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Contemporary world
poetry, it appears, is a prescriptive ocean in which contending world
views are strenuously vying for recognition and relevance. Contemporary
Indian poetry, no less, is caught in this agenda of making the human
voice to be heard.

Ankur Betageri is a poet born in India on November
18, 1983, whose poetry marks a departure from the predominantly
prescriptive into a probing, questing sensibility. Ankur who writes in
Kannada and in English, is a trained clinical psychologist and a
photographer of great talent even as he maintains a day job as an
assistant editor at the Sahitya Akademi.

While Ankur’s works bear a
semblance of the traditional fare in portions, his approach is actually
radical, verging on the iconoclastic. Betageri maintains a playful ear
on the fringes of his works, daubing with the erotic here and the
platonic there. He is in this introduction represented by a variety
both in kind and in chronological topicality. Ankur has benefited from
the influence of scholars like Hulkuntemath Shivamurthy Shivaprakash,
playwrights like Wole Soyinka, film makers like Martin Scorsese and
visual artists like Jayant Parmar.

Apart from being an
agent of a vigorous thematic impulse in his poetry, this poet is also
markedly improvisional on the level of style. His exposure to cultural
intellectuals in the mold of Satchidanandan, many times guest editor at
the Indian Academy of Letters has no doubt had an effect on his poetry
and writing generally. I find Betageri’s eclectic background and
approach to poetry a fresh way of ‘computing’ the universe.

Certainly
the idea that poetry is for those of a certain temperament or formal
training is now anachronistic and poets like Ankur have done their bit
to confirm the idea antiquated. I find the poetry of Betageri
invigorating on another level, that of risk. Even when he pretends to
be, he is no lotus-eater and his constant challenge is to a generation
that witnessed the winning lyrical strength and narrative impact of
Slumdog Millionaire, the film. If space had permitted, this
introduction would have included poems in which Betageri engages India
in a lover’s quarrel and in which the active imagination of a
generation of the youth of the Indian sub-continent is mirrored. The
reader is enjoined to allow the grace notes in Betageri’s poetry to run
free.

On a personal level, I derived a lot of enjoyment reading Betageri’s
‘I am Water’ to a song by Fela Anikulapo Kuti on Water. I found the
poem ‘If Love is the Most Natural Thing’ a most compatible dessert to
Roberta Flack’s grooves and I totally enjoyed Evening at Tagore Park on
the rocks. Finally, for me, Betageri proves that a ‘young poet’ is a
redundant expression. Poetry is ageless and a man is either a poet or
he is not. Ankur Betageri, everyone…