KARAN

I love the title of your book “Wound is the Origin of Wonder” — it’s reminiscent of Rumi, the Ross Gay line “Joy is happiness informed by grief,” and of course, the famous Leonard Cohen lyric: “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” which, in turn, was inspired by Rumi. You mention the etymology aspect in the epigraph of the book but of course this goes much deeper. What is it about our wounds that makes us more open to wonder? Would you speak about that, please?

MAYA

Thank you so much for these thoughtful questions, Karan. Wonder makes us ask questions — it deepens our knowing and our not knowing. Our wounds, similar to our deepest experiences of joy, are inherently mysterious, as all things, if looked at closely enough, are mysterious. I was interested in the notion that wonder breaches the limits of our understanding, and that wounds are a breaching, too. There’s also the reality that grief is always brand new; even if we’ve felt it dozens of times throughout the course of our lives, its particulars are always fresh and surprising. Similarly, we can have a handle on our wounds at one moment and not the next. To answer the question more directly in the final line: our wounds make us wonder about the material and nature of this life that makes such an intense feeling possible. 

KARAN

I also wish to speak about poem titles. I really like the simplicity of your titles. There’s a welcoming quality about them. What is your process behind titling your poems? Does a title come before or after the poem? Do you think of them as a door or a key or something else entirely?

MAYA

I don’t think I have anything quite as systematic as a process for titling. I’m glad to learn the titles work. It’s intuitive (or, rather, trial and error). I may bestow a poem a placeholder title as I’m working on it, but ultimately, I won’t know until the end if/how the title is working. At that point, I can make a conscious choice about the amount of tension or lack thereof I want the title to carry.

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. I can see all these elements in your poems, as one would in any good poet. But I’d love to know where you feel you're writing from. And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

MAYA

It depends, perhaps moment by moment or line by line, which impulse has the main melody. These categories all make up the music and logos of the poem. I can’t quite imagine a poem of the mind being separate from a poem of the body, heart, or soul. In terms of where I’m writing from, the natural world is often a starting or ending place in a poem. I don’t see that changing, because it’s part of how I orient myself in cities and spaces of all kinds.

KARAN

The philosophical ruminations in these poems appeal greatly to me. How you delve deep into the complexities of existence, identity, and human connection, weaving together the thread of thought and emotion. I feel that you’re reaching for a higher truth in these poems. “What is / the mind if not that surface upon which / the world can be endlessly rebroken?” Is poetry a way for you to investigate the vagaries of existence?

MAYA

Yes, insofar as poetry offers a space that temporarily clarifies, illuminates, and enacts ambivalences and experiences that are beyond language. But the most exciting part is the attempt and hope that you might truly capture a feeling or sensibility and “deliver it alive” on the page, as Pound says. It’s the effort and process of writing that offers so much meaning, and that itself clarifies the questions that drive us to the page in the first place. 

KARAN

I also sense in these poems a lot of kindness, especially toward the self. In the poem-letter to Life, you write “you’ll listen / if I ask you, // if you are the sort of life I think you are.” So many of these poems also read like prayers. Is tenderness a preoccupation for you? I think we live in a world where beauty, joy, tenderness gets unnoticed — and sometimes rightly so (because, let me quote Marwan Makhoul again: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent”) — is that something you think about? It is crucial to witness and document the world burning, especially in the times we’re living in, so where does this tenderness and beauty lie in the equation? How important is it, in the face of everything violent that the world is witnessing?

MAYA

Tenderness, gentleness, kindness: these qualities speak to us at our best, and I do believe our natural state of being would lean towards them. Fear (and all the systems thereof) veer us dangerously in the other direction towards violence, reactivity, division, and the illusion that we aren’t part of a shared human experience. But the work to undo this begins in each of us, and yes, I do believe that poetry can steer us there. A moment of tenderness glimpsed in language, in a day that might otherwise have been devoid of it, is doing vital work. 

KARAN

I invite you to speak about your Substack. You started it as a way to serialize your academic research on wonder, but it has evolved over the years to incorporate a lot more, and is now one of the most widely-read literary newsletter. How do you feel about that?

MAYA

Thank you, Karan. I write about wonder and “All things counter, original, spare, strange” (Hopkins) in my newsletter Poetry Today. Some days, this looks like a short essay on Coleridge’s dislike of imitation peaches, or on why wonder deepens empathy and curtails our appetite for destruction. 

But other times, I’m writing about whatever most gripped my attention that week or month, or whatever I’m wrestling with, in hopes of more deeply connecting with others. I do try to keep these posts instructive, or at least reflective in a way that truly invites others to reflect on their own experiences. Most weeks, I also curate a roundup of poems with a short introduction for readers to savor over the weekend.

Starting a newsletter freed me from the query cycle and gave me the permission to write whatever I truly feel like writing. The essays I’d written or was interested in writing were unlikely to find homes in journals for any number of good reasons. Poetry Today has allowed me to centralize my prose, research, and love of poetry and to share them with a wonderfully engaged and kind audience. I am deeply grateful for my readers and always encourage writers to start their own newsletters. 

KARAN

What is next for you? Are you working toward a new collection? Do you have any plans for writing a novel?

MAYA

In theory, I’m working on a book of essays on wonder in poetry, which adapts parts of my PhD and extends to contemporary examples. But my writing projects have been temporarily paused as I launched Conscious Writers Collective in May, an online writing community and platform for writers post/pre-MFA (though in practice, it’s for writers at all stages who are seriously dedicated to their craft). I wanted to create a space that would offer rigorous writing instruction, community, feedback, and access to visiting lecturers at a low monthly/yearly rate, and whose overarching attention would be on process over product, and on cultivating a helpful mindset long-term for writing and publishing. I’ve worked with amazing writers who never pursued MFAs and suffered from an entirely unwarranted sort of imposter syndrome, and likewise MFAs who graduated and felt rudderless, with no sense of how to upkeep and deepen their writing lives. And I wanted to be able to pay writers and publishing professionals to speak to my community, and to facilitate connecting writers with new audiences. So far, CWC has fulfilled every wish I had. It is the kindest, most generous group of writers I can imagine, and we meet five times a month over Zoom. We’ve had in-person meetups in two cities so far, and the group feels remarkably close-knit, even though it reached 100 members in its first three months. It has my full attention at the moment as I think of ways to best serve existing members and welcome more into the community.