On “Poem without Beginning or End”
“[the shut umbrella machine]” is a section from a long poem about war in my forthcoming book After. In addition to the Sanskrit of Valmiki, this poem draws, obliquely, on G.R. Josyer’s Diamonds, Mechanisms, Weapons of War: Yoga Sutras. Books of automatons were of course wildly popular across the ancient world; apart from Indic traditions, the poem also owes much to such books as The Book of Ingenious Devices, browsed as a Persian manuscript at the New York Public Library.
Read the poem this note is about, “Poem without Beginning or End.”
Vivek Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University.
Narayanan's books of poems include Universal Beach (Harbour Line Press, 2006/In Girum Books, 2011), Life and Times of Mr S (HarperCollins India, 2012), and After (New York Review of Books, 2022). A full-length collection ...