Vivek, we’re the same age and we’ve waited for a while before publishing our first books. Before this we’ve had a ten-year history of writing and publishing. And we’ve appeared together in a few anthologies like Ranjit Hoskote’s Reasons For Belonging and Jeet Thayil’s Give the Sea Change and It shall Change.  Let’s start by talking about the impulses behind our books.

Yes, I suppose for me there was a kind of diffidence for a long while about putting together a book, I wanted to wait until I really had something to say, something of that sort.  But putting together a book, as I found out very soon, involves a lot more than just throwing some old poems together.  It’s a strong statement, and since it was my very first statement of that order, I was nervous and careful, perhaps even too careful.  It’s a process of looking back over several years of writing and trying to see what still holds, what can be carried into the future; but it’s also about ordering and revising the poems and seeing how they can speak to each other, what one has to say in a larger sense.  The “Universal Beach” of the title is on one level a very specific place, Elliot’s Beach in Chennai, the only place that—given a lifetime of moving around—I have come back to again and again and seen change over time, and on the other hand it is a beach where all history and geography converges, a kind of space of infinity.  So one hand I was trying to search for a root, a home, however tentative, and on the other hand I wanted to bring the sum total of my experience and movement to that place, to try and “contain multitudes” as Whitman said, to feel free to be “polyvocal”.  I was also trying to go beyond a national literature in some senses, to write a book that wouldn’t be bound by belonging to a national literature.  By “national literature”, I suppose I mean a) literature that could be used to educate or instruct “ideal” Indian citizens, or to reduce the idea of India or “Indian values”, b) literature that claims to represent the aspirations and perspectives of an entire nation, to speak on behalf of it, c) literature that addresses itself to people of a certain ethnic or native background, rather than to members of the human species.  I wanted to try and work against all of that.

Strangely though, in writing the poems for the second book I seem to have doubled back, returned to the idea of India, however uncertainly and skeptically.  In some ways, this has also meant reaching for writers who had very nuanced and subversive ideas of how to belong or speak from a nation—like the poetic Tamil prose writer Mouni, who brought a kind of avant-garde intellectual spirit into the language, and who, it seems to me, is more interested in literature as a universal state of intensity than as simple “cultural” expression, or Agha Shahid Ali, whose conception of being a Kashmiri poet was large and comfortable enough to include a stylish New Yorkish sharpness, or Arun Kolatkar, who is simultaneously local and giddily cosmopolitan, concerned not just with breakfast in Kala Ghoda, but breakfast all over the world.  So all these things, and living here, have made me rethink my relationship to India.  But it’s almost as if I had to write the first book, seal it and put it behind me to return to the uneasy truce with the nation that I have now.  This is also, of course, the story of my life.

It seems to me that your book  is involved with the idea of place, to Shillong, a place you return to no matter how far away from it you go.  What was the impulse for your book?

Yes, Street on the Hill is a very ‘local’ book in that sense. It is about Shillong or an idea of Shillong, and I think the first impulse behind this book is a documentary one. I wanted to document both the physical features of a landscape or a street or a room, and I also wanted to document what’s going on inside, the relationship between landscape and emotion. I think the book has come to have this focus on the close at hand because I felt isolated. I wasn’t able to connect to the ideas that were important to people around me – the idea of belonging to a fixed community, for instance. I was in a small town and even that eluded me most of the time. So then I started getting joy out of noticing things right under my nose. And that became a kind of romance – believing that this is all one really needs to sustain oneself: just looking closely enough, enjoying trivial details. Kolatkar, the great poet of “seeing” for me, refers in an interview to the lack of physical observation and detail in Indian poetry. So I was also trying to develop a language with which to make the everyday sound significant, and I think the collection has achieved a kind of unity there. Looking back I feel happy about that because when I was writing these poems I constantly felt I was careening madly all over the place, but when I see these poems now between the covers of a book, I feel, hey…maybe there is a voice here, maybe there was a single impulse driving me after all!

Going back to your point about searching for a root and a home, I wanted you to talk a little about origins and how one comes into poetry. Your mother is a writer and translator, so was there a sense of the inevitable about your becoming one?

