Hi, I’m
Reena Prasad, cat lover, bird watcher, learning parent and poet from India (which part
of it is a question that has always stumped me). But now I have been living in Sharjah, United
Arab Emirates for 15 years and it is
still peaceful here despite me. (This is supposed to resemble a cocktail party
flirtation so this is me hanging out with the fat kitty under the kitchen
table). I think of myself as an extreme introvert and on certain great days
even my thoughts are too loud for me although I have been known to offer coffee
and biscuits to clueless visitors, startling them. Unless of course you are a
cat. Now that can change things drastically. The things I love most in life are
hanging out with myself, stalking birds, reading poetry, weekend family
lie-ins, my favourite people -- my family -- scratching cats behind their ears
and pretending to take pictures of people while secretly photographing birds on
the trees behind them. I’ve been procrastinating doing my own poetry book for
years, and I really love it. My idea of the perfect day would start with
coffee, sun rise, silence and writing, then a long walk, talking to cat friends
at the Corniche, cooking, writing, watering the three pots we have, fighting
with the kids once they are back from school, more writing, reading in bed and
falling asleep with a book while my husband swears at the accounting file on
his laptop-- Merely an idea. Such ideas do not in fact change your life though
television jingles say they do. Destiny Poets's UK gave me their
best poet award last year in the hope that I would desist from spamming their
pages, and to keep me occupied and prevent more damage to the Rejected Stuff
Facebook group I was made an Editor of The Significant Anthology, a book that
shocked me into writing more poems. (The guests are drunk. Now it is just me
and kitty and the food.)
DV. I really admire your fresh take on writing poetry. How did you ever get
started writing? And, in particular, why do you write poetry, of all things!
RP: It was in school in the 5th grade. The school magazine wanted kids to give
poems to them. I am a girl, this is my school, we live happily at home and cry
when the teacher breaks the rule ... poems of this kind. Wanting badly to change
the world, I wrote my first poem. Since then, the world has miraculously
bettered itself and I am left with free time to write more poems. Despite the
early appalling poems, I enjoyed my secret vice so much that I continued to
indulge in it, using the school desks and a geometry compass, math notebooks,
hidden diaries, and my family, relatives or the kids I played with and
befriended had no inkling that I was a poet. Most still don't know they have
been living with one all this time. All I knew was that someday if I
persevered, I would write something that I wouldn't be ashamed to show someone.
The situation hasn't changed much but Mark Z has made it a lot easier to find
similar crazy people whom you can safely bombard with poems and not lose them
forever. Poetry mainly because the smoke generated inside the brain when the
cogs turn can be transformed into clouds when put into words.
DV: Even your answers sound like some sort of spontaneous poetry! Have you ever
had any interest in doing form-based poetry, or has your proclivity always been
toward free verse?
RP: I try out different forms occasionally but they all start out as free verse
and I find it easier to adapt them to a particular form in which they might
read better. It is more of a way to experiment and try to master the form and have
fun than serious poetry. Early poems used to rhyme vigorously but I have learnt
to relax now. Haiku, Puente, Pantoum, Sestina are all forms I have written in.
Trying out the Roseate Sonnet invented by Dr A. V. Koshy has also been a fun,
learning experience. Here is a Sijo (Korean) for you:
You write of a blood-spattered heart that knows no respite from love
yet in solitude mine grows weary finding none seemly at all.
Can I be blamed for trying to steal the one you write about?
The Sijo is a tricky form that requires counting the syllables (mine has a
total of 46, 15-16-15) and which if it lacks an internal rhyme, can easily slip
into free verse. Also the lack of a title (which can often save a lot of words
in a poem) and the twist in the second half of of the second line make it quite
challenging. They were meant to be sung aloud I believe. I like my maiden mine
but would have liked a curvier twist (grinning).
DV: I think
you're right about the sijo's history, although "chanted"would be a
more apt description than "sung." They were really rap songs! Originally "sijo" just meant the music. Its identification with a
lyric form came much later. Actually. there were two streams in the sijo
tradition. The Korean yongban (the aristocrats, courtiers, intelligentsia) developed
it as a philosophical/religious vehicle, but there was a parallel development
among the kisaeng -- the professional female entertainers/courtesans
(rather like the Japanese geisha). As you can probably guess, the second strain
focused primarily on themes of love and carousing. Your example clearly
falls in the second category.. Yet I know from other work on this site that you
are capable of tackling more serious themes. Do you think the sijo form is too
short to engage adequately with "deep thoughts"?
