‘I’ll Have It Here’: Jeet Thayil blends the instinctive and incomprehensible in his new poems

“Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry makes taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter,” noted the celebrated poet of the Black Arts Movement, June Jordon (1936–2002).

Her poems not only expressed inherent racist violence that she had witnessed but also helped exhume histories that were buried deep by the ignorant culture of the United States, which excluded everything that helped any person of colour belong. In her words, poems were a tool to tell the truth. The form helped her process grief. While they may not have brought any hope, they did suggest change with the fight she was putting up against the powerful. She wouldn’t back down. Her message was clear.

Fact and fiction

In a contextual way, the simmering, inventive, and significant poems in Jeet Thayil’s latest poetry collection I’ll Have It Here conflate fact and fiction, blending grieving both the dead and alive, achieving a similar milestone that, in my view, Jordan’s poems did.

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