November-January Issue- An Interview and Poems
An interview with Abha Iyengar:
The Milestone: How was your first step in creative writing? Was it a poem or fiction? Which is your first poem? Where was it published?
Poet: This sounds cliched but I began to write as a teenager. My first poem was perhaps ‘A Wilted Rose’, a poem I had forgotten but was recently reminded of it by an old friend! Marriage and domestic life kicked in and I forgot writing. In the 1990s, I was introduced to the term ‘haiku’ by a friend, who pointed out a competition in a magazine. I sent in three ‘haikus’ and won two beautiful Japanese paper fans as a prize. Right around that time, my poems were published in ‘Femina’, selected by none other than the famous Kamala Das, who was the poetry editor. I continued writing poems after this, but did not attempt at getting them published. It was in September 2001 that my serious tryst with writing began.The first piece that I wrote, which immediately found a placing in an anthology in the U.S., was a work of creative non-fiction. I have not stopped writing since then. I have the internet and foreign publishers to thank for this continuity, for my work kept getting published outside with ease.
The Milestone: How do imageries spread in your poems?
Poet: As a young girl, I read Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock’ and lines like‘The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes’, have stayed with me. I think imagery is what brings a poem to life. Also, I am an extremely visual person, storied unfold themselves as images in my mind before I write them down. If you take my poem, ‘She’, with which my poetry collection,‘Yearnings’ opens, the lines go like this:
In the swirl and whirl
her skirt an orange fire lit
by the setting sun.
or take these from my poem ‘The Way Out’ first published in ‘Up the Staircase’,
He likes me scrubbed clean.
Every tiny morsel.
The flavour of imagery spreads across my poems in different ways.
The Milestone: Your poems seem to be as you perceive the external world, not craggy with difficult thoughts and symbols, I mean it’s very much like Sharon Olds’ poems. Is it true?
Poet: I love this particular poem of Sharon Old’s titled ‘I Go Back to May 1937’, where she talks of wishing she could have stopped her parents from marrying and producing her, but…
“I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”
Her work is described as ‘the use of raw language and startling images’. It is wonderful that you find a similarity in my work to her poems. I write from the core of my being and my work is often termed visceral because of this.
The Milestone: No serious type of writing, be it poem or fiction, can pull away from the personal domain of the writer. Do you have any personal memories that recur in your writing in the form of imageries or in them?
Poet: Of course a poet draws from her own life experiences and the world she inhabits. Yet there are poems that reflect the experience of others that she can only imagine. A writer has to have a highly developed sense of empathy, of being able to place herself in another’s shoes or rubber slippers or bare feet. It requires a kind of immersion very much like that of an actor.
The Milestone: You also write flash fiction. Though this is not new in the West it’s new in India. How do readers respond to this form ?
Poet: Flash fiction is the term for stories less than a 1000 words. Micro fiction becomes an even shorter form, a story less than 500 words. I write in all short forms, I recently had a story of 20 words published. In today’s fast-paced world, short fiction is the flavour of the day. I love writing flash fiction and my work has been published widely since the last several years. In India, it is still a new form, but it won’t be long before it becomes popular here.
The Milestone: Do you believe in ‘art’s for arts’ sake’, or do you believe that poets have social responsibilities? If yes, how do you fulfill it?
Poet: My poems are instinctive, but often protest is built into them, against injustice and harshness. I write from a woman’s heart, my sympathies lie with women, and I have written poems encouraging women to stand up for themselves. I have written against war, violence and injustice. Some words from my poem, ‘A Woman’s Cry’:
Don't give up, fight hard,
It may destroy you,
But you are making the world a saner place
For the daughters that follow.
Through poetry, all aspects of the human experience get addressed. Not only poets and writers, everyone has social responsibilities. It is only that poets express themselves through poetry. Grace Paley has said in an interview regarding social responsibility: “Writers? I advocate plumbers should also do something, everybody should do something.”
The Milestone: What’s the present trend of poetry in India ?
Poet: Poetry has always had its own little band of followers. It is not something that everyone picks up to read. Many people are afraid of poetry, saying that it is something they don’t understand. I think this is because poetry has been intellectualized. I remember a college student picking up my book of poems at a book fair, going through the pages, and then smiling. He bought the book, saying that my poems were something he could read. I have also introduced poems gently to my friends, and now one of them enjoys reading poets like Ritsos! The poetry scene in India is looking up, just as the rest of the writing scene is. I have hopes, but then, I have always been optimistic.
The Milestone: What are the qualities of a poem that touch a reader’s heart?
Poet: A true poem is one that touches a reader’s heart, that creates a movement of some kind. It makes the reader think and then want to revisit the poem, to eat up each line. Some poems are so exquisite that they may also devour the reader. Josephine Jacobsen writes in her poem, ‘Gentle Reader’:
‘O God, it peels me, juices me like a press;
this poetry drinks me, eats me, gut and marrow
until I exist in its jester's sorrow,
until my juices feed a savage sight
that runs along the lines, bright
as beasts' eyes.’
I can only hope that some of my poems have the quality to eat or be eaten.
The Milestone: How do you evoke a strong feel of music in your poems?
Poet: Thank you for saying this, it makes me happy to know. For me, a poem, even though written in free verse, must have a certain rythm and cadence to it. Poetry is a sensual experience, it works so much on feeling, just as music does. A major part of its appeal lies in how it sounds to the ear, though it is written for the page. Once I have written a poem, I do edit till it sounds right to me. Rythm is something that comes naturally to me, I am an instinctive foot-tapper to music.
The Milestone: Who is your favourite poet? Why?
Poet: I love too many poets. There are the obvious ones like Neruda, Rilke and Rumi. I love the poetry of Kim Adonizzio, K.Satchidanandan, Kamala Das, Mathew Dickman, Yahia Lababidi, Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Nida Fazli. So the taste is eclectic, but romance and passion is the ticket for me.
The Milestone: What’s the future of poetry when big publishers are investing in fiction? Do you feel poets are neglected by the publishers?
Poet: Poetry feeds a certain kind of hungry soul. It is not everyone’s brew. Publishers are in the market to sell. Since poetry has only a few select takers, publishers have no choice in the matter.
But poetry will never die since it is the voice of the heart.
( Abha Iyengar is an internationally published poet and writer. She writes poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, essays and book reviews and has also worked as fiction editor. Her writing has appeared in Doorknobs and Bodypaint, Bewildering Stories, Pure Slush, Arabesques Review, Muse India and others. She is a Kota Press Poetry Anthology Contest winner. Her story, 'The High Stool' was nominated for the Story South Million Writers Award. Her poem-film, "Parwaaz," has won a Special Jury prize inPatras,Greece. She has a published poetry collection titled "Yearnings"(2010).)