RP: I read
up on the Sijo forms before I attempted one of my own. Something
that held me enthralled was the lyrical quality of it and the music in the ones
I read. I read quite a few lovely ones on nature and I did not set out to write
a love sijo, it just happened. Yes, I do write on serious themes but am equally
fond of less serious, more lyrical, imagery-strong themes too. No, the form
isn't too short, in fact terse and concise, it might shine in the hands of more
seasoned poets but at the first attempt, I couldn't do much more than have fun.
This one here says so much. I think you may agree:
"Rivers,
lakes, buoyant the gull is.
Unexpectedly,
spittle spat
falls on the gull’s back.
O gull, do
not be angry.
The ways of
the world are filthy."
--Sijo song
#93, Chong Ch’ol (McCann, Early Korean Literature, 53)
DV: Robert Frost said, "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the
net down" -- but he certainly wrote quite a bit of it, didn't he? I take a
rather intermediate position. I appreciate the discipline that a regular poetic
pattern imposes but dislike the forms that other poets prescribe. So I don't
write much free verse, but I also rarely attempt a sonnet etc. When I lived in Korea I
discovered the sijo and enjoyed the flexibility-within-a-formal-structure that
it allows but never wrote a successful one. Would you mind showing us what
you've done with some of those other forms you mentioned?
RP: The form poems I mentioned were just experimental trials. I am all for
trying one's hands at and learning things I don't know about. Not really sure
if they are publish worthy.
DV: OK, let's agree that you don't acknowledge these as your best, mature work.
But maybe we can use the opportunity to conduct a little writers' workshop.
Let's see what happens. Would you like to start with the puente? The first and
third stanzas have an equal number of lines, joined by a one-line bridge
("puente") which functions both as the last line of the first stanza
and the first line of the next stanza (somewhat like a chain poem, where one
poet's last line becomes the first line of another poet's continuation of the
poem).
RP: All right, here's "Remnants":
A missed letter lay in a wooden box at her gate
A jasmine vine unfurled, weeping flowers at the haste
The house was empty, the memories had left
A broken promise loitered, alone, bereft
~There remains a not-so-sweet smell of forgotten love~
A brown crush of jasmine sleeps at your feet
The few I rescued from my hair lie on the crumpled sheet
The night meanwhile has ambled in, drunk, on all fours
and has stuck its cold feet in the crevices of a broken door
DV: You could have chosen any number of lines for your first and third stanza
pairing, and you could have decided to use free verse or any kind of rhyme
scheme you wished. Yet you used a quatrain composed of two couplets. Was there
any reason for this?
RP: This puente was written as part of the NaPoWriMo we celebrated in the
Rejected Stuff group on Fb. We were supposed to write one and the bridge seemed
fascinating. When one is not familiar with a form, one slides back into a
comfort zone and for me quatrains and rhyming couplets sort of come easy, for a
lot of my earlier poems were naturally that. The flexibility in the number of
lines is actually a greater challenge, for one can just keep rambling. It is a
beautiful form and one that I would like to try sometime again.
DV: Why do you think he "greater challenge" is having
flexibility? I imagine most folks would regard that as an advantage.
RP: Yes. I am talking about the time limitation. This puente was a
surprise challenge during the NaPoWriMo exercise and to learn the form and
write a passable one is easier when they say -- ok, do it in four lines or
less. Less thought, less time to ruminate, less space to experiment and a
faster poem but that is only because of lack of time. Otherwise flexibility is
welcome.
DV: Let's move on to your pantoum, another series of quatrains but this one
recycles lines: the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the
first and third lines of the next until the last stanzas, in which the first
and third lines of the last stanza are the second and fourth of the penultimate
one, so the first line of the poem is the last line of the final stanza, and
the third line of the first stanza is the second line of the final one. Kind of
tricky, isn't it?
