Inside Kavisangamam, Telangana’s quiet poetry revolution
HYDERABAD: A newborn arrives wrapped in placenta, fluid, raw, alive. It carries no borrowed identity. This is what Kavi Yakoob asks of every young poet who comes to Kavisangamam. Arrive fresh. Arrive as yourself. “When a newborn baby comes with various fluids in the form of placenta, it should be fresh,” he says. “You have your special touch. A poet should also have his special touch.”
This philosophy of original voice, a poet’s writing emerging like a placenta, nourishing, fundamental, and belonging to no one else, is the quiet foundation on which Kavisangamam was built. Over the past 15 years, it has become one of the most vital and far-reaching Telugu literary movements in Telangana.
Kavisangamam began in 2012 as an online space, a daily literary period posted on social media and blogs, reaching poets scattered across villages, towns, and cities without access to traditional literary circles. World poetry, translations, poetic philosophy, the craft of comparison and metaphor, the journeys of great poets, every day, something arrived in a reader’s feed that fed their understanding of what poetry could be.
In 2013, it moved into the physical world. Every second Saturday, poets began gathering in Hyderabad, not for competition or showcase, but for shared study, criticism, and growth. Three generations of poets sat together, including elders, mid-career writers, and those just beginning.
Kavisangamam has also refused to remain urban. The movement has carried its programs to the interior areas of Telangana, going into districts and villages to find poets who would otherwise remain invisible to the literary mainstream. Annual poetry festivals bring celebrated voices from outside Hyderabad as guests. Local voices are given the same stage.
The tagline that drives it all is “If you are a green tree, birds will come and settle down on their own.” Build something genuine and welcoming, and a community will grow around it naturally.
When Yakoob looked at Telugu literary life in the early 2010s, he saw a gap that troubled him. There was almost no written literature about the craft of poetry itself, no accessible body of work on poetic science, poetic philosophy, or the art of metaphor. The scattered essays in magazines were not enough.
Meanwhile, social media had created a new class of poets, people writing from fields, from homes in small towns, from communities that had never before produced literary voices. They were writing individually, without mentorship, without critical feedback, without community. “If new poets want to write in magazines or newspapers, there is less space,” Yakoob notes.
Kavisangamam was designed to solve both problems at once, to create the critical and educational literature that Telugu poetry lacked, and to give those isolated new voices a common platform, a community, and a tradition to belong to.
Walk through Kavisangamam’s archives, the social media pages, the blog posts, the records of its Saturday gatherings, and you encounter a remarkable breadth. World poetry and translations. Essays on poetics by emerging critics. Close readings of individual poems. Discussions on the journeys of celebrated poets. All of it open, all of it free.
Young writers who came to Kavisangamam to learn to write poems have, through sustained exposure to poetic thinking and debate, developed the skills to write poetry criticism and essays, a form Telugu literature.
The new generation it has nurtured is writing, Yakoob says, about things Telugu poetry has never touched. The texture of working-class daily life. Caste gaps. Their own cultures and upbringings seen clearly and unflinchingly. Global politics, Israeli bombings, Palestinian children, refracted through a local conscience. They are experimenting with form, paragraph poetry, rhetorical poetry, lyrical poetry, and verse as dialogue. “They are expressing in different life shapes,” he says, with pride.
Not without flaws. Some write flat prose dressed as poetry, without the charge of emotion that makes language rise into verse. Some misuse words, placing them in senses they do not carry. Social media makes honest critique tricky, correction can be received as an attack. But Kavisangamam has developed its own ethic of patient, loving mentorship. “We have to patiently accept it,” Yakoob says. “We should keep using human techniques.”
Kavisangamam did not emerge from an institution or a grant. It grew from the life of one man, Yakoob, a poet who began his journey not in a library but in a union office in Kothagudem, where a restless young man who had failed his intermediate exams was working as an office boy and singing protest songs.
From those beginnings, he navigated through student activism in Khammam, winning the position of culture secretary in student unions, drawing close to CPM literary figures, and befriending poets of his own generation. He moved to Hyderabad for an MA in Telugu, then to Rajahmundry for an MPhil, absorbing influences at every stage.
He became a Telugu college teacher. He married Shilalolitha, also a Telugu literature scholar, and built a home where books were as natural as furniture. He was, by the time he started Kavisangamam, someone who had been a constant observer and a constant student of poetry for decades. What he built, he built from everything he had accumulated.
Kavisangamam’s internal ambition is explicit to build a generation of writers with a democratic philosophy and a feminine perspective. Not writers chasing celebrity. Not poets collecting awards. Writers who understand that literature exists for a reason beyond the self.
“The ultimate goal of literature,” Yakoob says, “is a better social thing. A better human being. A better future.” If a frustrated person listens to a song and finds relief, the song has done its work. If a reader encounters a poem and their thought process shifts, if they pause and ask, is this right?, the poem has done its work. That is the standard Kavisangamam holds its poets to.
When asked what he would say to a young person who wants to write poetry, Yakoob does not speak of technique first, or even of reading widely. He speaks of authenticity. “Whatever you are, your soul, whatever society you are in, bring it into poetry in the way you want,” he says. “Do not succumb to influence. Be fresh. Have your own special touch.”
He points to how each great poet is recognizable by something uniquely their own, a signature in their words, their worldview, and their style. That originality, he insists, can only come from one source, a poet’s own life, honestly and fearlessly examined.
This is also why the movement’s advice to young poets begins not with technique but with identity. Come as you are. Write from your own life, your own experience, your own way of seeing. Don’t imitate. Don’t let influence become mimicry. The placenta is yours. Arrive fresh in it.
