Aug 16 2025 to Aug 16 2025 6:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

A poet’s prerogative is to witness life.

Siddhartha Menon’s poetry belongs to a modern practice, going back to around 1900, of creating poems through spells of intense attention to non-human life for its own sake. This evening will begin with a conversation between Menon and Prashant Keshavmurthy on how two of Menon’s six poem collections – The Compass Bird (2023) and Lone Pine (2025) – relate to this modern poetic practice. Together, they’ll trace the lineage of a quiet but radical poetic tradition that resists metaphor, transcends language, and pulls attention.

While the natural world has always been a favourite muse of the human mind, select poets have found powerful anecdotes to draw their readers in. Pushing past the self-centred gaze so familiar to us, the lyrical observations of this style asks us to witness the fascinating creatures with whom we share this world. 

Closing with a Q&A open to the audience, this event promises insights, inspiration, and immersion.

Speakers

Siddhartha Menon
Author, Poet & Teacher
Siddhartha Menon is a poet and teacher. He has worked for more than 30 years in schools run by the Krishnamurti Foundation India and is currently based at The Valley School in Bengaluru. He has published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which Lone Pine (Hachette India) came out earlier this year. His poems have appeared in journals including The Little Magazine, Nether, Almost Island and The Indian Quarterly. They are also featured in the following anthologies: Both Sides of the Sky: Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry and Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing.

Prashant Keshavmurthy
Associate Professor, Persian-Iranian Studies, McGill University, Montreal
Prashant Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies in McGill University, Montreal. He is the author of a monograph on 17th-18th century Persian poets and philologists from Mughal Delhi; and the co-translator of The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation (Brill, 2024) by Sohrab Sepehri (d.1980), a major Iranian modernist poet and painter. He has published in scholarly and popular fora on Persian literature in India and comparative Persian-Sanskrit-Hindi prosody among other topics. His blank verse translation and critical edition of Amir Khusraw’s court poem The Nine Skies is forthcoming in 2026 as is his book on the poetics of irony in the famous quintet of Persian poems by the 12th century Nizami Ganjavi.