Writers on Reading. Part Thirteen, Arundhathi Subramaniam.
Art by Bhargavi Rudraraju
"The story of longing
and union
is overheated.
Irrelevant really.
The end of the world?
Just you and I withdrawing, love,
from this conversation. "
Arundhathi Subramaniam's latest collection of poems brings love into the conversation. Dipped in nostalgia, Love Without a Story is intimate and earnest. Matter-of-factness combined with an unexpected turn of emotions, Arundhathi's lyric poems move and pierce while they stroll. In classic Arundhathi style, metaphors startle and sound-compositions invoke more than the words themselves. At the heart of the book, remain her long meditations on spirituality and her love for Bhakti poetry.
With being part of initiatives like the Poetry Circle where some exceptional poets met and critiqued each other's poems, to having been the editor of Poetry International India for many years, Arundhathi has greatly influenced Indian poetry in more ways than one. She remains one of the finest poets in the country, a voice that is distinct, sharp, and unapologetically personal. She has mastered sound and embraced silence, and her poems reflect a rare but critical balance.
From what makes a good poem, her inspirations, and preoccupations and why poetry is a dark art, many facets of her practice are explored in this interview, and Arundhathi generously answers.
What spiritual journeys does a poem undergo from start to finish?
I don’t know about ‘spiritual’, Ankita. But some poems are certainly born in more mysterious ways than others. Every poet will vouch for this. In fact, anyone who has ever created anything – whether it’s a child, a meal, a garden, a rangoli, even graffiti – will vouch for this!
As far as poems go, sometimes there is a strong imperative to distill a particular moment on the page, as I felt, for instance, about the poems about Avvaiyar in my new book. I wasn’t sure how or why, but I knew I had to follow this old crone, this wise woman, through the Tamil countryside, through fields and pathways and jamun orchards, in order to understand certain questions around ageing and a quest for myself. Likewise, the poems on the goddess demanded to be written. (Imperium is, of course, not unexpected when the subject is a goddess!)
And then, what follows is, of course, the process of crafting and re-crafting. That is a long journey, and a mysterious one in its own way. In some cases, it takes years. The poem cycle on Avvaiyar took almost three years to finish.
I had no idea how the poems would unfold. Two of the goddess poems turned out to be far shorter than I imagined. Almost haiku-like in their economy and tension. The Avvaiyar poem opened out into a cycle, arriving at a certain pivotal moment that I hadn’t anticipated.
So, no, maybe not a spiritual journey, but there is certainly magic in seeing a nascent image – in this case, the wise old woman poet of Tamil folklore -morph into a full-fledged poem.
You were an integral part of Poetry Circle and also conducted Chauraha at NCPA. Can you tell us more about these initiatives and how did they impact individual artistic practices and shaped Indian poetry at large?
The Poetry Circle was a vital part of my formative years as a poet. We were a bunch of young writers, temperamentally diverse, but united by a love of poetry. What was significant about the Circle was that we read other poets, not just our own work. What was also significant was that we did a lot of workshopping; the meetings were about painstaking line-by-line critique, not just about patting each other on the back. There were some inevitably tense moments, but at its finest, the Circle managed to combine the spirit of community and critique. Many of us of who congregated in that shabby Marine Lines room have continued to be writers of some kind or the other: Ranjit Hoskote, Jerry Pinto, Menka Shivdasani, Abhay Sardesai, Masud Taj, Anju Makhija, Marilyn Noronha, Prabhanjan Mishra, TR Joy, Gayatri Majumdar. Charmayne D’Souza, and others.
As for Chauraha, it was in the year 1994 that Vijaya Mehta (Marathi theatre stalwart and Creative Director of the NCPA) asked me if I would give shape and direction to a new forum she had just hatched. The prospect was exciting. Mainly because it allowed me to shape the kind of event that I would like to witness, as a rasika. I tried to shape Chauraha into an interdisciplinary forum based on three qualities that I still prize: informality, interaction and intimacy. They were years of immersion, years of conversation with some of the most interesting artists of our times. As a poet, one leads a solitary life; this was a chance to be joyfully and messily collaborative!
Through the next fifteen years, I learnt a great deal. The most important takeaway was learning the importance of being ‘invisible’ as curator. Curatorial work is integrally about humility: you are merely facilitating an event, not drawing attention to yourself. It was a valuable lesson in working frenetically, organizing festivals, choreographing events, but learning that there is much joy in the wings. The spotlight belongs to the artist, and rightly so.