Nothing inevitable there, thank goodness.  My mother had published stories in Tamil journals and won a couple of national prizes for individual stories; but for various reasons, including perhaps the move to Africa, she had stopped writing fiction around the time of my birth, and she didn’t return to that territory until the 1990s, when she turned to translation from and into Tamil.  Her identity as a literary writer was semi-obscured when I was growing up; at the time, I never registered her as a writer.  Much more to the fore was my grandfather, who had been a professor of philosophy in Trivandrum and then Chennai.  When I really found out was after going to university to study Computer Science, starting to write poems and stories and almost feeling guilty about it.  A couple of teachers had been very encouraging and inspiring, so I came home and showed my stuff to my parents, and to my surprise, they were overjoyed.  But there was, shall we say, a very high tolerance for poetry, and for all the arts, in the house when I was growing up.  My earliest encounter with poetry is at about eight years old, my mother explaining Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice, showing me how words like fire and ice could stand for themselves and also be doing so many more things at the same time.  I remember that moment very clearly; I never recovered from it.  It was in the kitchen, and I was looking at a packet of Eno Fruit Salt while listening to her.

Your parents are both teachers of literature — your father of English literature, and your mother of Hindi literature.  Do you remember your first encounters with poetry?

I have four siblings and, growing up, we were all writing poems, stories, diaries, plays with characters drawn from the books we read. Some of us were sketching, some acting in plays – but whatever it was we were constantly making things up. Fantasy was an important way of dealing with life, with boredom. We’d draw the curtains and move around the furniture and wear necklaces and assign ourselves names, and suddenly the world had changed. I still love that – creating an atmosphere; I think it’s the most crucial thing in a poem. Anyway, the point is that there was no big deal about me writing poetry, and I think I came to it later than the others. I don’t think I was the best at it or anything like that. I just persisted because there was a poetry ‘scene’ in Shillong that I became part of when I was in college. These were lecturers of English, students of English and so on, and we’d meet and read out poems to each other. There was a poetry magazine called Lyric. There was (still is, possibly) a Shillong Poetry Society. I learnt a lot by hanging around with these poets, some of whom like Robin Ngangom had published books and took the whole business of writing poetry very seriously.  This group was decidedly ambivalent about English literature, though. The divide between what was read and taught as part of the syllabi and what was read out of choice and for pleasure became a divide between Anglo-American poetry and poetry from other cultures, all of it in translation. Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Marina Tsvetayeva, Tomas Transtromer, Yehuda Amichai, Darwish – all of these poets were considered exciting. I started reading poets whose work I still love – especially the Italian poet Cesare Pavese for his stripped down, muscular verse that is at the same time moody, empathetic, and full of landscape and light.

But of course the fact that my parents were teachers and the house was full of books is what got it all started off, probably. My father, Noorul Hasan, is a Thomas Hardy scholar and Hardy was a kind of patron saint when we were growing up. As a child of four or five I was taken to see his statue in Dorchester – a black marble statue – and I remember being full of a kind of awed reverence, the kind that I suppose other children come to feel in the presence of gods. I think my father’s relationship with the English language has affected me deeply. His origins lie in a small town in eastern UP and he made this, to me, amazing journey from being the son of a working class father to being a professor of English. He wasn’t born into the language and yet he used it to pivot himself into another universe altogether. I was born into the language and yet I don’t have as much unquestioned confidence with it as he has. But talking of origins, there are several poems in Universal Beach that talk about the past. Do you think it’s something you’ll keep returning to given the fact that you’ve lived all over the world, that your background and influences are complex, to say the least?

It’s hard to say what exactly I’ll come back to, I expect that to be clear after a lifetime of writing and, well, living.  I try to build an individual poem as strongly as I can around an observed subject, sometimes I have a vague sense of the territory I’m exploring, and I see what takes shape when the poems accumulate.  I know that, despite literary dogma to the contrary, I’m equally interested in ideas and feelings, the statement or the gesture as much as the lyric.

I suspect that my “themes” would emerge better in response to the question, “How?” rather than “What?”  Thus far, I’ve lived in several places and been ejected from them, both with and against my will, and I’ve sometimes become terrified that those places have disappeared from my life, lost forever.  Writing then becomes a process of recovering at least some debris from the disappearance of the past, to both memorialize it and to put it in motion in the present, to make it an integral part of something new.  I think this is why poets like Czeslaw Milosz and Eugenio Montale have become so important to me.