RP: OK, then, here's "Climbing":
The humble tree can lead to the clouds
hung for you just out of reach
It is the worker who stands tall and proud
Firm footholds will find your feet
Hung for you just out of reach
The clouds will shade your bedazzled eyes
Firm footholds will find your feet
yet stubborn thorns will rent your leaves
The clouds will shade your bedazzled eyes
as you leave the ground beneath
yet stubborn thorns will rent your leaves
but there will be fields of golden wheat
As you leave the ground beneath
lift your gaze and aim for the skies
but there will be fields of golden wheat
the kind that greets the one who tries
Lift your gaze and aim for the skies
forget the fruits of the seed you did never sow
The kind that greets the one who tries
to hang his dreams on a stout rainbow
Forget the fruits of the seed you did never sow
It is the worker who stands tall and proud
to hang his dreams on a stout rainbow
The humble tree can lead to the clouds
I am not a fan of very abstract poems. I love it when they give me ample space
and time to pause and let the words, images, sounds and their overall tone and
beauty sink in even if they are mine. 'Climbing' was written because a few
friends had posted quite musical ones that tempted me. There is an old-world
feel in a good pantoum, a relaxed, slow movement, a music in its refrains. It
is named 'climbing'so because apart from the content, when I read it aloud (as
I do most poems), it turns into a sort of chant slowly ascending to a
crescendo-- don't know if I appear to make sense but to me it does seem that
way and the last line sort of completes the sloshing movement being the same as the
first.
DV: A lot of
standard English prosody had its origins in France or Italy, but the
pantoum has Malay roots. Do you think your Asian background has made you
especially receptive to that form?
RP: I don't
think so. English itself isn't our native language but I am fully aware
that it is the only language in which I can express myself to some degree of
satisfaction. The pantoum is attractive because it is meant to be a highly
allusive form and one that lends itself to oral expression and not particularly
because of its origin or mine.
DV: The
repetitive verbal effect of a pantoum is very much like that of a villanelle.
How did you set about the composition? Did you write the first stanza and
then use it to riff on the second stanza and then repeat that process from the
second to the third? Did you plan a series of rhymes that you could deploy like
lines of battalions? I'm just curious about the compositional mechanics of the
thing.
RP: It was fun. I wrote the first stanza as you said trying to keep the end
words simple. Then I made the rest of the stanzas blank, just filling in the
repetitions and wrote the last line of the poem (same as the first). Then
filled in the 2nd stanza and added the repetitions to the third and then filled
them up the same way. By the second stanza, a sort of storyline had emerged and
then it was easy to round it up .
DV: A lot of your poems seem to have a back story to them, the details of which
we readers are unfamiliar but which nevertheless we can intuit. The poem is
like the visible tip of an iceberg, with the greater part of it below the
surface. Is that part of your authorial strategy?
RP:I would not term it as a strategy. It just happens to be the way I
write. I start from the thing that is closest to me at a particular point of
time or a thought that has been there in my mind for some time and try to
analyse it by writing down and trying to pin point what it is that causes it
to linger. As a result a poem or several poems come to be. I am an Indian
citizen. My parents are from South India, Kerala, but
I was born and brought up in Odisha (East India) but for
fifteen years I am a non-resident Indian living in the United
Arab Emirates. The cultural diversity,stark
differences in the lifestyle, topography, language, climate and the extreme
contrasts among all these places, all of which I call 'home,' results in such
'tip of the iceberg' poems. On bad days I call it identity issues, on good
days, it is like having a platter to choose from. Most of the time, I
guess it is just trying to capture something of my Indian childhood,
particularly in Odisha and Kerala, which I cannot express otherwise, not having
the requisite vernacular fluency in the different tongues of these places. Here
in the UAE desert, a melting pot of world cultures and where splendour and poverty
live as neighbours, I see India locked up inside the hundreds of flats in the
innumerable sky scrapers, the moment a door is opened you get a whiff of it. It
is all here, hidden under the sameness of wealth, cars and drab lives. Like
people collect souvenirs or show pieces to remind them of home and lug it all
over the world wherever they go, I collect moments, people, emotions and smells
in my poems.
DV: Are there any English, Indian, Arab (or other) poets that have shaped your
own poetic vision? (Not just as "great poets" but as actual models
for you to emulate or to consciously avoid copying at all costs?)