Looking back, I realise that Chauraha played an important role in the Mumbai art scene of the ‘90s and the early 2000s. The idea of an intimate space where work-in-progress could be aired and discussed, where the focus was on an artist’s journey rather than a full-fledged production, on process rather than product, was essentially the Chauraha template. And it addressed a felt-need in the cultural scene. It is wonderful to see many other initiatives of this kind around today.
As for my poetry, my greatest nourishment has come from practitioners of other art forms. To this day, I would count my conversations with a dancer like Alarmel Valli, or a musician like Aruna Sairam to be among the most creatively invigorating I’ve had.
Theatre practitioners have a wonderful part of my life too: from Vijaya Mehta to contemporaries like Vikram Kapadia, Anahita Uberoi, Shernaz Patel, Sunil Shanbag, Rahul da Cunha, and others.
There were writers like Kiran Nagarkar, Shanta Gokhale and CS Lakshmi, and of course, interactions with poets -- Adil Jussawalla, Keki Daruwalla, Gieve Patel, Imtiaz Dharker – all of which happened around this phase of my life. I’m grateful to the NCPA years for making many of these convergences possible.
I’ve always characterized your writing with the beautiful metaphors and analogies you use. Textile for heart, plants for people, sock for face, cabbages for poets. How important are metaphors to poems and experiencing life at large?
Metaphor, for me, is the marrow of poetry, Ankita. It is the swiftest, most direct verbal vehicle to anything one wants to convey. And even vehicle is an inadequate word, because it reduces metaphor to a mere means. Metaphor is not about explaining or describing something; it is the closest you can come to the experience of actually being there. One might call it an idea made crunchy. An abstraction with grain. A place where the conceptual and the concrete are inseparable. It is the reason I turn to poetry again and again, as reader, not just as practitioner.
And that’s how we experience life, isn’t it? As this incredible mix of the material and the subtle. I have never understood ideologies that compel us to choose one over the other. Life is such an inextricable mix of thinginess and smokiness, of matter and spirit. Metaphor reflects this essential inseparability.
Many of your poems have line breaks and indents at surprising points. Form-wise, what determines the spaces you deliberately leave on a page?
That’s an interesting question. A line break can indicate a subtle shift in tone or rhythm or thought or feeling. It can suggest abrupt shifts too – rupture, even. In my own practice, I will say that as I grew more aware of breath, I began to inhabit language differently. The pauses increased – not merely as devices to create effects. Instead, I grew more aware of the weave of the poem – the inevitable places of density and subtlety in its fabric. Control is still important, but I think my form is less tense. I allow my poems the license to leap more than before! That might explain some of those “surprising” line breaks.
What happens in between writing poetry for you? Tell us about some current preoccupations and how they inspire your writing?
Between writing poems, I’m often writing prose. I also read (and re-read) a fair amount. I’ve been reading a slew of poetry manuscripts currently. This past year I’ve also read Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Hafiz, and revisited Pupul Jayakar’s biography of J. Krishnamurti.
Other than that, I travel a great deal – not just for lit fests, talks, readings, but also because I have multiple homes. I find I need regular doses of engagement and retreat. So, while I grumble about the travel sometimes, I do it because it reflects some diverse but still-important aspects of my life.
What else do I do? Well, I enjoy conversations, particularly with close friends, and preferably one-on-one. I love evening walks on Juhu beach. The rest of the time, like the rest of the human race, I’m trying to keep abreast of my emails!
There is a poem “How To Read Indian Myth” and you conclude, just like you would read a love story, your own. The love story and the love without a story coexist in your book. What do they mean for you?
That’s a thoughtful observation. Yes, there’s a certain creative tension running through the book between the story and the absence of story. And that probably reflects my own preoccupation. I like stories, but I don’t like to be stifled by them! I want to wear them lightly.
And while I’m deeply interested in people, I have always found ‘conversations without pauses’ exhausting. I enjoy people and their life dramas. I have the plot of my own life too, which is full of its own surprises, like everyone else’s. But I would like the freedom to step in and out of frames, to choose my drama, rather than be ruled by it. Anyway, there’s more to human beings than the stories they tell. Poetry is, in fact, the art of listening to the stories that people don’t tell.
I often say that the wonderful thing about poetry is that it offers both meaning and a reprieve from meaning. It is about words, and their absence. No other form gives you that patterning of word and pause in quite the same way. Those pauses are not the absence of life; they are its very presence.
