Shannan

The first word that surges into my mind as I read your poems (again and again) is “rich” and then, almost antithetically, “crave”. I sense that the former feeling arises because of the way you immerse the reader into language. Take, for example, “Chaos and Kismet”. The very first couplet has us doused in “rainfall…whirlwind…chaos”. Later also, you write with a fluid, melodic speed: “My sweet tooth hankers for whirlwind icing.” The reason, I think “crave”, though, has a lot to do with how your poems allow for multiple entry points. They are both dialogue and soliloquy; they pose eager questions while at the same time deploy precise answers. I keep feeling this craving to enter the words deeper, to explore the sentences from different angles of vision, and I keep coming up short. That’s not a bad feeling, actually. I felt this way when I first read T.S. Eliot, Tolstoy, and — a work you’re more than familiar with — the Bhagavad-gita. So I suppose my first question centers around the idea of a poem (or a piece of poetic writing) allowing for or containing a multitude of passages into and through. Do you think there is a way to decipher these — a flashlight a reader can take through the mazes and alleys architectured by such work in order to feel the most fulfillment from the creative experience? Or perhaps — call me crazy — is befuddlement the entire point here?

AMIT

I remember reading somewhere that poets do things in their poetry without really intending to, and I think that holds here. Believe it or not, I never intend to befuddle or mystify; in the moment of composition, there is a strange conviction of the absolute logic of what I am writing. I think sometimes it may be that the logic is musical or phonetic, that the rightness of the sound creates the illusion, in me, of the rightness of meaning. And hopefully in the reader as well. So the flashlight is always the form itself, the sequence of syllables; it is the ear that must illuminate your reading, for it was the ear that illuminated and guided my writing. So in the poem you quoted, the pleasure of understanding the ghazal is the pleasure of hearing the ghazal. In this poetry, which is somewhere on the spectrum between music and prose, approaches closer to music than to prose.

Shannan

“Denial” is so close to my heart. I keep getting lost in that poem. I sometimes feel that there’s either a glut of bad or cliched love poems out there now (especially with the prevalence of social media) and, perhaps as a consequence of that, the true love poem — the gentle, the wild, the soft, the tender — has become a little ill-fated, a little defamed even. Just this way you describe married love: 

The way the sugar cube dies and gets reborn 

as the coffee, the way a song touches her own face 

as her composer hums in real time.

Wow. There is so much at play here. The themes of birth and death both weaving in and out of a single thought, a carefully crafted image! And then, the poem begins to transform for me. The title, which I initially glossed over, beats alive. We read:

There is no such thing as divorce. When the knife 

slides in, you feel it no more than the sting 

a lidocaine needle numbs in real time. 

It’s both a jarring experience and something that requires calm attention, thought, even grace. You’re often playing with doubles, opposites, simple feelings and abstractions that — when unpacked — reveal themselves to be far more complex. What attracts you to writing in this vein, to go beyond the surficial and, in many ways, inverting expectations? And titles — I see that your titles are akin to Vedic sutras in that with very small literary real estate they set the heart of the poem into motion. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this. 

AMIT

I was so thrilled when you accepted “Denial” — pun intended — because it was one of my first attempts at an “enjambed ghazal”, in which the couplets and refrains run together and interweave in a way they don't in the traditional ghazal. I think that the play with doubles and opposites comes naturally to a poem in couplets. It beckons the paradox, the contradiction, the juxtaposition, all those tactics that mystics (and poets) use to upend conventional thinking and access the depths of experience and understanding. “Not this, not this,” as the Vedantic sages formulated: the ultimate formula, the doubled “denial” by which the ultimate reality of Brahman is to be neither known nor not-known. As for the titles of my poems, you are correct in that I often pay a lot of attention to them. In fact I think of each title as a kind of “koan” that rewards meditation both separately from and in light of the poem it both presides over and perches apart from. “There is no God but the Goddess” has over a thousand years of history hidden in it.

