Featured Poet- Aneek Chatterjee

Poet Aneek Chatterjee is a much-published poet. His verses make the abstract, concrete, the surreal, tangible. His poetry takes a feeling or an idea and toys with it, spinning a yarn that takes the reader inside the bone marrows, to the blue skies, to the mystery mind. In a lucid language with a conversational style, he brings history and people come alive with memory and nostalgia making a comment on the times, in poems like Tram lines and The Man, to name a few. Chatterjee’s mind weaves words and images that underscore the human condition.

Bio Note:

Aneek Chatterjee is a poet and academic from Kolkata, India. He has been published in reputed literary magazines and anthologies across the globe. He authored 16 books including four poetry collections, titled “Seaside Myopia” (Cyberwit, 2018); “Unborn Poems and Yellow Prison” (Cyberwit, 2019); “Of Ashes and Persiflage” (Hawakal, 2020) and “Archive Avenue” (Cyberwit, 2022). Chatterjee’s poem ‘Tramline and the Man’ has been adjudged as one of the best contemporary poems on survival along with poems in the same genre by Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton and others, by a South Africa based Poetry Journal, “Pick Me Up Poetry”.  Chatterjee has a Ph.D. in International Relations; and he has been teaching in leading Indian and foreign universities. He was a Fulbright Visiting faculty at the University of Virginia, USA and a recipient of the prestigious ICCR Chair to teach abroad. His poetry has been archived at Yale University.

Main Road

I lost Joseph

in Asia’s cleanest village,

in Meghalaya.

He requested, ‘Sir, get down from the taxi

here and see the village

to your heart’s content.

I’ll wait for you on the main road’.

I got down.

The world of darkness also got down

with me in the autumn evening.

Sophisticated, urban tourists loitering

on the asphalt road of the village

minutes ago, suddenly vanished into

oblivion.

I could guess many roads,

leading to marshy fields.

Rains have never been miser

in this part of the world.

And darkness descended on earth,

suddenly, on Asia’s cleanest village.

Joseph, I have never found the

main road, even in daylight.

I’ve never found anything main,

ever.

Main roads, events, people;

main porch, allies or

the very exclusive, main room.

Instead, I’ll loiter rudderless and unclean,

in all lanes and by-lanes, marshy lands,

searching for the main road,

once more…

© Aneek Chatterjee