AVK:
I need to tell you that I hate everything about the process of becoming a poet
like submissions, deadlines, guidelines and all the rest of it. Ergo: I guess I
am not a poet. What I am is someone who lives and then writes. Like going for a
walk and seeing flowers, then realizing that you think of them partly in
Malayalam and partly in English and wondering how to put it across in English
when it is essentially something that others have probably written better about
in Malayalam and wrestling with the event, the description, the bilingualism -
and finally coming up with or coming out with something I feel good enough
about to put it out in public for others to read and feeling happy if it
clicks. Guess that's my bio. Who needs to be a "poet" when you can
make love to a woman and then write a poem on it that makes women swoon or
write of an actual death in the family and a reader says that made me cry, or
of something funny and another says it made me laugh - there you have already
wrestled with form and architectonics, don't you think? My kind-of-a-primer on
poetry called Art of Poetry was written on facebook as notes using the same
slapdash method of living writing and it became quite a hit. It's all
"writing" at the end of the day and always circles around poetry.
Everything turns in my hands to poetry. To close - my themes are life, death,
love and and others like family, autism - my son having it - and anything else
but though it encompasses everything, and is restlessly inventive, I never
cease exploring, discovering, and making as that is all it is about for me -
poetry is creating and a constant search that I hope never ends and in the
process if I make something that lasts forever I will be grateful to the
Mystery of Life for that extra bonus. Here's one to start you off with -
on the famed nightingale - in which you can note this curious discrepancy
between two languages.
Nightingale, let me paint you
the
song
its notes a deeper black against the jungle dark
that makes my heart catch
Then
there will be you, night singer
carved in stone, too
Do
not forget
me
when you become words
and fly away
Nightingale
there must be graphic novels written on you
and animation
but my longing is to turn you into a human being
whom I can talk to
Your
sister the skylark is heard, not seen
like you
but of the day
Nightingale, it is your name in my mother tongue
- and hers -
that drips like honey from my fingers
turns the key in the lock
opens the door of my heart
Night-singer
and sky-singer
and three or four more singers
who became famous, singing of you
Nightingale, when the thorn
enters your breasts and drips blood
remember I will be thinking of you
weeping red tears
as if the worms have entered my blood
and are leaving their tracks there, true!
Nightingale
as the night is caught in a gale
if you came to me in human form as a woman would I not call you Gail?
Enough, dissolve now
as these words
porous and always flowing from my hand's tips
swirl in one more memory of searching
for something which I try to capture
beyond capture
a mood, a thought, a feeling, an emotion!
Beyond me and you!
Nightingale
do not bless me or blame me, yet to die
as I need company here
before the fires are banked in my veins thinking of you
and, arrives -
the Age of Ice.
DV:
Very nice, Koshy. What a wonderful way to begin this interview! How did you
ever decide to become a poet?
AVK:
It probably has to do with me writing two poems and getting a prize for
one when I was very small and having parents who loved poetry and a brother who
writes it, along with a sister who does too. There were books in my home while
growing up which, having nothing else to do, I read that were beyond me
actually but I still understood something or the other, and some of them were
anthologies of verse belonging to my mother who had beautiful handwriting. She
laid a kind of foundation in taste for me. Told me of poets who
"mattered" in England and America and
also those writing in English in India who
had made a name for themselves. The poets? William Wordsworth first and
foremost ("ethereal minstrel, pilgrim of the sky/bird thou never
wert?"), and Rabindranath Tagore ("Where the mind is held
high" etc). And William Shakespeare (Hamlet's monologue,
"to be or not to be," what else?) and Isaiah ("And His
Name shall be called" etc). I thrilled to recitals or renditions of
Tagore. I returned to verse briefly after facing a death in the family at age
ten, when my younger sister died. After that I took literature in my
pre-degree classes and met a teacher who was also my eldest brother's mentor
and guru, an unconventional Tamil Brahmin scholar, critic and poet called
Nakulan who was widely read and who introduced me to Hinduism, modernism and
post-modernism. In one of his classes, we learned the "Ode to A
Nightingale" by John Keats while he asked us questions in a very Socratic
manner on the poem, and something suddenly exploded within me and I knew
that the two things I wanted to do in my life were to be a poet and to
know as much as I could about poetry, as much as it was possible for
one man. That was the decision-making time, I guess. However, I did not
immediately start writing poems, but I read poetry like insane. Robert
Frost and Emily Dickinson impressed me a lot, but at the same time I
was also devouring the Master's degree literature syllabus my second brother
was doing. In terms of reading, I also read a lot of Europeans at this time
like Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire and
Arthur Rimbaud, as my eldest brother was reading them. Andre Gide was
another writer who impressed me with his simplicity and lyricism, like
Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. I took to writing poetry only when in
love. The first real orgasmic rush of writing came only when I was doing my
post-graduation in English Literature and was madly in love, but what I wrote
was not love poems - it was an attempt at great literature to impress my lady
love. This continued till she went off, sensibly, and I burned some seven years
of writing at one shot, to start all over again with nothing. I don't know if I
then burned my best or worst work, yet. Nothing is left of it, except some ten
poems in a collection, experimental, brief, minimalist poems I made into a book
called FIGS, of which only one makes sense to me as a good one now, though
maybe three or four others pass muster. By that time I was doing research
and was on the Samuel Beckett bandwagon, my own choice.
