Channaveera Kanavi will be best known for steering between Navodaya and Navya eras

Channaveera Kanavi was a remarkable lyric poet who began to write when the Navodaya poetic tradition held sway and had produced some of the greatest modern Kannada poets such as Bendre, Kuvempu and PuTiNa.

Even Gopalakrishna Adiga and Dr Ramachandra Sharma who ushered in modernist poetry had served a long apprenticeship to this tradition.

Overemphasis on the influence of English romantic poetry prevented critics and historians from seeing modern Kannada poetry as deeply rooted in the heterogeneous Kannada literary, folk and philosophical traditions.

It was also a complex many-voiced response to the making of Indian modernity which began with colonialism.

For a poet to grow out of the shadow of such great poetry required poetic talent of a high order and a worldview which believed in humanism, possibilities of the good in human nature and a deep reverence for the unending fertility and renewal in the world of nature.

Kanavi had all this in abundance in addition to an inwardness with language which helped him create fascinatingly new images from the everyday life-world and experiment with rhythmic patterns and prosodic forms.

His marvellous sonnets, Sunita, use its compact form and fixed structure with such versatility, it is hard to believe he is using a form introduced by the Italian Petrarch and renovated by Elizabethan poets.

Of course, it has survived modernity and later poetic revolutions, but Kanavi makes you feel the sonnet form is a natural expression of the genius of Kannada language.

One of the abiding metaphors in his poetry is of ‘two shores’ and in his poetic career, he had to steer his poetry between the two shores of Navodaya and Navya (modernist) modes in Kannada literature.

His creative response to navya is more than what the popular sobriquet Samanvaya Kavi (poet of integration) suggests.

What happened was Kanavi continued to explore his major preoccupation — the sense of wonder at the ambivalence of human existence caught between the two shores of the real and the ideal, the here and the hereafter by learning from the new modes of poetry.

He also enlarged his poetic world by writing about the urban world with wit, irony and deep reflection.

His later poetry is crowded with images of the urban world, but they brush shoulders with his patent images from the world of nature.

Kanavi excelled in creating amazing poetic portraits of Bendre, Mallikarjun Mansur, Madhura Chenna and Chandrashekhar Patil.

Many of these are loving tributes in an urbane style and tone we permanently associate with his poetic personality.

In retrospect, it appears as though Kanavi was creating his own familiar, but wonderful community which owes everything to Dharwad, its music, its poetry and the small town’s intense relationships.

The landscape and culturescape of Dharwad imbue these portraits with an enduring charm. No wonder, after Bendre, Dharwad recognised in Kanavi its poetic voice.

Kanavi was a reflective poet who wrote in a controlled meditative style which would quickly shift from the ordinary everyday monologue to a deep philosophical search.

His poems on time, change and human vicissitudes deserve all the critical attention one can give
them.

(The writer is a literary and cultural critic based in Shivamogga)

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