Poetry as the Arena of Transformation
An Interview with Ralph Nazareth, by Pramila Venkateswaran
1. Can you talk about one or two elements that have changed in your writing between your first book and your most recent one, Dropping Death? For instance, I notice that you mostly used the prose poem in this latest book. Can you touch on the reason for this choice?
Writing for me is a way of life, my sadhana, my unswerving companion. I’m sure this is true for you as well, Pramila. It helps me define my deepest self along with its cluster of playful, raunchy, poignant, witty, joyful, raging and sensitive selves—all the while opening a path to a continuous, passionate engagement with the world and its rollercoaster of absurdity, hope, madness, joy, and despair. This has been so ever since I seriously put pen to paper. Hence, I’d say both Ferrying Secrets and Dropping Death, published only a decade apart while drawing on historical and cultural contexts separated by a whole generation, come from the same place and are marked by the same ultimate concerns.
They are, however, quite different in form, as you note. Of course, I’ve not entirely abandoned verse with its characteristic end-stopped or enjambed line breaks, but the use of prose paragraphs in Dropping Death, often compressed to the point of a tensile complexity, has been a fertile new direction for me in the last two years. Let me confess that I go through periods when I find the line break quite silly, or if not silly, all-too-predictable, possibly even feckless, in the worst cases, a flaccid bourgeois ploy, in short, a distraction, if not a curse, unless, of course, it has the whimsical brio of e.e. cummings, the technical savvy of William Carlos William or A. K. Ramanujan, the scattershot faux brilliance of Jorie Graham, or the magic of intensifying the deep reach of Carolyn Forché, or accentuating the long-boned discursiveness of Vijay Sheshadri.
I hesitate to call my blocks or bricks of language prose poems, which have a complex history. I’d rather not go there partly because that quarter of the poetry world is becoming crowded with cheap goods like a flea market. Sometimes I like to offer my coinage “paratactics” (echoing the literary device parataxis while noticeably departing from it) to suggest what I’m trying to do or the “game” I’m playing with these language units or shall I call them “stanzas,” stopping places, sufficient unto themselves yet opening windows onto universes. They are a tactic or (in the extended context of an entire book) a strategy, of trapping, capturing, or pinning down (pardon these violent images) elusive, mercurial, ineffable, complex, renegade, subliminal flows of perceptions and ideas as they bounce and ricochet, pinball-style, off the edges and boundaries of consciousness.
There was a traditional fluid consistency to the poems in Ferrying Secrets even when they differed from each other drastically in their subject matter. They were marked by a discernible music, a traceable logic, real joy, real sorrow, a suggestion of settled meaning under the overarching canopy of a humanistic vision. The paras of Dropping Death have all of these elements, yet in a form that can at best be considered tenuous or provisional, and forever poised precariously on the edge of an entropic blade. Readers ask me about my process. I tell them I’m basically working out being in medias res, nothing less, nothing more. In the middle of things… Ah, in the middle of things, I find myself… in the middle of things, I lose myself… No immigrant I nor native. Neither at home nor in exile. And what is known and what is yet unknown unravel, and even as they do, the spinning skein holds promise of all that we are and not, will ever be and not… But to speak thus is madness. Next question, please!
2. You have done some amazing work for the poetry community in the U.S., particularly in the tri-state area. As editor of Yuganta Press, you played a pivotal role in bringing so many brilliant minority poets into the limelight who might otherwise have been forgotten or relegated to the shadows. Apart from this, your teaching in the maximum security prison in Connecticut is something you have been passionate about. What are your thoughts about the poet's role in the community?
There’s a humorous poem in Ferrying Secrets titled “A Question for Vaclav Havel” which centers around the issue of whether poetry can save the world. At readings, after the audience has had a hearty laugh at the joke that drives the poem, some of them stick around to ask, “But what do you really think?” I’ve been known to give different answers depending on my mood at the moment. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” in his great elegy to Yeats is always a good starter. Most often, however, I say that if there’s anything that can indeed save the world, it is poetry. So, there you have my answer in brief: the poet’s role in the community and the world, I believe, is nothing short of being the last stay against anarchy, blindness, and a spiraling down into endless darkness. Ha, if that heavy mantle doesn’t kill him or her, tell me what will!
Seriously now, how to fill or play this role without being entirely consumed by the savior complex is our ongoing challenge. Have we prepared ourselves diligently to be the “legislators” Shelley had in mind? Have we looked squarely at the deadly fruit of hubris and resolutely turned away? Have we meditated long enough on Keats’ dictum about truth and beauty to be able to live our lives as if this is “all we need to know”? To be true to ourselves as well as be responsible stewards of creation? Do we have what it takes to help undo “the folded lie” that Auden warns us about? Or write poems which, following Milosz’s passion, “save nations and people”? Now, if THIS expectation doesn’t kill him or her, tell me what in the world can?!
