Indran Amirthanayagam
Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published thirteen poetry collections thus far, including The Elephants of Reckoning(Hanging Loose Press, NY, 1993) which won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States, Uncivil War (Tsar/now Mawenzi House, Toronto, 2013) and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 2008) His latest books are Il n'est de solitude que l'île lointaine (Legs Editions, Haiti, 2017), Pwezi a Kat Men written with Alex Laguerre (Delince Editions, Miami, 2017), and Ventana Azul (El Tapiz del Unicornio, Mexico City, 2016), Two new manuscripts, Paolo 9--a suite of poems about the case of Paolo Guerrero and the World Cup--and En busca de posada are forthcoming in 2019.
In music, he has just released Rankont Dout (available to download from all the music stores), a collaboration in creole with emerging Haitian musicians. He writes a blog on poetry and the arts at http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com, Anirthanayagam is a past fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the U,S/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the Macdowell Colony. He won the Juegos Florales of Guyamas, Sonora in 2005.
Amirthanayagam serves on the board of DC-ALT, an association of literary translators . He directs the Spoken Word series “Poetry at the Port” at the Port Au Prince restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland. He has contributed articles and op-eds to the Hindu, the Deccan Chronicle, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Reforma, El Norte, and other periodicals around the world. His poems have been published in Strix, Wasafiri, the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, Grand Street, Hanging Loose, BOMB, El Malpensante, Alforja, Siempre, La Gaceta, the Asian Literary Review, the Little Magazine, the Times of India, and many other journals and magazines. His poems and translations have been included in the anthologies Fafnir's Heart: World Poetry in Translation, Language for a New Century, Only the Sea Keeps, ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,
In music, he has just released Rankont Dout (available to download from all the music stores), a collaboration in creole with emerging Haitian musicians. He writes a blog on poetry and the arts at http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com, Anirthanayagam is a past fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the U,S/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the Macdowell Colony. He won the Juegos Florales of Guyamas, Sonora in 2005.
Amirthanayagam serves on the board of DC-ALT, an association of literary translators . He directs the Spoken Word series “Poetry at the Port” at the Port Au Prince restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland. He has contributed articles and op-eds to the Hindu, the Deccan Chronicle, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Reforma, El Norte, and other periodicals around the world. His poems have been published in Strix, Wasafiri, the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, Grand Street, Hanging Loose, BOMB, El Malpensante, Alforja, Siempre, La Gaceta, the Asian Literary Review, the Little Magazine, the Times of India, and many other journals and magazines. His poems and translations have been included in the anthologies Fafnir's Heart: World Poetry in Translation, Language for a New Century, Only the Sea Keeps, ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,
Mini Interview (2019)
Your poetics?
I think of poems as word music. So I dance, rest in peace, tune out, tune in, review the events of the day and week while listening to words drift through ears into the windy spaces where debts and regrets jostle with satisfactions about work well done. I love poems that turn on rhymes and off rhymes, that give the appearance of order, structure while subverting their own premises. So I would like to present the contrarie states of the human soul in each verse--as Blake fashioned the phrase.
Your influences?
We are multiple, mixed, modern and old, fresh and stale, becoming always and wrestling with demons in every poem we write. I love and learn from Nazim, Allen, Pablo, William Butler and Lao Tze; from Rosario Castellanos, Sylvia Plath, Nicanor and Violeta Parra, and Mahadevi Akka. They are my friends and confidants and they live in my phrasing my embrace of experience, my translating that experience into poetry.
Why is the Matwaala fest and collective relevant and needed?
Matwaala is home, refuge, and launch pad. It recognizes poets who are migrants celebrating and living their South Asian relations, their waking up in the world surrounded by the gods, fruits, flowers, philosophies and animals that prosper in the South Asian ecosystem. Yet we are living abroad, in a global village where every inspiration seems to be at hand, or on a screen, but where the apple, cherry and peach predominate over the mango, rambutan and date. We are from South Asian and America. Let there be commerce between our multiple selves. Ah, I like Pound and Whitman too.
I think of poems as word music. So I dance, rest in peace, tune out, tune in, review the events of the day and week while listening to words drift through ears into the windy spaces where debts and regrets jostle with satisfactions about work well done. I love poems that turn on rhymes and off rhymes, that give the appearance of order, structure while subverting their own premises. So I would like to present the contrarie states of the human soul in each verse--as Blake fashioned the phrase.
Your influences?
We are multiple, mixed, modern and old, fresh and stale, becoming always and wrestling with demons in every poem we write. I love and learn from Nazim, Allen, Pablo, William Butler and Lao Tze; from Rosario Castellanos, Sylvia Plath, Nicanor and Violeta Parra, and Mahadevi Akka. They are my friends and confidants and they live in my phrasing my embrace of experience, my translating that experience into poetry.
Why is the Matwaala fest and collective relevant and needed?
Matwaala is home, refuge, and launch pad. It recognizes poets who are migrants celebrating and living their South Asian relations, their waking up in the world surrounded by the gods, fruits, flowers, philosophies and animals that prosper in the South Asian ecosystem. Yet we are living abroad, in a global village where every inspiration seems to be at hand, or on a screen, but where the apple, cherry and peach predominate over the mango, rambutan and date. We are from South Asian and America. Let there be commerce between our multiple selves. Ah, I like Pound and Whitman too.