DV:
That's quite an eclectic list! You mention Wordsworth. One of my close
poet-mates, Jeremy Toombs, is also an admirer, but I've never understood what
all the excitement is about. What have I missed about Wordsworth? Why was
he "first and foremost" for you?
AVK: Well,
initially just that chronologically he was the first. I remember my mother
making me read his take on the skylark, as I already said. It was an electric
jolt, the use of a word like ethereal with pilgrim and minstrel and the
use of rhyme - wert, heart, art! But nowadays it is different, I really freak
out on him. His poem "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "Solitary
Reaper," his sonnet on London,
lines written above Tintern Abbey, sections of the Prelude. I think it is
because I grew up in a very scenic countryside and he gave me a way to
understand that one could actually write poetry about such simple things and
their beauty and make it work. Yes, a rather humdrum view of mine I know,
but he also has this way of using form whereby although he says it is written
for the common man it hides actually much learning in being able to bridle
things like metre and stanza and figures of speech and imagery and music to get
the kind of or try to get the kind of simplicity he wanted. He makes the
homespun in its littleness luminous. "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
has so many nuances, of high contrasted to low, of religious thought, of sex,
of psychology, of armies that do not clash, of carnival, of singular and plural
- it is amazing. That poem remains a hot favourite!
DV: Maybe I should try old
Billy once again! What about more contemporary poets? Do any of them ring your
bell?
AVK: I
have been reading a lot of contemporary poets recently who mainly come from India and
write in English. They sure know how to write and I am amused at the so-called
establishment for not knowing of them or picking up on them. Reena Prasad, you
already know. There are many more like that. But if you mean contemporary
famous poets I have to mention Geoffrey Hill. This is a far cry, I know, from
my liking for Wordsworth and Frost. But he is a challenging read. The problem
with my love for poetry is it is very vast. Today from my memories on facebook,
for instance, I dug out posts of poems by Pablo Neruda, Jorge Guillen,
Sextus Propertius, St John of
the Cross, Roy Campbell...Boris Pasternak! Joseph Brodsky! It's crazy! Since
you name 'Billy', I like Billy Collins. How it all feeds off into my writing is
by giving it range. I guess. Reading so
much has helped me to be very wide in topics I cover etc.
DV:
If someone were to label you in terms of "topic" (i.e., as a
"love poet" or a "pastoral poet," for example), what do you
think would be the most representative "box" for you to be put
into?
AVK:
Having written so many kinds of poems I do not classify myself but people tell
me my love poems are my best ones, so yes, a love poet it would be. This is
because it inspires me the most and sears me literally into poetry. I like that
inspired feeling and its results. It never palls, especially when laced with
sex, romance, erotica and the eternal complexity of the psychological
intimacies and intricacies of man-woman relationships.
DV:
What about "style"? Are you a postmodernist, a minimalist, a
Romantic?
AVK: I'm all that but probably also a Modernist with High
Modernist pretensions. Meaning I was very heavily into poets like Ezra Pound so
I use a lot of references, allusions, intertextuality, quotes, fragments etc.
Post-Poundian with a vengeance. There's another thing, which is I often write
like the Beats. I like to attempt huge poems that ramble on and are very wordy,
explanatory and descriptive and are not considered by those who do not like
them as poetry... Romantic, yes, minimalist, yes, in attempting short poetry
and from Beckett, post-modernist, more rarely but inevitably yes - finally,
love poet!
