1979) and Bone Sculpture (1972).

He edited Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, translated a
selection of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poems, The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected
Poems, and wrote a critical study, T S Eliot as Editor.

Shahid received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and
the Ingram-Merrill Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize.

He held teaching positions at Delhi University, Penn State, SUNY
Binghampton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, the
University of Utah and Warren Wilson College.

New York University announced it would establish an annual reading in his
name.

o o o o o

Tehelka.com
Dec. 9, 2001
http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/2001/dec/9/lr120901kamila.htm

"Mad heart, be brave"

Poet par excellence, Agha Shahid Ali passed away fighting brain cancer in
the early hours of December 8, 2001, in Amherst. He touched everyone he
met with his unique flamboyance and gift for living. That memory of him
dominates.
An erstwhile student, Kamila Shamsie - author of A City By the Sea, Salt
and Saffron and a third forthcoming novel, Kartography - remembers

I keep thinking of those lines of his:

'I want to live forever. What else can I say?
It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave.'

That's only one of the many - he wrote all the lines I think of when I
think of grief. And yet he was the most joyful person I knew - not because
he was filled with joy at every moment, but because his presence, his
company, the mere thought of him was enough - is still enough, even as I'm
crying - to make me feel so blessed to have him as a friend.

There are so many guises in which I knew him over the 10 years since I
first found him - it seemed like some miracle - in the middle of the
snowbelt of upstate New York when I first left Karachi as a student. He
was poet, teacher, friend and always, unmistakably, Shahid. It should be
an adjective - 'Shahidian'. Anyone who's ever met him will know exactly
what it means. There's so much to be said about him. But all I can do
right now is conjure up just a handful of the many unforgettable memories
with which he left me when he was being his most irrepressible.

Shahid being both tough and utterly charming in criticizing a student's
poem: 'This line should be put against a wall and shot.'

Shahid showing that all poets don't have to sigh in Wordsworthian fashion
at the mention of a tree: 'I hate Nature' (which he pronounced 'Nay-cha'
for added effect.)

Shahid inviting Americans over for dinner where the food would be hot: 'I
want to burn your Anglo-Saxon tongues.'

Shahid explaining to a room full of Americans the origin of one of his
poems: 'It was my first Christmas in America and no one had invited me for
turkey. So I stayed at home, wrote this poem, and cursed Christians.

Shahid in the mood to dance at a friend's house where Ella Fitzgerald was
playing in the background: 'Don't you have Donna Summers? Don't you at
least have the BeeGees?'

Shahid on the phone to a woman doing a survey for a car company,
responding to her question about why he chose to buy a Nissan Stanza:
'Because I'm a poet.'

Shahid to a student who wanted his grade changed: 'I'll raise your grade
if you sing Achey Breaky Heart.'

I remember him telling me how he was in a Shakespeare class in graduate
school and people were supposed to give 20 minute presentations during
each class. A woman stood up to do a presentation on King Lear, and went
the whole 3 hours, in very dull fashion. At some point it stopped being
boring and started being very funny, but somehow Shahid kept a relatively
straight face. The next time the class convened, the woman stood up at the
beginning and said, 'There were a few things I couldn't mention last time
which I'll finish up now' and Shahid ran out of the room, into the men's
room, and laughed uncontrollably for a very long time. When he finally
stopped and returned to the class, one of his friends leaned over and
said, 'Shahid, everyone could hear you.'

I can still hear him - the most infectious laugh in the world.

With love,
(I can hear Shahid expressing outrage if I tried to end this with anything
as formal as 'warm regards' - 'Darling,' he'd say! 'How English! How warm
can regards be?' Then he'd pause and add, 'Why not hot regards?' with a
suggestive emphasis on 'hot' and then he'd laugh that irrepressible laugh
of his)

- Kamila Shamsie

o o o o o

Tehelka.com
http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/2001/dec/8/lr120801agha.htm

Agha Shahid Ali: A Few Memories
By Rukun Advani

"Right now I can only hear Shahid himself, declaiming in
his endearing, giggly, wicked-sweet voice: 'Darling, I don't want
immortality through my works. I want
immortality by not dying'"

: Rukun Advani remembers the poet
Agha Shahid Ali, who died this evening
of a brain tumour in Amherst, USA.
Shahid will be buried tomorrow.