Speaking of returning to things, one of the most interesting aspects of a memory is how, as a story, it keeps changing all the time.  I’m thinking of my poem, “Learning To Drown”, which is about my falling through the ice of a river in my first year of university (I started university a little early, at fifteen) and drowning, almost.  Of course, right from the time it happened, I wanted to write a poem about it—the perverse way that writers are always only thinking about how to use “life material”, especially life material linked to death—but I didn’t quite get around to that until I was twenty.  The poem then won the poetry award in the English department at university, so that version was circulating for a while.  By the time of the Reasons For Belonging anthology in 2002, I had become dissatisfied with the earlier version and come up with a drastically new, much clipped version.  Then, at the age of 32, while I was sitting down for this book, I found myself drastically revising again, this time to make it about twice as long, reflecting all that I had now understood about that memory.  Of course, at this point, with two very different earlier versions already circulating, the poem had also to make revision—including the revision of memory—as one of its principal subjects.  So now, I’m wondering if I should keep that up actively, doing a new version of the poem five or ten years from now, ten years after that, and so on.  Each version would be a snapshot of what I thought about that event, almost dying at the age of 15, as I got older.  One then moves towards an idea of revision as being less about revising towards the ultimate, presumably perfect poem (can such a thing exist, is it even desirable?) and more about the revising of one’s poems as a kind of necessary thinking through, a lifelong search for the right word at the right moment, that produces not better or worse poems, but variants.

But speaking of memory, and to inflect it a little differently: in your prose poem, "England", the narrator, which one might assume is you, complains that "England never went away." The romance of England,  (and by extension, the English language ?)  drawn from childhood and yearning,  (could one go so far as to say that this the most important source for meaningful poetry as a whole ?) is contrasted with a wry, adult revisioning: "Could we please take England away, walk on streets with their cruel graffiti and their real winters?" And then, at the end of the poem, a tentative repose: "This idiotic recollecting, this tender ache just below our breathing—what should we do with England?" This is a strange, partly combative, partly longing relationship that many English writers in the once-colonial world use in a productive way; I am thinking, for instance, of Derek Walcott in his elegy for W.H. Auden:

"In treachery and in union
despite your empire's wrong..."

Could you talk a little about your treacherous romance with the English language?

Yes, but I first wanted to say, with reference to ‘Learning to Drown’, that this constant revising of a poem is interesting because then all the versions put together become a kind of record of the poetic choices you have made. So while each version is ‘imperfect’, taken together they are a kind of hyper-poem. Also, there are lines in the poem that suggest the watchful poet can mediate memories even as they are being made, which is interesting too. Like: “I made a drama, /doubled as witness and mistress. I kindly stopped for time/ because by then he could not stop for me;” or “My future flashed past me/ not my past.”

Coming back to my own poem, my first memory, from the age of three, is of being on a plane to England. After that came the awareness that one was somehow different from all the other people around one – in school, on the streets. And finally one leaves England for a place where England becomes not just a memory but a yardstick, a centre, a place whose tangibility somehow weakens one’s present reality. So you naturally want to overthrow it, and yet you can’t: it’s too late, it’s written into your blood.

The romance with the language, and with the culture, is crucial; it's shapes our personal relationship with it. On the other hand, there’s the idea that one is writing in a language that is associated with a history of oppression. But this is an abstract idea. What is not abstract is a question like – how do I sound to myself? Or, how do I close the gap between what I want to say and the language I have to say it in.

So what does one do with these questions, to what uses does one put them? The discussions we keep having in this country about whether we should write in English or not overshadow possible discussions on how we could write in English, how we could write in a language with which we have an uneasy yet passionate relationship. We haven’t paid enough attention to this. We have all, implicitly, developed or are developing our approaches to this question, and there are so many different ways of doing it. It’s not any one thing for Indians to write in English. I admire poets like Kamala Das who are able to sound so at home in the language, who write in it with a cool sense of entitlement. Arun Kolatkar too has set up a highly naturalistic, yet sardonic way of describing things, which is utterly convincing. In a poem called “Parameshwari”, for instance, he describes an old lady, a pipe-smoking lavatory attendant, with very careful attention to physical details but then ends the poem by saying – “…she can see through the new day/ and know it/ for the clever forgery it is” which seems to me a kind of joke on the supposed veracity of his own realism. But his love of things that have taken root at eye level, of everyday things, is genuine. Amit Chaudhuri says quite wonderfully that his poetry deals with objects that “that disturb and ironicise the logic and flow of capital”. And the sense of time in The Kala Ghoda Poems, for instance, is one of an intense contemporariness.

Thinking of which, I find it interesting to compare a poet like him with a poet like you, whose work appears to be striving for a place outside time. That somehow renders the usual anxieties about language and location irrelevant. We’re in a different space while reading your poems. We’ve talked often about how I find your poems interestingly ‘atemporal’ (even though you have written poems on particular historical events or on events in your history, like you’ve just said). But usually, one starts reading a poem of yours and immediately a poet of specific places and times like me wants to know – where and when is this happening? The poem doesn’t usually tell you and this deepens its mystery and its allure. Would you like to talk a little about this kind of obliqueness that you seem to cherish?