Shannan

In your lovely interview with the amazing Jane Zwart over at Image, you said:

On the other hand, I’ve written entire poems purely to alliterate, purely to rhyme, purely to play with a set of sounds that didn’t have any idea or any emotion associated with them, which is not how people typically think about poetry. People tend to think, “Oh, you had to break up with your girlfriend, and that’s why you wrote a poem.” But sometimes—though certainly not all of the time—I’ve written a poem solely to play.

I love this way of thinking and I must admit, as a young poet, I’m also a bit daunted by it! One often hears advice on infusing narrative into the poem in order for it stand alone, stand strong, resonate with the reader. But the case you’re making here — and please correct me if I’m wrong — is that poetry can purely be for the art of language itself? Would you please speak further to this, and perhaps shed more light on how and why you approach poetry as play? Does it have something to do with the multimodal literary forms and genres you work within and beyond poetry?

AMIT

Absolutely it has to do with working so much in prose. Prose is the majority of what I write, both as a creative writer and also as a radiologist. When I write poetry, I need it to be set apart from prose at a very fundamental level. That is both phonetic — hence my obsession with forms and musical elements like assonance and alliteration—but also in the very mindset with which I write it. You will notice that Kipling, too, who wrote a massive amount of prose, rhymes and rhythms jauntily in his poems. Goethe too gravitated toward a variety of rhyme schemes, all on display in Faust. This is because the rhymes and forms — let's just call them patterns—of language create a demand that parallels and sometimes dominates the demands of narrative and plain sense. There are too many poems that could have been prose paragraphs; and that, stripped of linebreaks, become prose paragraphs. I do indulge in the occasional anecdote-capped-with-an-epiphany, in free verse. But there is something that draws me to freewheeling linguistic play, and I suspect it is an escape from prose.

SHANNAN

As someone who loves Sanskrit poetry (and I’m just beginning to translate it also), I’m also really interested in learning a bit more from you about the way you translate. Do you see translation — in particular from a text like the Bhagavad-gita which uses intricate Sanskrit poetry — as more an act of transcreation? Or forming a third thing from what you read and what you are trying to bring across to the new reader. Your poems here also refer to deities rooted in Sanskrit scripture. Is there an element of personal worship that goes along with your poetry, or poetry in general?

AMIT

Quite the questions! With the translation of the Gita, I was meticulously accurate, diving into etymologies in an attempt to get each line as right as possible. I even recreated anaphora and often mimicked the order of clauses and words (which was a challenge given the variable word order of Sanskrit).  That was my worship: compare the intricacy of Vedic recitation, which must be exact. That was the intricacy of the translation.

        Yet in the second volume of my three-volume Mahabharata retelling, forthcoming next year from Penguin India (which published the first volume there in late August), I have included a full-length version of the Gita that is not a translation but a full-scale, verse-for-verse recreation of the Gita in modern English, as a contemporary poem. That is, it contains the exact same number of lines, with the exact same number of lines devoted to each speaker, with the exact same ideas expressed — only it's all new, no overlap, and its references encompass the whole world up to the 21st century. So that was the Gita version where I let things rip and recreated it whole — the unfaithful leap of faith.

SHANNAN

I’m wondering what you feel about the idea of poetry as a culture in its connection with specific countries and, then, further with diasporic movements. Let me give an example. I spent about 9 months in India this past year. Though I was born in India, I have grown up in the so-called western world (Oh Canada!). I was surprised (and perhaps I shouldn’t have been) to see how few opportunities there are for poets in India. Even though India is a culture and country rooted in art (art that sparks for revolution, is a conduit for sexual education amid an often-oppressive society, art that breaks boundaries and barriers between the under-the-surface classism, etc). Alongside this, I noticed that while there are many literary-adjacent communities, there does not seem to be the push towards self-expression that occurs in western education (igniting young people’s interest in poetry, among other arts). I wondered if this is a viscous cycle or if the way to put art at the forefront of public thought is first primarily rooted in governmental policy? And how can this latter truly happen when minimal attention is paid to uplifting the arts and truly recognizing them as a power for change and growth amongst the citizens?

AMIT

There are a lot of moving parts to that question, and a lot of them dovetail with the simple issue of wealth. The crucial distinction to make is between "art" generally (which includes films and music) and literature, and within literature, between fiction and poetry.