New Delhi December 8, 2001

In the early 1970s, Agha Shahid Ali already had a high reputation as an
Indian 'University Wit'. He was known in poetry coteries as a connoisseur
of verse, a fund of learning on T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound (he went on to
write a fine PhD on 'T.S.Eliot as Editor'), a ghazal enthusiast, an
inspiring lecturer of English, a bird of the most dazzling feather who
everyone in our university wanted to look at and hear. His reputation had
spilled out of Hindu College, where he didn't so much teach as captivate
and infect his students with his knowledge of Hindustani music, Urdu
verse, and the Modernist movement in Anglo-American poetry. He was much in
demand in the other colleges, where he would invariably be encored and
asked to read some of his own verse.

This he always did with consummate, engaging immodesty. We are all
narcissists in some way, but Shahid had perfected the art of narcissism.
He displayed it unashamedly and was universally loved for the abandon with
which he could be so unabashedly and coyly full of himself. He was just so
disconcertingly free of pretence in this respect, so entirely unique just
for this reason. As he said of himself once, 'Sweetheart, I'm successful
in the US of A only because I've raised self-promotion to the level of
art.'

But he deserved every accolade he got. He had one foot in the realm of
mushairas and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the other in the world of Western
versification and translation activity. His own achievement was to blend
the two. Eliotic blank verse was, in the main, not for him because he
thought it an easy way out for poets. His own evolution as a poet is
marked by his increased interest in mastering the most complex verse forms
of Europe, such as the 'canzone' and the 'sestina', and deploying them as
moulds for subcontinental ideas, Kashmiri themes, Urdu sentiment. No one
did this as successfully as Shahid. Literary criticism does not yet
possess a proper vocabulary to describe the ways in which he pushed
English poetry in new directions.

It was a privilege to be counted among Shahid's friends, even though he
had so many. He was at home everywhere. All he had to do to attract an
adoring throng was just be himself. I lived with him for a few days in New
England, where he was teaching at Ezra Pound's alma mater. 'They pay me to
teach Creatiff Wrahting', he said with a mimicing, self-deprecating drawl.
Attending all his creative-writing classes - they were chockful of
aspiring writers who wanted him as their personal tutor - was the most
natural and easy and pleasurable thing to do. In the evenings he cooked
Kashmiri food, revelling in the aromas of his parental home in Srinagar.
In Delhi, which he visited annually in order to meet friends such as the
singer Sheila Dhar (and because his publishers were located in the city),
he was only fleetingly available because he yearned to be in Srinagar. The
violence there affected him deeply, personally and as an artist. It shaped
him, ironically, to write some of his finest poems, such as the title poem
in The Country Without a Post Office. It is not as well known as it ought
to be, that Shahid's father, Agha Ashraf Ali, remains one of Kashmir's
most dedicated secular educationists --- respected equally for his wisdom
and urbanity by Islamists and Kashmiri Pandits. Shahid was entirely
constituted by the ideals and values that he inherited from his parents.

A small corner of India's cultural landscape, which I'd assumed would be
forever Shahid, has died with him. His poems will keep him alive, maybe,
but only among those who never knew him and therefore missed out on seeing
and hearing what being preternaturally alive means as an everyday,
ordinary practice. When someone like Shahid dies, you know it's the end.
Right now I can only hear Shahid himself, modifying Woody Allen's words
and declaiming in his endearing, giggly, wicked-sweet voice: 'Darling, I
don't want immortality through my works. I want immortality by not dying.'

Also read:
'Mad heart, be brave'-Kamila Shamsie pays tribute

Poet of loss-Alok Rai pays tribute

Fleeting Remembrances- by Parsa Venkateswar Rao

**********************************************
Satish Kolluri,
Department of Communication Arts and Sciences,
103E Performing Arts Center, 
DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135

Ph: 765 658 6559 (O)
    765 655 1802 (H)

skolluri-AT-depauw.edu



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