I think the question you just asked, “How do I sound to myself?” is an extremely important question for a poet.  It’s a question that might end up having political implications, but it’s a much more useful and multi-directional starting point for poetry than, as you say, more abstracted political questions and allegiances.  One of the dissatisfactions with critical movements like postcolonial theory is that, although they have opened up certain new spaces, they have tended to frame their questions in very stark binary terms –this vs. that—and do not adequately reflect the complex and layered way that things like different languages are actually negotiated in everyday life.

With regards to my “atemporality”, I suppose it is partly also a response to “how do I sound to myself?”  Virtually every one on this planet is now a product of at least two “cultures” and most of us, in one way or another, live psychically in more than one place.  In my own biography, this problem is acute: I cannot claim to be the “authentic” representative of any place or culture, and I don’t pretend to do so.  So that process you speak of, where different places or times and further, different selves or different aspects of my self coexist and find a way to cohere, sometimes in the same poem, is partly just a reflection, I guess, an attempt to find a reason and rationale for the existence of a creature such as myself.  There is something more also: for a number of years I studied, researched, and taught historical anthropology.  During this time, one of my concerns was to do with poetry what history, for instance, was not so capable of doing: taking up fragments of a life, listening to silences.  I was determined to write poems that could not easily be taught in voyeuristic history or sociology classrooms, especially in the West, as a cheap way of getting information about somewhere else, as a naïve document of native perspectives from a native informant, as a way of putting things and people into categories.  So my question was, what if you take a memory or an experience, which is first of all and most importantly sensation and detail, and strip it of easy context, of its pretensions to knowledge and authority?  How do you move from being a “product” (the word becomes more troubling when you think of global economics) of a particular place, culture or civilization?  Now, of course, I’ve not been a historian for more than six years, so my relationship to and angst with history and sociology is changing; some kind of truce is in the offing; but I still find myself exploring those older questions in one way or another.

If you have been to one of the locations of a poem of mine, you might—some people say— recognize it immediately.  People in India might complain that they don’t know who Chris Hani is; in South Africa he’s a household name.  Many Europeans have never seen a Maruti 800, or Silk Smitha.  But, I still want to say, it is not important for you to know everything about where I’m coming from to enjoy the poem.  And if you really want to know, you might have to do a bit of work to find out.  Life ain’t easy, so why should I be?

What if we move now from talking about themes to the more nuts-and-bolts question of form?  Anjum, one thing that often comes to mind when I read your work is the resilience and use of your English sentences.  Sometimes we mistakenly simplify to think of poetry being about the line and prose about the sentence.  Robert Frost, of course, famously challenged this separation in his notion of “sentence-sound” in poetry.  Now as far as the sentence goes among Indian poets writing in English, I do think that you are about as good as it gets as a practitioner. I’m thinking, for instance, of two poems in your book, “Mawlai” and “A Place Like Water”, two poems that run to a page or more, with very long lines.  Apart from their other delights, one notices that both these poems have only two, very long, sentences in them.  For instance, the second poem begins –

All through the day it stays: the sadness of coming
into a wet city at dawn, not speaking, neither of us,
when one by one the neon lights wake us from a cramped,
dream-ravaged sleep, driving home in one long curving sweep
on traffic-less roads with their morning walkers and damp dogs;
still thinking of that other place worked on by the sun,
the casuarina trees and shouts of people on the beach, frayed and
muffled by the heaving of the sea.

One has to have a tight hold on grammar to pull this off, but one has to be in control of other things too, like the breath.  As you also write novels, do you experience the sentence differently in poetry and in prose?  Of course, as a poet one has to do these things instinctively and not analytically, but I wonder if you could think back retrospectively to your use of sentences?

Yes, I never want to let a sentence go. It pains me to do it! In your poem “Two Epigrams”, you talk about the play between music and poetry when you say, “poetry is not yet music / poetry may be music, but sheer music is not poetry”. I think the long sentence moves the poem closer to music or at least away from the form of other kinds of writing. Long lines, as long as they have pauses and breaks in the rights places, can set up really hypnotic rhythms. I like the incantatory quality here. Writing a poem is often about paying heed to a voice in the head and usually such mysterious voices have very little use for full stops. Also, I’ve often got the sound of a poem before I’ve got the words to it. I have a kind of mumbling in my head – a long, drawn-out, insistent sound that is straining towards words. So all this taken together makes me favour the long line. As for grammar, I think that speech often implies a natural fluency (regardless of how well one speaks a language in a technical sense) and most people can have this natural, spontaneous relationship with language when they’re speaking but lose it when they write. I like to think of this when I’m writing – the grasp of the language that exists in spoken forms.