DV: Certainly in English, and I suspect in all other languages as well, poets
deal with love more than with any other subject. Second place, whatever it is,
is not even close! Why do you think that is so? After all, our other emotions
can also be as overpowering and all-consuming. Is it because being in love is a
common neurosis and we don't have to try to hide it? Is it because, unlike our
other powerful feelings, it actually takes us out of ourselves and gives us a
new identity for a time?
AVK: Yes, love is not only an aphrodisiac but a drug.
Drugs do what mystical or spiritual experiences do, lift one out of
oneself, melt the ego - whatever terms we use, give us temporary enlightenment.
It is like a designer drug or a cocktail drug - with its combination of sex and
romance, sensuality and sensoriality (is that an acceptable word?) , and potent
mix of emotions like grief, happiness, hurt, pain, suffering, ecstasy all mixed
in with it. It gives one an adrenaline rush and releases endorphins. It gives
rise in the case of poets like me to the best of poetry. It is really the key
to poetry of a very high quality. I have read Federico Garcia Lorca and
Octavio Paz and both are superb poets but people talk most of Neruda. Why?
Because of the love factor. Paz is more intellectual and Lorca more about
passion. To give just one example. The world changes but love remains a
constant. A poem of Mahmoud Darwish's the name of which I forget now that
speaks of a Palestinian man loving an Israelite girl says it all. Children and
their innocence, art like music, family bonds and love remain among the last
few refuges of mankind we still consider sacrosanct enough that will help us to
bond together in the face of increasing divides and poetry that celebrates
these themes finds universal appreciation as do poems on women getting
empowered. I am sure you know what I mean. However, the poetry of empowerment
often seems escapist, a kind of way of circumventing activism through words as
if words alone are enough. But that of love is not as it often springs from not
just emotion but experience. What I mean is to talk of the evils of war will
not necessarily bring peace but to talk of love always strikes a chord.
DV: I
think I know what you mean. Recently, Maya Angelou was an incredibly strong,
confident omnipresence in the American social, political, and cultural worlds.
She even read at Bill Clinton's first inauguration. In "Phenomenal
Woman," she both romanticized her femininity ("It's in the arch of my
back, / The sun of my smile, / The ride of my breasts, / The grace of my style.
/ I'm a woman") and humanized it ("It's in the click of my heels, /
The bend of my hair, / The palm of my hand, / The need of my care"). I see
the same kind of duality in the poem you opened this interview with, a kind of
simultaneous existence of incompatibilities, on a multitude of fronts. I wonder
if you can sort of lead us through the process of its creation. Was this
primarily a mystical experience, in which the whole poem appeared all at once,
or more of a series of planned engagements? St.
John of the Cross or Napoleon?
AVK:
That poem was written in one flow and harks back to Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley
and Wordsworth but also to Malayalam where the words for the two birds it
eulogizes are night-singer and sky-singer and to wordplay on gale and Gail etc.
It came in one shot and apart from correcting typos it has not been tampered
with, so inspired. Yes, it deals with dualities of night and day, happiness and
pain, as that is the reality of life. I eat beef and someone else does not and
wants me also not to. I like two people and they don't like each other but both
like me. Life is full of these complexities that are dual but also a door to
something multiple and to sort them out is difficult. I talk to women but when my
woman talks to other men, I feel jealous. Simple but deep things. I get some of
it reflected in the poem somehow, these battles in one's mind in such poems
that are a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions but not exactly therefore
freely structured. They are the result of always dwelling on poetry and living
in it and very happy occurrences. So you are right, it is very much "a
kind of simultaneous existence of incompatibilities, on a multitude of
fronts" and oxymoronic. Romantic and morantic. This makes poetry addictive
for writer and reader, this shifting morass of meanings and layers. So yes,
finally St John of
the Cross and not Napolean. A Dark Night of the Soul rather than an "able
was I ere I saw Elba"
type of poem. The poem you quoted from Maya Angelou is very familiar to me and
I want to point out that it matters as it is activism that brought about some
change and not escapism in the sense of a poem that touts women's empowerment
but does not manage to bring it about. In connection with this I want to add
that I try to think a bit like a new T. S. Eliot in the present poetry writing
in India in
English scenario, especially the poetry one, meaning to bring about change.
