write an account of an imaginary interview session with your favorite poet or writer
Answers
Arundhathi Subramaniam, one of India’s best-known contemporary women poets, has a most natural prowess and elegance with which she brings verse to life. A poet as well as a cultural curator and critic, she also explores spirituality and relishes the contradictions and complexities around her in her verses. You have four published books of poetry – the themes ranging from relationships to god, from love to urbanisation. Is there a recurrent theme you keep returning to?
The first book, On Cleaning Bookshelves, contains in germinal form many preoccupations that developed in later books: the city, relationships, gender, home, love, quest. The next book, Where I Live: New and Selected, circled the question of belonging – or unbelonging – as a source of unease, rage and celebration. That intensified into a kind of dark elation in the new poems in Where I Live, where the poems are erotic and existential all at once. And in the most recent book, When God is a Traveller, the central focus is journeys. Journeys of all kinds – real and mythic, with images of past and present, colliding all the time. There is an encounter with Mrs Salim Shaikh on a Mumbai local train as well as encounters with archetypal figures like Shakuntala and Kartikeya. There is a fascination with personal gods or ishta devtas as well as a deep revulsion at the religiosity of modern-day Varanasi. Basically, while there’s a fascination with the sacred, there’s a mistrust of dogmatism on both sides of the sacred-secular divide.
So what has stayed the same is a relish of contradiction, the textures of ambivalence. Poetry is a place where a moment can mean many things all at once. That’s always drawn me to it. It still does.
love that you view yourself as a “lyric poet”. What attracts you to this form over others?
When I look back, I realise that what excited me about poetry as a child was its capacity to soar and dive, skate and swivel, be terrestrial and aerial all at once. All those are qualities of lyric poetry, aren’t they? A lyric poem is a place where language can be unexpected and startling, where language longs to be unstarched, untethered, unbound – free of the staid rhythms of everyday prose; of the tyranny of beginning, middle and end; of past, present and future; itching to defy gravity and yet capable of obeying it with a certain wonderful inevitability. It’s language at its most heightened, its most alive. It’s that mix of defiance and alignment that makes a lyric poem what it is – a buoyant compound of sound and sense and silence. Who are some of your biggest influences in your poetry?
My influences are as varied as Wallace Stevens, TS Eliot, Adrienne Rich, Basho, Tukaram, Akka Mahadevi, Sangam poetry, Denise Levertov and Neruda! I admire AK Ramanujan as poet and as translator, and Arun Kolatkar as well. And there are many poets whose work I enjoy, who are too numerous and varied to name from John Burnside to Savithri Rajeevan and Manglesh Dabral. What is the state of contemporary poetry in India?
Contemporary Anglophone poetry in India seems to be bristling with activity. There are lit fests, poetry competitions, performance poetry sessions, spontaneous addas, and quite a flurry on the internet and in social media, in particular. Something’s definitely in the air. And that’s to be celebrated. What are you currently working on? Also, what are you reading at present?
I’m working on poems, but it will take a while before a book is ready.
And I’m reading eclectically, as always – Tamil siddha poetry, revisiting Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to GH, poems by George Quasha, a commentary on the Yoga Sutras. hope it helps you please mark me as brainliest please