Door of Paper: Essays and Memoirs

This collection of prose of Jayanta Mahapatra, which brings together his engaging lyrical essays written over the last thrity years, should open a door on the provide a deeper insight into his work. In these essays and memories Mahapatra ruminates over such things as what he finds in a good poem, how he feels about his own creative process and what governs hims while he writes a poem; or a book like The Hive, or his meeting with the mythic Ginsberg. Even in his essays on social issues life hunger in Korapt or a cyclone in Orissa, he is trying to plumb mystery, an activity so dear to this conscientious poet..
About Author :
Jayanta Mahapatra is a leading Indian poet. He has read and published his poetry all over the world. He has won such coveted awards as the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award of Chicago's Poetry and the Sahitya Akademi Award. Four out of his sixteen collection of poems are published abroad. Some of the latest prestigious international anthologies which include his poems are The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (Random House, New York, 1996) and The Poetry Anthology 1912-2002, Ivan R.Dee, Chicago, 2002.
Contents :
Acknowledgements
Freedom as Poetry: The Door
An Orissa Journal: July to November
About "Hunger" and Myself
Mystery as Mantra
Summerdusts and a Scent of Mangoes
The Inaudible Resonance of English Poetry in India
Recent Commonwealth Fiction: Writing from Three Different Cultures
A Poet First of All
The Voice in the Ink
The Moving Horizon: Visiting America
Acceptance Speech on Receiving the Sahitya Akademi Award for Realtionship, 1981
Face to Face with the Contemporary Poem
Our Escapist Art
An August Day in 1942
Publishing in India: An Overview
Translating from Oriya: An Approach
A Symphony in Stone
This Sadness is Mine Also
A Book from My Shelf
Letter from Orissa to The Hudson Review
Of the Lowly Potato: Indian English Poetry Today
A Note on Ayyappa Paniker;s Poetry
Cuttack: Smoke and a Sunset of Rivers
Stranger than Brothers: Writing at the Edge of Anonymity
Land to Land: A Moon in our Eyes
The Door
Hedging the Heart: To What is the Poet Responsible?
By the Way
Silence: Poetry's Last Word
On the Mountain with Allen Ginsberg
Containing the World that Contains Us
The SAARC Writers: Suffering from Our Poetry
The Absence of Absolutes
Slow Swim in Dim Light: The Quest for Modernity in Poetry
Mirror of a Mirror
A.K. Ramanujan: A Tribute
Time in the Poem