Amit Majmudar, ‘To the Hyphenated Poets’
Richer than mother’s milk
is half-and-half.
Friends of two minds,
redouble your craft.
Our shelves our hives, our selves
a royal jelly,
may we at Benares and Boston,
Philly and Delhi
collect our birthright nectar.
No swarm our own,
we must be industrious, both
queen and drone.
Being two beings requires
a rage for rigor,
rewritable memory,
hybrid vigor.
English herself is a crossbred
mother mutt,
primly promiscuous
and hot to rut.
Oneness? Pure chimera.
Splendor is spliced.
Make your halves into something
twice your size,
your tongue a hyphen joining
nation to nation.
Recombine, become a thing
of your own creation,
a many-minded mongrel,
the line’s renewal,
self-made and twofold,
soul and dual.
*****
Editor’s comments: Being Anglo-Danish from birth and with the subsequent acquisition of other passports, I am naturally biased in favour of multiculturalism. It was interesting a couple of months ago to hear Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman say “Multiculturalism has failed.” As one commentator noted, “She’s descended from Goan Indians from Mauritius and Kenya, married to a Jewish husband, and is in a senior cabinet position in a government headed by Britain’s first Hindu PM, himself the son of immigrants… Hello???” Suella Braverman left the cabinet shortly after.
Indians in particular, having been invaded and occupied by the Portuguese, French and British in the past couple of centuries, have used those connections to move out into the world – not just as entrepreneurs, but also in the arts, sciences… and politics. In mid-2023 the Prime Ministers of Ireland, Mauritius, Portugal and the UK, and the Presidents of Guyana, Mauritius, Seychelles, Singapore, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago, all had Indian origins.
Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. He is the author of twenty books so far in a variety of categories, with different bodies of work published in the United States and in India.
His poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award, and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now.
One of Majmudar’s forthcoming volumes is a hybrid of prose, drama, and poetry, entitled Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2024). A new poetry collection is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026.
For links to Majmudar’s Nonfiction, Fiction, Mythology and Translations, please see his website.
Photo by Ami Buch Majmudar.
