No hero, here. Nor a muse. Only poetry in all its blues

There is the poet, who dwells on a deeply personal moment and sets it free from its solitary confinement into the cavalier disdain and cacophony of the world. Then there is the commentator, who never is game for involvement as much as he is for a detached understanding of the world fancying it as a comedy, a tragedy or a painfully lamentable exercise in waiting. Jagdeep Singh, brings together the two distinct worlds in the singularity of a poet’s universe with his anthology of poems, My Epitaph. 

The striking feature about the collection of his poems is his liberal infusion of the fabled heroes of English Literature and their creators. He draws out Hamlet to underscore the irony in Nike’s brand tagline – Just Do It – in Denmark where the devastating tale of the prince is set in. He pulls out Yossarian, Michelangelo, Thomas Stearns Eliot and Sylvia Plath like a magician commandeering rabbits out of nothingness in his poems. Yet, when you ask the poet if he has an affinity for the tragic heroes who perhaps hold the candle to his dark, he says, “no”. 

“Every hero has a tragedy lurking within. Whether it is Macbeth, Hamlet or Achilles, they are all remarkably similar for the one fatal flaw that would bring them down,” he says drawing a soft sip of the red wine he has chosen over his favourite single malt. The same is true of some of the best poets who see the world different just as the world finds them strange. “They inspire. I can explain myself at ease with their narrative because the reader is quick to relate to them,” he says. The dissociation is stark and yet his involvement is moving. 

This passage from his poem, Hamlet, is a reconnaissance of the incredible feat. 

And then I saw,
a sportswear hoarding –
and had I not been dead already,
would surely have died of a shock
It screamed “Just Do It”!

For a poet who literally invokes the muse, more than once at that, he is quick to deny any presence of a muse in his life. “There is none,” he speaks with the nonchalance of a lama who has mastered the trick of detaching his strings with the world safeguarding the heart from any emotional recoil. Come on! A poet writing on pain has no muse? An emphatic no lands with a chill more biting than that of the ice cubes in my glass of gin. “There is no such person for real as a muse in my life,” he says over and above the din at the Ashok Club in Jaipur where we are huddled together on a cold December evening. “The Greeks would do it. They had a tradition of invoking the muse before a scared undertaking. I invoke the muse for the same reason,” he says. 

Every hero has a tragedy lurking within. Whether it is Macbeth, Hamlet or Achilles, they are all remarkably similar for the one fatal flaw that would bring them down

Jagdeep Singh

Singh is crafty with his written words as he is a charmer with the spoken ones. He cloaks his pain well even in brandishing the experience like a katana sheathed in the glitter of colourful gems, only to disrobe you without warning and bleeding you of your own grief and guilt with a gentle but deliberate twist of his closing verse, like the pommel being put back in its place by a knight. 

Jagdeep Singh has served as a teacher, a journalist and a government servant before he carved a niche for himself in the world of public relations. To his inner circle, he goes by the name of Jags. He has a hearty laugh every time, over how the babus in the government rolled out the red carpet for him in one of the first assignments he had landed with them taking him to be a foreign national based on his nickname. “They asked me where is Jags and I told them, I am Jags,” he says with a mischievous grin. In any other world, an epitaph marks the end of a journey. But this is the world of Jags where it heralds the beginning of a new chapter, that of a poet – one, which in his own words comes with the license that no other art form does.