      How many MFA programs, symposia, university-funded poetry journals, poetry festivals, and so on existed before America's post-WWII boom, and the money pumped by the GI bill into the university system? The United States's literary world came into its recognizable, modern-day existence during a massive postwar bubble. That is all contracting now, through a combination of administrative bloat and inflation and college sports-frenzy—tuition still goes up, but the money gets siphoned off and directed away from the literary programs and arms of universities.

       In India, there wasn't enough money for any of that to begin with, and the adult literacy rate is about 81%, so one out of every five Indians is not going to participate anyway. The “mushaira” culture of Urdu or Hindi poetry readings was mostly a thing of small circles and the privileged, educated few even in the heyday of Ghalib and Mir. Every 19th century description I've read is of a circle of poets passing around a candle and reciting for each other. Not quite poetry slams, not mass art. Ghalib had a reputation for being abstruse even among fellow poets. A portion of his work isn't even in Hindustani, but in Persian. 

        India does have an Anglophone literary culture today, but for someone to know English well enough to read poetry in it, it's inevitably a tiny, highly Americanized fraction of the population. At the high literary level, that culture takes its cues from New York and London; if you want to get traction there, you have to get traction among American or British elites first. Simultaneously there is a popular fiction world of writers like Amish and Chetan Bhagat who are probably not so suited for international non-Indian audiences. But that is fiction, fiction of a very basically, clumsily written sort. Page poetry is inevitably going to have a hard time when complexity is foreclosed. It has a hard time even in countries where English is the main language. Elaborate literary styles are selected against.

             The diaspora (I'll speak of the Indian diaspora in the US, but it may well hold true of others) is in the position of trying to write creatively for an audience that is culturally alien. Your success or failure as a writer, your recognition or obscurity, depends on the opinions of progressive white women (that is the subgroup that, statistically, purchases the most books, and that gatekeeps literary publishing). To succeed, you must tailor your portrayals and create your art by filtering it through certain pre-set lenses—brown immigrant angst, how "traditional culture" is fascist/misogynist/backward, and so on. This is what your NPR-listening audience wants from you, and if they don't get it from you, they'll move on to the next Indian-origin writer who will oblige. Maybe that will change, but if or when it does, the change is unlikely to be driven by Indian Americans themselves. Do we really expect fellow diasporic Indians to champion our poems? Diaspora Indians are disproportionately STEM oriented or business oriented. When I was growing up, we were doctors, engineers, and hotel and convenience store owners. In the past few decades, America added a massive influx of IT professionals. But there is an intense selection bias at work, and the selected-for subpopulations had and have very little literary culture or patience with what they think of as superfluous or confusing language. Fiction has a chance, poetry not so much. Indian culture in any case skews toward movies, Netflix shows, songs, and WhatsApp forwards; most Indians experience ghazals, for example, as songs in performance. In the diaspora, which is under 2% of the US population, there is no true literary culture yet, much less a book-buying culture. Give it time, I guess? I am thrilled to see you doing your part to grow it. 

         And in regard to whether government policy helps, I can't say much about India, since it has problems and poverty that Americans know nothing of. They have just recently managed to get proper plumbing and electricity into rural areas.... As far as our own country goes, I absolutely am in support of redirecting US taxpayer dollars toward poets. I have looked a bit into what those dollars are currently spent on, and how absurdly. The US military recently lost a plane over its own territory — just...the pilot ejected and let it crash — and that thing cost so much money that every living poet on the Poetry Foundation website could have been paid a living wage off it, and you'd still have money left over. A country this rich is inevitably going to waste its money somehow. Pumping out human-piloted, $100-million-dollar jets...in the age of  drone warfare? Poems, I submit, are a far shrewder use of money.

