RAVI SHANKAR
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Pushcart-prize winning poet
Author Editor Translator Professor |
Correctional Memoir - coming 2021
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I’m so pleased to tell you that "Correctional" is now under advance contract with University of Wisconsin Press and due out in 2021. I humbly think it’s the most important work I’ve ever done - and I know it’s been the most difficult. Given the occasion, I thought I might provide you with some periodic news of what I am up to and keep you updated of the progress of the book (if you’d rather not be interrupted, please don’t hesitate to say so). Even in the face of the discord in our democracy, there is so much good work happening around the world, and I’m glad to share some of that with you.
Stay safe and inspired, Ravi |
Read an excerpt (originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review)
Alone with myself, in a place I never dreamed I would be, I realize that I am not the perfect son. Not an unfailing husband. Not a role model professor. Not the most fully realized father, much as I endeavor. I’m not my name, or my family history, or my social class. I’m not just an anarchist poet who somehow ended up in jail, but rather, I’m a being who irreducibly, at base, is simply a pulse of pure potential and cosmic energy, entering and leaving my body. I am the lives I am touching briefly, that have accepted me and I them as roommates for a spell. I am not judged by them and thereby can suspend my own judgment of myself, halt the recitation of missteps that unreels obsessively in my head. On my bunk with these men for this brief instant in time, playing chess, cards and basketball, sharing stories along with our interpretation of certain statutes and photos of our family, I find myself no more or less human than anyone around me.
At last, I can simply breathe.
Alone with myself, in a place I never dreamed I would be, I realize that I am not the perfect son. Not an unfailing husband. Not a role model professor. Not the most fully realized father, much as I endeavor. I’m not my name, or my family history, or my social class. I’m not just an anarchist poet who somehow ended up in jail, but rather, I’m a being who irreducibly, at base, is simply a pulse of pure potential and cosmic energy, entering and leaving my body. I am the lives I am touching briefly, that have accepted me and I them as roommates for a spell. I am not judged by them and thereby can suspend my own judgment of myself, halt the recitation of missteps that unreels obsessively in my head. On my bunk with these men for this brief instant in time, playing chess, cards and basketball, sharing stories along with our interpretation of certain statutes and photos of our family, I find myself no more or less human than anyone around me.
At last, I can simply breathe.