NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

The first thing one notices about this journal is its tactility: the paper has an unusual feel and a moistness about it, as if it were forever in the process of drying out from being stored in an open crate in monsoon weather.

Moreover, the journal has a pungent smell that brings back, for this reviewer, memories of a hand-cranked mimeograph machine in a basement back in the early 1970s. Paging through this journal reminds me of those days of heady ambition and low means. Indeed, Prakalpana Literature is full of ambition and this is the most appealing thing about it.

One crows with delight at the subtitle:

Password to latest [sic] trend in Global Literature.

I can, however, say that Sheila Murphy is well represented on pages 42-43 with a hard-edged deconstruction of several vaguely sexist texts which results in an untitled, vaguely feminist poem (or at least one that implies that this is the general gist). An excerpt follows:

	negotiation coughs light (wind
	in several paces behind maleness
	strutting for the world to peek into
	as chalk within smooth
	powdered tray (Ash Wednesday
	perspires the mix (to mud thou shalt....
	And seminal pre-emptive cathering [sic]

Later, the editor gives over a full six pages to Paul R. Grosse's high-school effort THE INCUBUS which willfully deconstructs itself as we read such stanzas as:

	such such is all you got?
	soon such pardons from the sot
	some such cardons [sic] all around the place
	sooner than not the whole thing erase

Dilip Gupta's poem ...MERRY-COLOURED WOODEN DOLL!!! is also worthy of note.

Add a sampling of concrete poems and art work, and a reviews and letters section, and you have an afternoon's worth of adventurous reading. This is classic small press at its best: a fine net for exotic butterfly poems, wooly moth poems and the occasional blue bottle fly.

This is magazine of experimental poetry in English and Bengali. It starts off with a survey of publications and internet sites covering Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, India and elsewhere.

The editor describes Prakalpana as a form of literature and art comprising:

             Prose, poetry, graphics
          stoRy
             Art
             Kinema
             a
         noveL, culture
             Play
           soNg
             a

suppose while digging the mine of mind, you reach such a layer where all thoughts & conceptions, emotions & imaginations, subjects & matters are mixed up together liked the mixed oars [sic], which if you want to express in toto without any major distortion as far as possible — then casting the material into the dice of any of predesigned forms like essay, poetry, drama, story, novel won't and can't do adequate justice to the subject matter. In that case, is not the rightest and broadest way to express that mixed material is prakalpana

Perhaps the piece that expresses these idea most is MY CAMERA by Dilip Gupta. He writes about visiting Sujata. He takes photographs of her playing the organ, feeding her baby, working the bellows of her sewing-machine. Out of the rhythms come poems which he recites to Sujata. One of these is a Bengali version of HUMPTY DUMPTY which vexes her. This leads him to quote mathematics:

	Take the mystery of the poem as               — x
	 "    "  distance of the poem read
	             from the camera as               — s
	 "    "  depth of the meaning of the
	            words used in the poem as         — M
	 "    "  beauty of the poetic diction as      — F
	 "    "  degree of loudness of the
	                readers voice as              — d
	 "    "  listener's power of acceptibility as — L
	                (a variable factor)

	then x = (M + F)d + (where L = s)

A substantial 120 page journal of experimental literature in Bangla and English. Some pieces, but I'm not sure all, have been translated between the two languages. Certainly a poem composed using computer symbol fonts includes a key in both languages.

Although I didn't completely understand it, I enjoyed Nikhil K Bhaumik's SURYAKANTA, A TETRAHEDRON WITH AN APPENDIX with its insights into attitudes surrounding marriage in India.

Enjoyable too was Braja Chattopadhyay's poem THE LOCAL TRAIN:

	It rolls, it goes mindless
		It no more carries dream
	It rolls it carries agony
		Crowding multitude
		who run after what very little offers

How soon one forgets the very thing one so very much loves to remember and talk about!