SHANNAN

You mentioned that “money gets siphoned off and directed away from the literary programs and arms of universities.” It  feels even more important that we’re discussing this in light of the recent shuttering of The Gettysburg Review (I for one am still holding out for some last-minute miracle). I think such aggressive and ignorant disregard for the arts must also be linked to capitalism. Same goes for STEM fields being pumped with resources (people and money). But it confounds me how such institutes cannot see that art is at the core of a thriving capitalist society. The best social media ads — I mean, they are art, aren’t they? Sure, we can go the highbrow route and say it’s not real art. But which one of us hasn’t felt like we’re witnessing poetry in motion when watching something that truly touches our hearts. To get even more divisive, the recent Taylor Swift Eras tour is being credited for single-handedly reviving the economy of several American cities. Sure, she’s no Whitman or Plath — but that’s still a form of art, poetry — commercial and highly marketable. 

          My concern then is that when the kind of art that gets championed requires such specific packaging (and this is linked with the brilliant point you made about diasporic Indian authors trying to sell their books to white female editors) — where is the value in trying to focus on the wild and experimental. Yes — it shouldn’t matter. But especially for poets — poetry just doesn’t pay the bills. Even a good short story might net you at least $200 from a paying venue. A poetry publication (hello, ONLY POEMS), if it pays at all, will be much less than that. And so much goes into funding (thinking back to Gettysburg) — big flashy independent donors are not a luxury we can all afford. I come to think then that trying to write non-commercial poetry and not care about “branding” and what sells is either an act of madness or some kind of obsession that comes from a place you can’t control. And for you — I mean, you were, on paper anyway, a physician first (please correct me if I’m wrong).

             I’m also curious to know, was there some kind of strategy involved here haha… that if I can earn as a doctor then I can write whatever the heck I want and not need to worry about that being the breadwinner profession. I’d love your thoughts on any aspect of this. How do we as poets balance practical concerns and worldly expectations of what poetry is becoming today alongside serving the art of poetry itself, and following that mad drive that comes from a place untouched by the tangible material world? 

AMIT

When I was about 17 years old, I started a publishing company (with my dad's money) and self-published a book of poetry, Entrance: Collected Works of Amit Majmudar. It had lyric poems that imitated Dickinson among others, some blank verse narrative poems, and two blank verse pseudo-Shakespearean plays in it. Very few people have a copy of that book—your recently featured poet Jane Zwart, for one, and another is the Scottish editor of the Dark Horse, Gerry Cambridge. No one else in the literary world that I know of. Anyway, in that book, which I wrote and published before I even went to college, I have this poem called “On Entering Medicine.” I'll quote it here for you in full:

Chains and a lock to close

The loyal factory: my energies

must switch

And all endeavors passionate

Be laid off now, like laborers

too costly,

To rove ragged. In paying

poetry

My hours and intelligence

I spend my promise, my ability.

It must not starve away,

but neither must

It eat of me. - The bullish

market of

My inspiration might yet

crash; if not,

I'll have to pen the public

preference

For an unconscionable gain.

Think on

My melancholy paradox: I

am

A patriot either heroed

by a foreign government

Or shot by his own.

So you see that, as early as high school, I knew I had to avoid making a living as a poet in order to live as a poet. I think I was pretty honest, in that piece of irregular blank verse juvenilia, about how I would be influenced by market forces (or else, the zeitgeist) to betray my true nature, in order to gain worldly success as a writer. I entered an accelerated six-year program and ended up earning my MD by the age of 23. Yet I never gave up poetry. In fact, my ambitions got only bigger. If you include the works I've published in India, and the works I haven't yet published but have signed with various publishers, you would see that I am very much all over the place! I ended up pursuing both careers, writer and physician, at the same time. I am my own patron, my own Maecenas, my own NEA. I don't think I was entirely honest in that poem, in retrospect. There was never any doubt in my mind that I could—that I must—do both. And then or now, I have never really believed the inspiration would dry up. I do not have enough insight to know when to stop, and I hope I never do.

          For what it's worth, I think STEM funding is a good thing. It's just that cutting arts funding is not a good thing, and not really necessary. Colleges have too many administrators, just like hospitals. Bloat is a huge driver of college costs just as it's a huge driver of health care costs. There is this parasitic class that has battened onto these institutions, midwits in offices pulling salaries and benefits for doing next to nothing, and none of them take a pay cut when the budget tightens—they just axe the literary journal!

