Category: Publications

In honor of National Poetry Month and its final day of celebration, poet Rita Banerjee, her tattoo, and her poem “Paper Men” from Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018) are featured today (Monday, April 30, 2018) on Tattooed Poets.  Since 2009, over 320+ tattooed poets, including Joy Harjo, Carl Phillips, Eileen Myles and Noelle Koch, have appeared on Tattooed Poets in celebration of National Poetry Month.

And today, on this final day of celebration, poet Rita Banerjee explains the history behind her tattoo:

“By my senior year of college, I had been tapped into a secret society. When dusk fell over New Brunswick, we wore our dark robes long, accompanied by tawny-colored hats, as we tagged skulls and messages on the sidewalks across Rutgers College. Our secret society, which had been modeled after Skull and Bones and Quill and Dagger, had existed in our quiet but peculiar corner of New Jersey for over a hundred years. Paul Robeson, Ozzie Nelson, Al Aronowitz, Dick Standish, and Rebecca Quick were all members. We let our black robes and anonymity guide us. We wore our mystique close to the vest. Only a handful of deans and administrators kept the roster of our names. And so, in senior year, we easily flitted between the worlds of academic and cultural excellence and our shadow selves. But in May, during our graduation ceremony, our identities would officially be revealed to our fellow classmates and graduating seniors. So before we left the banks of the Old Raritan, broke our clay pipes, and signed our names inside the bell tower of Old Queens, we decided to take up one last dare. One evening, between finals and graduation, we took a trip to Montclair at night. I was the designated driver, and I was in charge of transporting my fellow skulls to a rather funky tattoo parlor in town. I was only there to hold hands and offer encouragement. Just half of us were willing to take the plunge and get a tattoo after all. But before the night was over, I, too, had been persuaded. While other members of our secret society got skulls emblazoned on their biceps and buttocks, I got the words ‘Spectemur Agendo’ inscribed on my lower back. The phrase was from Ovid, from The Metamorphoses. In Book VIII of The Metamorphoses, Ajax the fearless, exclaims: ‘Denique (quid verbis opus est?) spectemur agendo!’ That is, ‘Finally (what is the use of words?), let us be judged by our actions!’ A beautiful and terrifying sentiment. The perfect challenge for a writer: What is the power of words, dear poet? Let us be judged by our actions.”

And offers a sample poem:

Paper Men

xeroxing epiphanies at 5¢ a page, the messiah standing next to me has
been speaking the word of hope and rage for 37 years. with 4000 books
living in his mind, he’s international, a sage who hands me a song of
California. and anaheim—anaheim—been on my mind for seven straight
minutes. why? 7 for luck and anaheim for memories not mine. brushing
the tattoo of a carnivale, he says there isn’t a circus in the world he hasn’t
been to. and he’d like to be called Nesmith if you don’t mind. and when he
says Nesmith, i think of mike and white out. white out morning after
crash—seven days of meditating Tantric verse and I crashed, crashed for
six long hours at the highest level of understanding and do you
understand me, child, when I say, I cannot describe it to you? the
Supreme spoke to me and I had something to say. and this I’ve said for
years. and when his eyes ask, believe me, i do ’cause there isn’t a story i
haven’t believed in. and when i nod yes, he says, I have found in your
eyes a kindred spirit. and i think of the paper man i once met on an island.
in my back-pocket wallet, the name Yoshida’s inked, hand-pressed on
rice-white paper. Yoshida sighed once, look at the color of our
women—hair the color of the sun—there is no space for dark anymore.
just the shade of this paper store and the wait, the wait for a word-maker
to pass by. and so he tells me of Korea, the blasphemy of emperors
disgraced, and the beauty of his wife when she wakes him. we talk and
talk and talk of the greatness of rome, sartre, and curry. and somehow
beneath the talk, i can hear his heart. and tonight after kissing another
man of verse, i walk down white halls with a book of words on my head,
and think. today, i met a poet.

Read the full post on Rita Banerjee, her tattoo, and poem “Paper Men” on Tattooed Poets here.

“Paper Men” originally appeared in the literary journal Objet d’Art and is featured in Rita’s new collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018).

Rita Banerjee’s new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats is now available for order on Amazon.com and also through the Finishing Line Press website. Echo in Four Beats will officially release on March 9, 2018 at the AWP 2018 Conference in Tampa, Florida.  Here are some upcoming authors signings for Echo in Four Beats:

Rita Banerjee will be signing for CREDO and her new poetry collection Echo in Four Beats(Finishing Line Press, March 2018) at the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Table (T403) from 1-2 pm on Friday, March 9, 2018.  She will also be signing for Echo in Four Beats at the Finishing Line Press Table (T743) from 1-2 pm on Saturday, March 10, 2018.

And here is more information about the collection:

Combining elements, rhythms, and personas from American jazz, blues, and ragtime, poet Rita Banerjee presents a modern-day spin on the love story of Echo and Narcissus in her debut full-length poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats.  But in this story, told in four parts, Echo is more than just a fragment, she is a Sapphic voice that speaks, foretells, forestalls, and repeats. 

Praise for Echo in Four Beats:

“In our narcissism-addled times, Rita Banerjee awakens Echo out of mythical slumber and accords her center stage, with stirring results. These poems dance nimbly from the playful to the sacred, the pentatonic-ancient to the jazzy-contemporary, the observational to the contemplative, and cross languages and borders with abandon…offering a music both savory and profound.” — Tim Horvath, author of Understories and Circulation

“Echo in Four Beats uncover[s] what makes a word into a sensation, a sensation into a moment and what, in the swirling constellation of geographies, turns a moment into the sublime. Amidst the kinetic search for buried treasure in everyday encounters,…there are also unexpected collisions with silence so shocking, they stop us dead in our tracks. We realize the whiteness between words was here all along; its stillness curving the inside of this syncopated journey across time and space.”— Dipika Guha, playwright and author of Mechanics of Loveand The Rules, and screenwriter for American Gods

“From Ovid to Baudelaire, from Manhattan to Atlantis to the Ganges, these poems conjure shape-shifting and gyroscopic worlds where erasure is sustenance, myth is religion, and home is but a constant state of momentary arrivals. Banerjee’s attentive, precise, incantatory poems reverberate… with the “enchantments of art/ and life.’” — Tara Skurtu, author of The Amoeba Game and Skurtu, Romania

“Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a lyric wonder. Wildly intertextual and multilingual…the breadth of her work is staggering and yet utterly approachable, at once intimate and worldly. This may well be the first truly post-national book of poems I’ve ever read. I look forward to reading it again and again.” — Jaswinder Bolina, author of The 44th of July, Phantom Camera, and Carrier Wave

“[In] Banerjee’s polyglot collection–abounding with erasure, mistranslation and wit, [she] has crafted something astonishing.” — Stephen Aubrey, author of Daguerreotypeand What I Took in My Hand and Co-Artistic Director of The Assembly Theater, NYC

 is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), which was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, and Aquarius Press / Willow Books Literature Award, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps(Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop.  Born in California and raised in New Jersey, she teaches on modernism, art house film, and South Asian literary theory and aesthetics at the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany.  She is the judge for the 2017 Minerva Rising “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest, and she is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays. Her work is represented by literary agent Natalie Kimber at The Rights Factory.