Indian Mythopoetics in A.K. Ramanujan’s Oeuvre: Book Review of “Soma: Poems” by A.K. Ramanujan (Ed. Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan)

“In August of 1971, in the afterglow of the psychedelic sixties, my father, the poet-scholar A.K. Ramanujan, swallowed a capsule of the hallucinogenic mescaline. … He … popped one [capsule] on a kind of whim. Then he fell asleep. When he awoke, … [o]ver the next twenty-four hours, he recorded his experience in fragmented, confused and overwhelmingly sensorial verse. By the end of this episode, his writing, like tributaries flowing into a river, had found a main channel, and he began composing lines that led to a series of poems on the theme of Soma, which he explored for the next decade.” (Krishna Ramanujan, 2023, p. 3) In Ramanujan’s “Mescaline Notes,” published as part of Journeys: A Poet’s Diary edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez, we find faint impressions of the aforementioned “main channel.” Towards the end of his notes, he writes: <a href="https://thebiblioraptor.medium.com/indian-mythopoetics-in-a-k-ramanujan-book-review-of-soma-poems-by-a-k-ramanujan-171458099873">Read More</a>