           For the record, I think Taylor Swift is an excellent lyricist. There are these strangely evocative phrases and details in almost all of her songs. It's difficult to pinpoint how, but she creates a personal emotional pull in a way that (Nobel nothwithstanding) whimsical, free-associating, pseudo-bluesy Bob Dylan lyrics never have, at least not for me. She's at the top of every list for a good reason.

          Regarding art and capitalism, though, again I insist on making fine distinctions here. Filmmaking, showrunning, music, advertisement — there's a bucket into which they all fit, and complex page poetry is not in that bucket. That kind of poetry is usually not lucrative at all, which is why even people who dedicate their life to it are usually professors who teach it for a living. Rupi Kaur (to speak of an Indian diaspora poet) is a red herring, she made a lot of money with her simplistic snippets and doodles, but that is not replicable, just as winning the lottery is not replicable; it's not a model aspiring poets can pursue, especially not ones who are serious about chasing an idiosyncratic aesthetic deep into an undiscovered country.

SHANNAN

Regarding Indian culture specifically — you confirmed my worst doubts. As a writer of Indian-origin myself who writes across genres — poetry, fiction, essays — I do wonder how the publishing world will treat me (if they pay any attention at all, that is) when I start sending my longer work out to agents. I do see today there is a rise of experimental work and many diaspora writers are helming that. This is perhaps so far the alt-lit scene, but this gives me hope in some small way. Do you think, though, literary publishing as it is right now, will embrace this shift more? We do certainly see a taste for the weird and undefinable rising amongst serious readers. But, perhaps that’s an endangered species? (Gosh, forgive me if I’m sounding cynical, I really do not mean to). 

AMIT

I am more cynical than you are, both by nature and by experience, but I am going to do the unexpected and give you hope. One: Literary culture is built on fads. All it takes is one random breakthrough work, and publishing houses will scramble to sign more authors from that demographic. Around the time of Jhumpa Lahiri's rise, it was a good time to be an Indian-American writer, because literary Manhattan was looking for more Jhumpa Lahiris. A decade or so later, African diasporic writers became a fad. Then Scandinavian writers, both their mystery novelists and their realist high-literary types, like Knausgaard and the new Nobel winner Fosse. I've stopped paying attention recently, but eventually a “South Asian” fetish will cycle round again, and names will be made. Too late for me, but not, I hope, for you!
          Two: Realism (with its straitjacket spectrum of "plausibility") has been thoroughly on the wane lately, so the supernatural and strange (which is infinite and fertile) is reentering American letters as we speak, and has been for some time; the high-low distinction has been obliterated, just as it was in Shakespeare's London, or during the surge of early French Romanticism, when it became acceptable, after over a century of tightly controlled diction, to mention a handkerchief on stage. This is a period of flux, recombination, upheaval, both culturally and geopolitically. Take heart. It is in such times that comets streak through the sky. Hugo and Byron needed a generative Age of Unrest to rise, as did Joyce and Eliot a century after them; as will, soon, our own literary culture's new stars, another century on. Literary excellence is not an endangered species at all. It is a hardy species that is at times a dormant spore and at times a medicinal fern. The greening is at hand.

SHANNAN

It’s been such a delight delving in your mind. Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would also love to know your most influential poets.

AMIT

I am afraid my three masters are the usual suspects, very uninteresting and conventional! Homer, Shakespeare, and Emily Dickinson. Also the poet of the Gita, but that doesn't count because it is mixed up with my religious fixations. But if I could add some other poets to that mix, I'd add Ludovico Ariosto, the Italian chivalric romancier who wrote in ottava rima, and Ovid, poet of Metamorphoses. I emulate Goethe in his do-everything attitude. Milton has inspired a lot of poems from me, though I avoid his idiosyncratic signature style of blank verse. I have loved Keats deeply, both as a poet and as a letter writer, but Byron's Don Juan delights me most from that era. Hopkins taught me consonant play, Eliot gave me permission to be esoteric. Among my living American contemporaries, I center A. E. Stallings, Christian Wiman, and Kay Ryan. Does the late Cormac McCarthy count as a poet? I think of him as one. I just reread Blood Meridian and it strikes me as the greatest prose poem ever written.