Better come down from these Parnassian heights and step into the marketplace. That is, from the rarefied air of high ordination to the dirt and din of the world where poets apparently don’t matter or, at best, must sell their wares alongside other heisters peddling trinkets. For almost two decades now, I’ve been at the heart of a poetic community in downtown Stamford. We’ve met every week at Curley’s, a modest ‘little-engine-that-could’ diner, to share our lives in poems. One of the four anthologies we published over this tumultuous period of unimaginable national and local political chicanery and predatory corporate practices designed to wipe out the small guy is titled Eating Our Hearts Out. That says it all. It names poetry and poetic activity—what it is, what it does, how it helps when nothing else will. It stands in strong contrast and opposition to the power and privilege of the rich as well as to the Hallmark culture around us with its bland, sentimental, partial truths and airy nothings. Our group welcomes all and sundry—from would-be poets to wounded people, men and women in rehab, the old and young seeking community. It enables the emotionally and spiritually disabled to regain a measure of their humanity. Therapeutic? Incidentally so, perhaps. There’s always healing, isn’t there, in opening oneself to the truth and beauty of one’s elemental self?
Speaking of which, there’s nothing more stripped down, raw and ground-zero than the self in prison. Following a Dostoyevskian insight, the Russian rebel rock group Pussy Riot routinely asks its hosts on their international concert tours to take them directly to the local prison. They have rightly decided that we as a society reveal who we are by the way we treat our fallen brothers and sisters. Prison is a dark place. It is where humans are warehoused, entombed, silenced when not killed. Generations of artists and poets, skilled in the use of self-expressive tools, have helped them reclaim and recover their voice, their name, their self. I’ve had the rewarding experience of working with these men for the last decade and a half. I often wonder if whatever I give them as a poet can ever come close in value to what I receive from them: not just an insight into resilience—how deep must a man dig to summon the strength to face a life term, cut off from life?—but also into human depth. There’s a deepening of the soul in some of them that one may ascribe only to mahatmas. How many of those do we see walking under our open skies? A young man in one of my groups wrote: “I haunt myself daily, waiting to be revealed.” How does one begin to unpack the implications of this statement? Where does one end? The poet certainly has a role to play in this “disappeared” community. It won’t do to romanticize the men behind bars. But it may serve us all well to listen to them should the opportunity present itself. The news we bring back from the edge of their darkness may well turn out to be a vital part of the news of the universe, news that saves us.
As in the case of my work at the diner or in prison, the small press I’ve run since 1986 has also striven to help individuals find their voice. The communitarian aspect of this enterprise is self-evident. The writers we’ve had the privilege of publishing have gone on to shine and occupy an important role in their respective communities. You, Pramila, are a sterling example of this. Following the publication by Yuganta Press of your first book of poems Thirtha, you went on write powerfully as a prolific, totally engaged poet, your voice, especially as the Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, speaking for others while at the same time exhorting them to find their own in a world sorely in need of culture, clarity, beauty, justice, and healing.
That was a long response to your question regarding my sense of the poet’s role in the community. Obviously, it has many aspects to it. If I were pressed to cite a crucial one for me, I’d say that I often see myself as an agent provocateur. Not a pestilential ideologue, I hope, but one who seldom misses an opportunity to question the status quo. To do this with conviction, force, wit, humor, and elegance, that is, without lapsing into a propagandist rant, is a challenge, but one worth taking on.
3. Some people believe that poetry cannot bring about social and political change. Yet we see in countries like Nicaragua, poets are front and center in the attempts to bring about change. Do South Asian poets in the US have the capacity to do this?
Only poetry that’s sentimental frippery fails to bring about change. Earlier I mentioned the Hallmark card. Despite the pleasure or solace it may afford a class of people, on the whole it’s an irrelevance, if not a potentially harmful distraction. But serious, engaged poetry has always been at the heart of significant change, be it personal or collective, be it social or political. The history of revolutions and freedom movements all over the world provides ample evidence of the crucial role writers have played in bringing about a transformation of consciousness. The names of Whitman, Tagore, Bharati, Neruda, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Darwish, Marquez, Ginsberg, Szymborska come readily to mind. Your experience in Nicaragua and mine in Colombia and other Latin American countries attests to this basic cultural fact.