Something of that is seen in your blog's activities too which pleases me
immensely, in daring to move it a notch higher or elsewhere beyond what people
expect.
DV: The blog started because I was bored in retirement and I wanted to preserve
some of my own work before it all got misplaced or destroyed (or before I did).
But I also wanted to preside over a kind of ethereal open mic, so I groveled
before a number of poet friends and pleaded with them to contribute something.
Some still haven't, but others responded positively. After a few months, and a
lot of blind recruitment, I started to get submissions from strangers, and they
keep coming in. So far I've been amazed how much really fine, really
interesting work I keep getting, and I hope that it continues. And, in the
process, I've also made some new friends. But, really, almost all of the credit
goes to people, like yourself, who are willing to trust their
"children" to someone like me. Getting back to our discussion, do you
have any authorial rituals? Do you keep notebooks? A regular, business-like
schedule?
AVK:
Talking of rituals reminds me of this book by C.P. Snow whose novels used to
bore the hell out of me. And something I read by Walter Benjamin
yesterday, about which more later. But Snow wrote two really great books, one
on the Realists, and another on scientists. He detailed two things which stuck
in my mind. One was about Feodor Doestoevsky who used to dictate to his wife
Anna to write down his great novels but she had to be in the buff while doing
it. It insprired him. Dora Maar says the same about Pablo Picasso. The second
one was about Benito Perez Galdos - he used to visit a colony of 'whores' every
evening and continued this habit even while he was old and blind. It was a
ritual that inspired him. A lot of authors have used sex as an authorial
ritual! I'm no exception, but for the past seven years my authorial ritual has
been the scariest one, which is to type directly into fb posts and not save
anything practically that I write! This self-destructiveness keeps me going
like never before - being both an intense octane fuelled writer and a
workaholic who writes anything from one to innumerable poems a day but directly
into my fb posts so I have to keep on churning them out without losing quality
so that something may somehow survive. To put it in a nutshell - write every
day and every minute if possible so something remains despite your
self-destructive streak! Now to come to Benjamin: ‘The Writer’s Technique in
Thirteen Theses’:
1. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be
lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that
will not prejudice the next.
2. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it
while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will
slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to
communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
3. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a
background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by
an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the
perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the
former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most
wayward sounds.
4. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers,
pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is
indispensable.
5. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the
authorities keep their register of aliens.
6. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with
magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more
maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought,
but writing commands it.
7. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour
requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting)
or at the end of the work.
8. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already
written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
9. Nulla dies sine linea [‘No day without a line’] — but there may well be
weeks.
10. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to
broad daylight.
11. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not
find the necessary courage there.
12. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy
is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills
inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
13. The work is the death mask of its conception.
As you can see times have changed so I have done away
with the idea of writing materials altogether - am a purely online writer, but
keeping myself tied to an abundance of net connection, electricity, tab,
laptop, pc, mobile phone handy does help, and keeping my fb wall as a place to
jot down every thought helps me. I agree with Benjamin but not to "Keep
your pen aloof." I have a bad handwriting and do not make hard copies, the
story behind the bad handwriting being I was forced to shift from left to
right. Beckett had a pretty unreadable hand, according to me, and he needed his
lover Suzanne Dumesnil to help him decipher it, so maybe it is alright
Maybe it explains his increasing minimalism. I never had a line-less day.
The penultimate two points in Benjamin's thirteen theses applies to him, not
me. I love his last line. I have not done the tenth one so have suffered. All
in all it is quite sound, his ideas, don't you think?
DV: Obviously, whatever works works well. For you, and
Walter also. But I've never developed any regular routines, though I've tried
many. Notebooks, time schedules, certain materials or locations. None of it
ever made much difference, so I abandoned them all. I write when I am compelled
to write from the inside, and then it doesn't matter what the conditions are. I
just go until it is "finished" or dead. On the other hand, practical
writing, in my professional duties or whatever, has always been easy for me,
making more "elevated" writing more difficult. Because I'm more
conscious of its shortcomings, I suppose. But your approach baffles me. Why
don't you save your work before you post it on Facebook? I suppose your answer
would echo Christo's: "Do you know that I don't have any artworks that
exist? They all go away when they're finished. Only the preparatory drawings,
and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think
it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things
that will remain." Are you courageous, then? Is poetry's only purpose the
creation of new ways of viewing familiar, mundane situations? Should the
poet be concerned only with the process of creation itself, as a
selfish/self-fulfilling exercise of joining beauty and intellect, or does the
poet also have some responsibility to "the public" or to
"posterity"?
