Your early interest in the external architecture of poetry—i.e., the overt, formal construction of poetry—over the years has grown and graduated into an internal, much quieter, perhaps spiritual, and sparer organization of poetry.
You have put that quite well. In my early poems, the architecture of the poem itself was visually much more apparent. Whereas, over time, I have been able to be much more subtle in my writing. It is essentially because of a greater experience, both in life and writing itself. You learn how to use craft and words, and hopefully you get better and better to a point that you can in fact hide very complex formal constructs in a poem to an uninitiated eye, one that is only apparent if you dig deep into the skin and tissue of the poem.
Of course, there is also a shift in sensibility, in the sense that I was much younger then. Life’s circumstances change, and with that your sensibility changes and grows. I think these aspects are also reflected in my later poems.
Certainly that tends to be very true. There is an immense visual quality in my poetry, partly influenced by the fact that I worked for many years as a filmmaker. Besides, I do have more than a part-time interest in photography. As I mentioned before, architecture was an important area of interest of mine, a field I might have actually pursued as a career, but circumstances took a different turn. But I am still interested in visual and graphic art, and in the whole nature of light, photography, and fibre-optics. So, all that somewhere along the line must permeate and stain my poems.
However, that’s only one aspect of the poetry—only the stretched canvas, only the surface of the parchment where the colours you see are brightly dabbed on. Once you go beyond that level, there is an intensely quiet, an inwardly deeper depth of field in my writing—an aspect of my poetry which perhaps you are alluding to. I don’t know whether it is spiritual or not, but certainly it is an introspective kind of writing. So, in that sense, you are right.
One of your published chapbooks, Almanac, contains poems corresponding to the twelve months of the year. What inspired you to write poems on the different months?
It was completely accidental, actually. At the time, I was trying very hard to write poems for my newborn son, Aria, and I increasingly found that writing poetry for children was very difficult. One of the things that I was experiencing in my writing was that when I was consciously trying to write for a child, I realised that I was speaking down at them rather than to them as a colleague. So, I thought the other alternative could be poems about each month of the year as a calendar so that my son could learn the different months of the year in a creative way. Part of it was that.
Part of it was also that I realised that I had enough poems that had some reference to some month or the other. So, when I pulled all those poems together, some published and others unpublished, I realised there were poems that represented about eight of the months. Since I already had eight poems, I thought, Why not try and write four new poems relating to the remaining four months to complete the sequence? From reading the poems, you would realise that not all the poems are directly related to month concerned as such. They are obliquely related to the months. For instance, there is a poem about rice-harvesting called “April’s Air,†which is set in Japan, that takes place in April. So, the poem conveniently fit into the April month-slot.
Similarly, “One Moonlight December Night†obviously comes in the December section. But the poem, for instance, that refers to the month of May is a recent poem which I wrote for my son, whose birthday falls on the 21st of that month. Even though the poem is titled “Aria,†the reference to people who are in the know is to the month of May. So, I had quite an enjoyable time putting this volume together.
The volume Retracing American Contours takes us back again to an American landscape, a terrain that you explored in your highly successful third book, New York Times. Why the return to the United States?
The poems in Retracing American Contours are poems that were originally written in the period from 1987 to 1990, much of it around the same time as the poems in New York Times itself. Originally, I had planned for all these poems to have come out together as one volume. But since the book became very large, my British publisher thought it would be a good idea to cull out the New York–based and New York–related poems to form one independent book. I went along with that idea and was very pleased about the eventual results.
So the poems in this new volume, Retracing American Contours, are the ones that I want to preserve from that original group which were not published in book form. Publishing them now, almost a decade after they were first born, is also a private way of visiting those places again. There are so many important events and significant memories attached to those places that it is almost like a journey down memory-lane, but with a freshly considered perspective.
Your volume Lines of Desire is stunning—quite a stylistic revelation. As a poet you strike similes and evoke metaphors that are original, cool, untainted, soothing, and, at the same time, urgent. In addition, they also remind one of conceits in metaphysical poetry.
That is an interesting observation. Lines of Desire is basically a series of very tightly written, short, erotic poems. In fact, I was rereading and savouring the poetry of John Donne, Sappho, and the erotic Sanskrit poets quite a lot while writing some of the poems in this volume.
It is very difficult to write about love and passion in an original and fresh way because it is one subject that has been completely exhausted. So I wondered, How does one write about it without actually sounding old? My way of getting into it was to turn them inside out, rather than going from outside into the inside, which is usually the case, as it is a much safer and controllable route. I wanted to capture the raw passion and essence of the particular range of emotions, and at the same time be subtle and unobvious. Also I wanted to give these poems a meditative and chilling quality, an edge that is at the same time sharp as well as mesmerising.