The difference between prose and poetry – ah! The perennial question. I don’t think one can think of this only in technical terms because a prose poem often need not be a poem at all but would work as a piece of ‘prose prose’, whereas bits of prose – taken from, say Vladimir Nabokov or Henry Green – would work as poems. So there are overlaps but this doesn’t worry me. Poetry and prose are not fortresses to be defended from each other. In a larger sense, of course, they’re different, and I think the difference lies in this – the poem’s work is different from the work prose does. The insight you’re trying to reach as a poet is a uniquely poetic one. I do believe that poetry is a form of knowledge – like science or geography – and the knowledge that it offers helps you to see the relations between different things in the world. Essentially a poem is about setting up and arguing for relations. Take ‘A Place Like Water’. It describes a moment of coming from a sea-side place into the city and feeling this absurd sadness because somehow the experience of having been in this other place has not fully carried over, has remained essentially untranslatable. Now that’s a little story that a poem and perhaps only a poem can tell – pithily and evocatively.

But looking at the form of your own poems, I notice that Universal Beach has several sonnets and you seem to enjoy doing them. Does your interest in strict forms have something to do with the fact that you studied poetry writing? Clearly you take the process of crafting a poem very seriously – there’s a rigour here that’s quite rare.

Well, my very first poems were in free verse, so I think I learnt the value of it early.  In free verse there is nothing to hold up or cushion your lines if the words themselves are not doing any work; if you are honest with yourself, you are forced to be meaningful and economical with every single word.

I still write a lot of free verse, and I try to carry and keep its lessons even when I am writing in strict, historical forms, or finagling new forms.  At the same time, from the time I was seventeen to fairly recently, I have had mentors who have made me write in metre and rhyme, taught me to take immense pleasure in those things which, for a while (say, in American poetry of the seventies and eighties) seemed almost like disappearing wonders.  What you realize quite soon is that free verse is never free, it inevitably carries the shadows and traces of the way that language has been used and poetry has been written for centuries.  If you think that freedom is cheap, that you are free to break a line randomly, then very often you just end up reproducing stale, age-old rhythms without realizing it, and you are subject to a deeper slavery.  On the other hand, if you start with a very strict form and create surprise and unpredictability within its bounds, then you experience a rare and exhilarating freedom, a freedom despite the chains around your feet.  This is a political lesson to learn also.  This is what I was taught, but also what I learnt and internalized through my own practice of reading and writing.  Further, strict, “symmetrical forms” (as Ezra Pound more accurately calls them) bring out clearly the relationship between poetry, music and mathematics.  Finally what you also realize if you look at the history of poetry is that forms are invented and continue to evolve, and once you realize that it is all about invention, you feel liberated, not trapped.

I am not a traditionalist; I am interested in the avant-garde possibilities of form.  The sonnet has been an incredibly resilient form; it first gets shaped in Italian, but then goes through transformations in English, in Bengali, in Marathi, in many languages.  So on the one hand, I feel excited by the fact that, even after all these centuries, there are still new kinds of uses and variations for the sonnet.  On the other hand, when you write in an old form you can be in dialogue with and also tap the energy and spirit of all the other people who have written in that form.  In my life, I have turned to the sonnet in times of extreme emotional stress, and found, somehow, that those earlier others have also turned to it in times of stress.  You are in free fall, at the point of losing it, and the sonnet catches you in its tight embrace, pulling you back from the brink, forcing you to make (provisional) order and sense.

Similarly, the ghazal-- another incredibly resilient trans-language form, which is now being carried in the opposite direction, into English.  Agha Shahid Ali was the master who first made it work, made it true and full of convincing feeling.  It’s hard to say exactly how he did it, but part of it was to insist on the strictness of the ghazal’s form, its rhyme scheme, but also its historical tradition where the couplets are disconnected: that there be a “ravishing disunity” to the ghazal.  This “disunity” gives the ghazal a surprisingly experimental feel in English.  That, combined with Shahid’s rich and wildly varied range of allusions made it live.  He showed the possibility for an incredibly wide range of moods, attitudes, and sources for the English ghazal.  Here are a few couplets from his well-known ghazal, ‘Even the Rain”:

[…]
"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?