So, in short, I’m drawn to stories, but largely those that become a springboard for certain moments of aliveness, of startling insight. That is why myth draws me. I love detail and minutiae, but I find many novels and conversations rest content with just that. Myths don’t. They speak to us through those large, spare, elemental characters that we recognize instantly. They take us swiftly to the heart centre of a human predicament. That fascination and impatience with stories is probably at the core of my new book.
Who are some of the contemporary poets from India you really like and what about their poetry do you specifically enjoy?
Too many to name, Ankita. I’ve written about a host of them for the Poetry International Web.
But to name a random few, I’d say Mangalesh Dabral for his poetry of distillation, KG Sankara Pillai for his irony, Prathibha Nandakumar for her gumption, Srijato for his edge, Savithri Rajeevan for that heartbreaking poem on bathing a mother, Mona Zote for her Ernestina poem on the hills of Aizawl.
I’ve been revisiting and enjoying Karthika Nair and Sridala Swamy recently. And there are several younger poets whose directions I’m curious about: Sharanya Manivannan, Urvashi Bahuguna, Aditi Rao, Subhashini Kaligotla, Sohini Basak, Sumana Roy, Anupama Raju, Srividya Sivakumar, to name just a few.
What are the elements that make a good poem?
Image, tone, rhythm, sound, economy, surprise.
You’ve often said, poetry is a dark art. What goes on in a poem or for that matter, in a poet, that makes it so?
When language is subjected to great heat and pressure, it grows in intensity, in voltage; its chemistry is altered. That’s one reason why poetry seems like such a mysterious form. It is also a verbal art that uses pauses so consciously that it becomes an invitation not just to music and meaning, but also to silence.
Poetry doesn’t work through discursive logic or reasoned linear argument. It is a rigorous form, but its logic is essentially nocturnal. And its guile runs deep; it seeps into your bloodstream and transforms you without your knowing it.
Three words that describe love.
Alive, radiant, expansive.
Three words that describe loss.
Empty, sunless, contracted.
If you could bring one Bhakti poet to life and ask them a question, who and what would that be?
Interesting question! Maybe Akka Mahadevi. I am curious about her vagabond life, and I’d like to know more about that line: ‘to be with him yet not with him, my lord white as jasmine.’
Or maybe Tukaram. I’d like to ask about his inner journey, to try and understand how he found his way to journey so seamlessly between the saguna and nirguna, the embodied and formless notions of the divine. There is an ease with which these poets traverse the personal and the universal, the local and the cosmic, that fascinates me.
Have you ever felt that poets write the same poems over and over again?
Most poets do. I also know this from personal experience. Each time I’ve finished a book, I realise that what I believed were discrete and utterly unrelated poems are actually circling the same themes again and again!
What are you currently reading?
Mani Rao’s fine book, Living Mantra. Also Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik’s fascinating graphic novel, Aranyaka.
What's your advice to poets when it comes to working on craft and exposing oneself to criticism?
Craft is absolutely vital to any art form and is not incompatible with inspiration. It is, in fact, a deeply pleasurable, sensuous experience to sit around words, chipping, polishing, scraping, approaching language with the right mix of attention and self-forgetfulness.
A writers’ group can often be useful in honing one’s craft, particularly when it is with an intimate group that one trusts. It’s important to remember that not all criticism needs to be taken on board. Over time, one learns to integrate criticism that resonates with a hunch one already has about what might be wrong in a poem, and disregard the rest.
What are your thoughts on the new revolution called “Instagram” poetry?
No thoughts, since I’m not on Instagram! But I will say this: if it makes poets feel less isolated and helps foster a real sense of community, it’s welcome. The challenge, however, (and I often say this) is to be inclusive, but not indiscriminate.
What is the most important need of a poet amongst these: solitude, boredom or passion?
If I had to say it my way, I’d say a poem is born when you’re able to align artistry, authenticity and aliveness. But if I had to list these choices in order of preference, I’d say passion, solitude, boredom – in that order.
If passion means intensity and aliveness, I’d say it is essential. And I don’t want to romanticize solitude, but I do believe we need large doses of it in our lives. In a world of instant and unrelenting communication, the role of poetry is to remind us that a conscious utterance – an integrated compound of word and pause – can be beautiful, true and profoundly life-altering. To arrive at that distilled utterance, you need a willingness to listen to what Rilke called “the news that is always arriving out of silence”. For that, solitude is useful. As for boredom, I think I’d prefer to see it as a kind of voluntary idling – or what we so aptly call ‘timepass’ in India. There has to be time to do nothing. That is when most poems are born.
Interviewed by Ankita Shah