RP: I used to read a lot of Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare,
Rabindranath Tagore, the Bronte sisters, Auden, Robert Browning and a great
deal of translated works of poets who write in Malayalam and no doubt it has
influenced my poetry but actual models have been the poets I met after boarding
the FB craft. Cannot name them all but my writing has undergone a sea change
thanks to Dr. A. V Koshy, Prathap Kamath, Dr. Mary Annie, Dr. Madhumita Ghosh,
Rukhaya MK, Zeenath Ibrahim, Ra Sh, Iulia Gerghei, Santosh Bakaya and many more.
I am mentioning them because I have made a conscious effort to spruce my
writing and strike out some conservative elements especially Romantic
influences after reading them. Taking the best of their weapons and striking at
my poems has helped me. All of them are fantastic poets with extremely
different styles of writing. Naming is always problematic and often inadequate
like this answer.
DV:
Artistically, what do you have against the Romantics?
RP: Nothing against them at all. On the contrary, I am an ardent fan
with an overwhelming conviction that it is the best kind of poetry to read and
relish. Neruda, Ben Johnson, John Keats, Elizabeth Browning and Co. knew what
they were doing But at the moment, my poetry is in an uncertain terrain, I am
trying to work on avoiding sounding like a sloppy version of the old Romantics
because quite a few of my older poems when read aloud are absolutely
mortifying. I want to talk to myself rationally about things that matter
to me without consciously or unconsciously coating them with metaphors or
beauty and not cringe while hearing myself speak. That is all.
DV: Do you have any idea what direction your poetry is taking, or is going to
take?
RP: It is
spontaneous. Mostly I have only a faint idea where the next poem is coming
from, it is like doodling for a bit with inane words and basically hanging
around till a circuit completes in my brain and then the poem just starts
pouring. I know I want to write poems narrative/non-narrative that will delight
and act as a small self-help manual for my kids or anyone reading them later on
but somehow it is important to me that when they go into a book, they must make
sense and not leave the reader frustrated. Some contemporary poems are
all images and no heart, difficult to follow and resistant to any form of
understanding other than language play. Right now the goal is to improve the
way I use language and coaxing it to speak ardently for me while keeping intact
the wilderness that is so essential to poetry.
DV: A little
earlier you said that English is the only language you can write in
satisfactorily. When I sold encyclopedias door to door in Montreal I asked one
of my customers why he wanted to buy an English (rather than a French)
encyclopedia, and he told me English was more precise. And one of my students
in Seoul said she had a different
personality in English than she did in Korean. So I ask you: How do you explain
your own affinity to English over your native language?
RP: English
is still the only language I read books in. Growing up in a different part of
India, with a language, Odiya, that was not my mother tongue (which is
Malayalam) and growing up in an industrial township where every other kid spoke
a different language, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada - you name it, I had friends
speaking all of these. And we communicated primarily in Hindi with each other.
But once home with books, English was the only language my eyes would read in.
Though I retain a smattering of most of the other languages and can speak in
Malayam and Hindi, there was no real choice to be made when poetry found me.
DV: It's been a real pleasure talking to you and picking your poetic brain. Do
you have any thoughts you'd like to close with?
RP: It is
fun in a bizarre way to be living with people who don't know how it feels to
belong to poetry country. A number of poems have taken birth from that angst I
feel. Some of my kind friends call me a natural since I have not studied poetry
formally but it happened to me because I read up entire libraries when small.
When I read, I want to write. That is how it works for me. It is me in
your debt for allowing me to ramble on and on and for publishing my poems in
your excellent blog. If you permit, I would like to mention my first editorial
venture. The Significant Anthology published by Morph Books is a book I have
co-edited with Dr. Koshy A. V and Michele Baron and it is a mixed anthology
that features 176 poets and writers from 29 countries and is a landmark in my
writing career with the rawness in its poetry, the intensity of its short
stories, drama, a long poem (Dr. Santosh Bakaya's Oh hark!, a rhyming epic poem
running into a 100 +? pages). Editing this mammoth book was a humbling
experience and taught me a lot about what makes a poem, a piece or a book
resonate with readers.
--Julia Rosenkrantz 