AVK:
I'm very courageous, yes, and one has to be to try this kind of method and
influenced also by Beckett in his Three Dialogues to face the predicament of
the post-modernist which is the inability to feel that anything I write is
necessarily a final draft though obviously there has to be a 'first' draft, so
like Christo I agree with the words preparatory and drafts, and also with the
idea that it is more difficult - and imperative now - to create works
that are gone from your mind the next minute and then start again than to try
to create enduring works. However, it is not just a vengeful middle finger
against society that acknowledges (not) my rebellion, or a mere fascination with
the process of creation itself or selfishness or a self fulfilling exercise of
joining beauty and intellect as I also do get published and write criticism and
edit and anthologize and contribute, having finally even brought out my own
collection of poems called Allusions to Simplicity, so I do enter both
sides of the fence, so to speak. The problem is that literature now is an
industry and often canned and manufactured by aggression and there I am
dysfunctional as people push themselves forwards or their candidates, so to
speak, based on religion or race or region or culture or language or sexuality
or cause or politics and it gets bewildering, irritating and jarring for
someone like me who is rather out of sync with how to make it in that milieu.
The age of poetry being recognized for its excellence alone seems past, and
having collected both rejection and acceptance, bouquets and brickbats, I have
come to the conclusion that being prolific seems a temporary solution, so I
have brought out any number of books, thirteen in a manner of speaking, in
fact. The issue here is when one does that the quality varies in consistency
and the editing is not up to the mark sometimes and the speed makes for this
unevenness but still some of it is of such high quality that I feel it has to
leave an impact on readers sooner or later bringing change and though it is
slow, the progress, I feel it is happening, Over the years I am gathering a
small but steady following of readers, despite belonging to no school and only
fostering movements. What is really difficult is holding on in the absence of a
social group I can say I belong to, to back me, rather than holding on in the
absence of huge recognition in the poetry world. To return to the idea of
being prolific, it was borne out recently in a study where two groups were
asked to make, one copiously and another a masterpiece each, of clay sculptures
and one was to be graded on weight and the other on mastery but the group that
churned out more pieces produced the better ones finally! They learned on the
job, so to speak. This requires a lot of courage as people are always
watching and saying not good enough yet but over time they become overwhelmed
as you keep going and are silenced not so much by the quantity but the quality.
This interview itself is beginning to take on a kind of classicist curve that
rivals Paris Review interviews, and it is because of its length and approach.
DV: Most people don't realize
that the vast majority of Renaissance paintings were done on the factory model.
The celebrity brand artist had a bunch of apprentices who did most of the work,
while he perhaps only advised (or did nothing) or maybe sketched out the
overall vision and left them to fill in the "details" or maybe edited
out their mistakes at the end and then signed his name. That's why they were so
damn prolific! And this kind of collaboration is endemic in the theater, which
encompasses so many different artistic modes (acting, directing, writing,
cinematography, scenery, costumery, makeup, music, choreography....). But
writing, and especially writing poetry, still seems like a mostly private
affair, and people do it even if they don't have (or seek) a wider audience.
There are a lot more Emily Dickinsons than Oscar Wildes in that respect. (Emily,
please visit my site! You, too, Oscar, though you probably have bigger fish to
fry!) In addition to your reviewing and editing, what else do you do in an
extra-authorial mode? Do you ever read your work in public?
AVK: It's interesting you
should say that, as editing does take on that collaborative aspect where I work
with younger editors and only oversee like a grandmaster and my name appears
too, so a lot of being prolific also has to do with coming into that position
of eminence as the main editor in an editorial team, but poetry as a group
venture hardly works unless one can cut off from what the other person writes
totally in a poem that has, say, many authors - however, poetry too is a group
venture, in the sense that you do give it to someone trusted to read and take
suggestions and what readers and publishers and editors say matters, as do
printers and designers if one goes into the whole putting it up in public
process and studies it analytically. However, I guess they don't matter as
much as in theatre or music or sculpture or painting or any other plastic fine
art, this aspect of collaboration. I do read my poems out, rarely, but prefer
others do it as I feel reading a poem is also an art that probably others more
trained in it can do better with my guidance. The way Beckett used to guide
Billlie Whitelaw. I play the guitar and sing so that is extra authorial, and I
run a non profit organization and teach English language and literature in a
univeristy in Jazan, Saudi
Arabia. Teaching feeds a lot into
my creativity and writing work, as does reading. Everything else. Travel. Am
sure Dickinson and Wilde read your blog from heaven; it is getting earthly
denizens to read it that is difficult, probably.