[…]
After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

[…]
After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

[…]
They've found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these?
No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.

The first quoted couplet lifts lines from a poem by Adrienne Rich, about whether future readers might not find enough in contemporary poetry that would actually help them to live “in this world”; the second is Shahid’s intense, angry agnostic’s relationship to God, the third draws from Hindu, even Vedic ideas, and the fourth (the last couplet of the ghazal) is a rather murderous take-off on a line from a popular E. E. Cummings love poem!  (Shahid tended to approach his own death with a great deal of both courage and panache.)

In years to come we may begin to think of Shahid as the founder of a new tradition in English—if the current international craze for strict ghazals is any indication.  I think there are a lot more forms and formal properties that could be brought into English from other languages; one of the things I’d like to explore further is ways to imitate Tamil metres in English.  My point is that form is not just a technical surface for the poem, but goes far deeper: form is itself a kind of content.

This is my question to young Indian poets, in fact: what are you doing to innovate the historical forms in your language?  I have talked to young Tamil poets who sometimes say they are more authentic because they write in Tamil and not English, and yet, they might write in a free verse (unconsciously?) borrowed from 1970s America, and many are not even able to speak on the basics of historical Tamil metre.  This is not the case with older poets, but many younger poets, whether writing in Tamil or English or any other Indian language are profoundly estranged from the poetic traditions, whether folk or classical, of the language they are writing in.  If this trend continues, I think it may prevent Indian poetry from making it new and evolving further.  Tradition is innovation.  You look to the past for clues about the future.

So in the future, I would want to see more work done with renovating and reinventing forms and formal properties, more work to bring them across languages.  Then, I would want to see more serious translations as well.  I am reading now a rare, beautiful translation of 20th century poetry from an Indian language into English: Chidananda Das Gupta’s English versions of Jibanananda Das’s Bengali poems in the new Penguin Selected Poems.  I feel like I have been waiting for it most of my life, a deeply moving version of Bengali poetry into English.  Translation is the most noble of the arts.  We need to revere our translators more, accord them the full rights and responsibilities of poets, treat them as poets, egg them on to do even better.  Finally, I expect to see a new generation of bilingual poetry—not forced or artificial experiments, but a bilingual poetry that is natural, comes from within, and reflects the bilingual and multilingual realities of our everyday conversations.  This will happen automatically, I think—you see this kind of comfort among young poets, young people in general.  Perhaps I am being naïve, time will tell, but I think that these three projects will help to transform the scene in the years to come.  At least, this is my not-so-secret prayer for Indian poetry.  Difference will not and should not disappear, but we must be forced to formulate it in less crude terms.  Anjum, do you have any prayers or hopes for Indian poetry?

You’ve said it all, really – tradition as a source of new ideas, translation raised to the stature of art, and poets who are able to write in and across several languages. In my recent readings, the first two have come together in a volume of poems called God on the Hill, a translation from the corpus, originally in Telegu, of Annamayya who was a 15th century poet-devotee of Lord Venkatesvara of Tirupati. This is a stunning translation by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman of a stunning collection of poems. What you say about the importance of reaching back into traditional forms and idioms in order to see how they can be given a contemporary life, is reversed here, though. In his intimacy with the god, his frank descriptions of Venkatesvara’s love life and his working through the tiniest existential details of being a seeker, Annamayya sounds like someone who would be ahead of his times even if he were a contemporary poet! So “tradition” can be a misnomer, sometimes: the old is not necessarily “traditional” in the everyday sense.

Another, not so much concern, as daydream of mine, is trying to find an answer to the question of the ideal personality of the poet. What kind of work ought one to be doing on oneself in order to become a better poet? In an earlier generation, poets were connected with each other, but many like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Kolatkar are/were also highly solitary figures. I’m not saying that you need to be reclusive to be a poet, but I’m attracted to that kind of ideal – of being aloof from things in order to see them better. It goes back a long way – the idea of the poet as an outsider. I wonder if today we’re in danger of becoming ‘professional poets’. On the one hand, it’s great that there are more platforms available for us to read, more anthologies being published, more people willing to listen to us, more awards to win. But I sometimes worry that we might be getting too sucked into the ‘business’ of poetry, the public side of it, and then I feel like cautioning everyone, myself most of all. I think that poetry is a kind of loneliness. Ultimately, after you’ve taken everything in, it’s just about shutting up and listening to yourself.