On Maps and Metaphors

January 18, 2006 AS: What does poetry mean to you?
KD: Many things. To mention a few – poetry to me is an intense and a slightly unique way of saying something, something that touches the mind or the heart and also lingers in memory. Though even before that, the stage of feeling something intensely and differently has to be traversed. (Are stages ‘traversed’ or are the bloody things ‘passed’? Horsemen pass by). Insights are always welcome, be it prose or poetry. I would expect music, some lyrical quality, if not in each poem (sometimes the subject and its treatment can be anti-musical) then in some of them. If you are writing about terror, musicality would be an intrusion, don’t you think? But there are no rules. A poem on homicide written as a lullaby could be something tremendous.

But basically, poetry means two things to me. Firstly, solace for the soul – does that sound corny? I am afraid it does. What I want to say here is if I am really feeling out of sorts, I go back to poetry – Rilke, Akhmatova, Elytis, Auden, Ritsos, sometimes even Paul Celan. I would like to start the New Year or my birthday or my wife’s (I still celebrate her birthdays) by reading poetry. Seconde, when it comes to writing, I still think of it as a valve that releases the pressure of a strong emotion, a haunting image, etcetera. There is great relief at completing a poem and exhilaration – till you read a few days later the wretched stuff that you wrote.

And sometime or other there should be a rhymed poem somewhere. It’s then you feel you are a part of a discipline – I could never think of a volume without at least half a dozen poems in rhyme.


AS: How would you map the directions your work has taken over the years?
KD: My first poetry volume came out in 1970. My first poems were printed (Quest) in 1964. So I’ve been at it for 40 years now, and directions change. Often you don’t ‘map’ anything, but the winds take over and you sail along. For instance, when I started writing monologues, I started thinking only in those terms – stance, voice, viewpoint of different characters, and a poem would come to me only as a monologue. I refer to my last book The Map-maker. But for instance in my volume Winter Poems I set out to chart the Emergency, the droughts of 1974 and the memories of 1965 and 1966 – also what I saw touring the country by helicopter of the 1979 drought. Crossing of Rivers was obviously about Varanasi – and on a different plane, what rivers meant to India’s soul. I may have failed in what I set out to do, but there was a clear intent about these volumes.

AS: What directions do you feel your poetry is taking currently?
KD: I am writing elegiac verse these days and also a complex of poems on the mountains – gompas. I want to go back to nature in a big way, and move away from “The proper study of mankind is man” and that sort of nonsense. I am writing these poems in a relaxed sort of manner. But poems come slowly now. My main interest is in fiction and yet poetry tears me away from it.

But my ‘big’ story is about completing a Poetry volume I abandoned in 1992-93. It is set in the times of the Persian and Greek wars, there are poems on Herodotus on Cambyses, which is easy – you’ve only got to read the guy – and Cambyses on Herodotus – which is much tougher to write, the soul of the dead king castigating his chronicler (history has proved that the historian was off mark). There are poems on Alexander, Cyrus, Tomyris (the Messegate Queen who eventually killed Cyrus the Great), nine sonnets on Cyrus’s Tomb (published in Jerusalem Review), and six sonnets on the encounter between Cyrus and the Jews in Babylon (Jerusalem Review). There is also a whole section on what happened to Zoroastrians after the Arabs conquered Persia. The section is entitled ‘After the Coming of Islam’. The book will be called The Fire Altar

The volume is almost ready – I’ve just to devote two months to it and tie up the loose ends. Many of these poems were published in Poetry Review London.

AS: How do you work on a poem? Has your approach to the process changed over the years?
KD: Something hits you – a new feeling, an idea. You let it germinate, roll it over your mind, your tongue. Sometimes it could just be a line that comes to you. That period is important – mulling over the feeling, idea, line. That’s the time when the poem actually takes form, though most poets are not conscious of it. Formerly the struggle used to be much greater. One wrestled with drafts, sometimes changed the line length and metre drastically in the second or third draft. Now that isn’t the case – which means either I’ve turned lazy or, heaven forfend (there’s no law forbidding the use of archaisms in prose), I don’t think the struggle worth the trouble. Or perhaps one is more easily satisfied. Or one may have grown a little more adept at the craft.

AS: What about your approach to form? What, in your opinion, are your strengths and limitations as a poet?
KD: Actually, this should be answered by reviewers and critics, at least the latter half of the question. I find the first part too large to handle. It’s like asking someone what is his or her world-view or ‘philosophy’. All I want to say is I wish to be very short now. Leave a lot unsaid and what you want to say, say in as few words as possible.

I have been criticised (just twice) that I write about ‘incidents’, and as a corollary to that was asked “Where is the real Keki?”. I am referring to a question I was asked. My answer would be that whoever I may be writing about (my last book The Map-Maker contained many monologues) I am writing about myself too – my viewpoint, how I see things, also comes through. Still, I’ve taken this criticism to heart and wish to get out of my set habits. I don’t want it to be said that I am casting my poems in the same old rusted dye.

AS: And you think the Indian English poetry scene today is – ?
KD: Lively.