DV: Wilde would probably be
baffled (and maybe outraged) if he somehow found himself in Heaven! As for
collaborative poetry, the Japanese mastered the art of linked haiku among two
or more poets. Basically, the last line becomes the first line of the next
poet's haiku, and so on. But it's difficult to pull off, as you suggest.
(Jeremy Toombs and Keith Francese and I tried it once, with very mixed results.
Maybe we shouldn't have invited Jim Beam to join us.) But you raise an
interesting point, about teaching feeding into creativity. Nowadays, at least
in the US,
most writers (certainly of fiction and poetry) make their living as professors.
In what way do your classes affect your writing?
AVK:
I used to teach creative writing earlier, but nowadays it is all mainstream,
meaning poetry, criticism, fiction, drama etc. When I used to teach creative
writing it was exciting as I used to lead by example in the sense any exercise
I gave to my students I also used to do and I would ask them to read that too
and criticize. Have made them write manifestos, constitutions and what not. I
used to bring the kind of raw energy that John Keating does in Dead Poets'
Society (or try to) in my classes. This was before I saw the film,
interestingly enough. My students found my creative writing classes an unforgettable
experience as they had not come across that kind of bridled and unbridled
explosive outlet to writing they found in them. It fed into my writing a lot in
that all that creativity helped me to improve my own writing more than theirs.
A teacher learns most in a class. Now that I teach literature proper, so to
speak, it still feeds in as that past helps me keep writing creatively and this
present helps me edit, write criticism analytically etc. Both seem to be like
the two wings of a bird and keep one flying, teaching creativity and teaching
analysis, if one is also a creative writer. The problem with this is taking on
novels and drama is difficult to do, as a result, at least for me, due to time
crunch factors. Right now I have scripts for checking and rechecking sitting in
my room and assignments and question papers to make but I also have to be
creative. So short pieces become the norm. That suits today's fast pace of life
anyway. Your experiment at form and collaboration is interesting but I work
totally alone now. About Wilde being in Heaven, well, they say "truth is
stranger than fiction." I'm amazed at your receptivity in asking the
questions showing a kind of sensitivity that I who have been interviewed
several times before really find appreciable because you have really drawn me
out to talk seriously and in depth about writing after a long time whereas I
usually clam up as people talk more and listen less and feel they know more and
so do not let the other person have an equal say. So let me ramble on for a
little while more, just to add that while poetry is my ejaculation, analysis is
my equivalent of making a woman have an orgasm - reading a really well written
analysis or criticism or critical theory such as is found in Jaques Lacan's
analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's Purloined Letter or what Soren Kierkegaard does
in Attack Upon Christendom and trying to do the same, makes my life really
light up. That is a heaven I feel and when I'm there would like to think
whoever I am studying is there with me in it and is helping me like a familiar
friendly compound ghost, to misquote Eliot. When I worked on Beckett and wrote
the last chapter of my book on him I felt he, though dead. was there with me
looking on benevolently, and that feeling, though completely irrational, helped
me to complete the best part of my thesis which later became the book Samuel
Beckett's English Poems: Transcending the Roots of Resistance in the English
Language. Recently I came across a story by Mahasweta Devi that fascinated me
in translation which would be worth studying but I stopped short or fell short
as I have to keep my bread and butter job, teaching, going. To end, one cannot
be a full-time writer, no one buys poetry or criticism much - at least my kind
of writer - but one can be a fully immersed in the world of writing despite
having to work to keep family and self in place and together. And Wilde would
approve of this, I understand! Writers speak of madness, dying, suicide, and
depression often - to survive these states and not to inject it into others,
but they survive too and that is probably the real message - that we are not
defeated, though we can be destroyed, to misquote Hemingway, either by fate or
destiny or history or others or ourselves in all our glorious, human unpredictability.
DV: There's a whole lotta misquotin' goin' on! But at least it's Eliot and
Hemingway, who are usually hard to better. In almost every response you have
something interesting to say about Beckett. I realize that you devoted a big
chunk of your academic life to him, but in what way does he still influence
your creative output? Are you a Neo-Beckettian, still waiting for Go-Dot?
AVK:
Yes, a very big chunk, six years to be precise. And he has left an indelible
mark on me as a man, writer and, well poet, critic, what not....When I began my
burst of non stop-poetry writing around seven years back, something like Bob
Dylan who is on a never-ending tour, at first I used to write like him dropping
punctuations, and to change it a bit I dropped capitals and became more like
Cummings but his real influence is deeper, it comes from his examples in
productivity, and hitting a golden period, his minimalism and his
existentialism. I think these have remained with me more than anything else,
that slender sliver of ontology whereby he uses the word "on" for
instance to suggest that there is hope, maybe. Maria Jolas said of him that
like James Joyce he was Christ haunted and this is true in that he actually,
unlike what people think, never lets the dark overtake him fully. This lesson
about content and his painstaking eye for perfection in matters regarding form
have remained with me as has his uncompromising search to find his own voice
and style and it drives me on ruthlessly to try to do the same things in my own
art, have my own voice and style, be as perfectionist in form and find that
golden streak in terms of content. It makes me sweat over my art relentlessly
whether I get anywhere near to being as great a writer or not and also helps me
as it did him to ward of as I said earlier thoughts of madness, despair,
suicide, dying etc., in those odd moments when you try to wonder what the hell
you are doing with your life and how it all makes sense. His mastery of
language is a delight and his sense of humour is too and I could read him again
at any time and still not get bored, ever. He also wrote some beautiful poems.
His poems come back to me, to mind, in mine, when least expected. Here is an
example. In a poem called Cascando he wrote:
"love
love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words"
and in a recent poem I wrote called Shaman it suddenly came back to me thus:
The
living mortar pestles
The Milky Way
Entering, head first, entirely, its entirety
Through the dense underhung
Tangled black
Worming, being pushed in, squirming...
The engorged passage
Makes curds and whey
Some of my poems are purely Beckettian and hopefully as
powerful, I owe him that and more. He haunts me with his writing and I cannot
but be post-Beckettian - a major influence along with Bob Dylan and oh, so many
others already named in this interview and yet to be named, probably -
including filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov, not to
mention Ingmar Bergman. The common denominator being the passion for
excellence. In their making.
DV: Hmmm. I see your favorite authorial ritual at work here in
"Shaman." How do you explain that title?
AVK: I saw a video, a documentary of a witch doctor in Africa, in the Amazon,
who to make a woman fertile puts a snake into her vagina, after using it to
make it make kind of ritualistic love to her, a huge baby python, to be
precise, and it gave me this metaphor for writing as a kind of making fertile
process as well as love, sex, life etc. To defamiliarize it slightly I called
it Shaman. It reads a bit like danse macabre or grand guignol but the metaphors
make it work, or so I feel. I put it on my blog and elsewhere and it got more
than a hundred reads. Yes, very much based on the authorial ritual, I agree. I
have been influenced by Jim Morrison and he makes much of the shamanic
tradition and his lyrics for The End make use of this kind of grotesquerie
too.
DV: Just from the two examples you've shared with us here, it's obvious (to me)
why you should abandon your quixotic quest to produce ephemeral FB-only poetry.
These are strong works that deserve to be available to everyone. But, of
course, artist should be the final arbiters of what happens to their creations.
The rest of us have the right of input but not of decision. But I think it's a
shame that a lot of your work is probably unavailable. We've covered a lot of
ground, and you've given us all a lot to mull over. So, I want to thank you for
your time and intellect. You've been a real stimulant!
AVK: Thanks for honouring me by putting my poems in your award winning blog and
also by interviewing me!
[Koshy
has co-edited The Significant Anthology with Reena Prasad and Michele Baron
besides co-writing a book with Dr Bina Biswas called Wake Up, India: Essays for
Our Times, along with the published books he mentions in the interview like Art
of Poetry, Samuel Beckett's English Poetry: Transcending the Roots of
Resistance in Language and his collection of poems Allusions to
Simplicity. He has also co-edited Umbilical Chords with Dr. Santosh Bakaya and
two others and a book on Mahesh Dattani's Plays.]