South Asian writers, poets, and teachers in this country already have an impressive track record as agents of change, be it in their communities or among the generations of students they’ve taught. They have the ability to bring about change just as effectively as members of any other ethnic or racial group in the U.S. Their continuing influence in affecting thought and sensibility, however, will depend on the depth with which they feel and assert their difference from the mainstream or the dominant cultural norm. This is important to note. Movements such as Black Lives Matter or #MeToo bring home to us the need to clearly define and hold on to one’s identity, not let it be whitewashed or broad-brushed into a homogeneity, into a flattened-out global culture. It’s the identity that refuses to be defined by outside forces and reigning cultural powerbrokers. It names itself. It claims itself. It owns itself. South Asian writers in America need to do more than merely point to a common geographic origin. We need to write from that place within us where South Asia, through its own rich, tortured, multivalent and diverse stories, collective myths, and history, shapes a unique sensibility and vision which has the capability of inseminating American culture, goading it, so to say, into newness—away from its parochial thinking to one that sees difference and diversity as nourishing sources without which we will all die a collective cultural death. What about our common humanity? one might ask. Of course, there’s nothing more important than that. Yet, the only way that idea can be rescued from vacuity is by exposing it to the specific textures and contours of our experience as South Asians. For instance, a visiting Dalit poet, who by throwing light on the oppression of her people in India as well as in the immigrant communities in the US, has the power to provoke and stimulate a re-evaluation of racism, classism and casteism in the U.S., opening the door to reform. A South Asian feminist drawing powerful parallels between the painful marginalization of women in South Asia and their counterparts here in the western world may radically politicize and possibly help write desperately needed change into legislation.
4. What is the value of making South Asian American poetry part of the curriculum in literature and creative writing in the community college and in the 4-year schools?
What I’ve just said about poetry and social and political change contains the core of the answer to this question as well. But let me add a few further observations.
Multiculturalism and diversity have occupied an important place in liberal arts education in colleges for at least thirty years. You’ve been yourself actively involved in this movement toward change. It goes without saying that South Asian American poetry would be a vital addition to all that our students are being exposed to these days. I can’t overstate the importance of the need for its inclusion. I say this because we’re at a juncture in American politics and history where there seems to be a vicious reactionary trend against inclusion. The Other is being increasingly portrayed in some quarters as the bogeyman, the enemy. Walls are going up everywhere. In view of this dangerous development—although not entirely new, it’s taking a particularly virulent turn these days—it’s all the more important now that we find ways to bring the world to our students in all its multiplicity, difference, beauty, and wonder. What better way to do it than to add South Asian American poetry to the mix?!
5. What is your advice to emerging young poets in the South Asian diaspora?
The last time I heard a group of young Indian rappers in Queens, I was bowled over by their passion. What I found stirring about their virtuoso verbal fireworks was that while venting their frustration and anger, they didn’t seem consumed by rage. What they were doing was hammering away for peace and justice, for the dream of an embracing family of brothers and sisters. If I have any right to advise the young poets of the diaspora, I’d say, “Keep on keepin’ on”!
I might also urge them to find their unique, unrepeatable South Asian self. This takes work. They must know who they are before than can write or sing out of a productive and creative difference, one that does not alienate as much as advance the rich complexity of human community.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, I’d hope that as they attempt to tell their stories in this hyper-fast, noisy global culture, they’d find a sanctuary of inner stillness. Our best poems rise from a depth beyond culture and politics where words strive to give shape to the mystery at the heart of things. Poems that deliver this, paradoxically, ripen on the bough of silence. I believe it is important to be attuned to it if our poems are not to be mere passing things.
6. Do you think poetry can transform us? Can you give us an example from your own experience?
Of course, it can. It does. Obviously, I’m biased. However, there are so many people to whom poetry doesn’t speak at all. Perhaps, it’s partly because, even though it may not appear to be so, poetry is a special language. If we don’t get it instinctively, we must be taught its ways. But once we understand its unique character—the magic of words shaping, containing, and expressing worlds, big and small—there’s no way we wouldn’t be deeply stirred, entertained, provoked, touched, and changed by it.
The year I came to the U.S. in 1968 as a twenty-three-year old was clearly not “a very good year” for the Vietnamese who were being bombed to hell. But for me, out of my motherland for the first time, it was a year of profound discoveries. I was fortunate to have the best poets of the generation troop through Stony Brook: Ginsberg, Lowell, Duncan, Levertov and others. Among them was Gary Snyder, fresh from his experience as a Buddhist practitioner in Japan. Amid the sound of music and smoke of weed, Snyder spoke of his love of nature. He spoke so movingly about trees that I was inspired to join a small group of students to go stop a bulldozer from razing a grove of trees for the projected new Administration building. Snyder’s poems had raised our consciousness and impelled us to do whatever we could to protect nature. The fact that our small, idealistic act finally ended in failure is a different matter. It has little to do with the real transformative power of poetry.
Lest I go on interminably about a subject dear to me, let me end with this little story of an experience when I taught poetry to ten-year-old children in Stamford in the late 80s. One morning a severe case of laryngitis made me lose my voice. In class, I mimed my way to a question: How does it feel not to have your voice? The kids wrote in response. One little Black kid piped up: “I feel like a cow with no moo”! He’d nailed it! Without poetry, without my essential voice, I too feel like a cow with no moo. Poetry is my moo. When I’m happy I walk around the house saying Moo, moo. When I’m sad, I do the same. Moo, moo! You understand this, Pramila. That’s what I meant in response to your first question when I said poetry is my way of life, part of my deepest self and the arena of all transformation.
Writing for me is a way of life, my sadhana, my unswerving companion. I’m sure this is true for you as well, Pramila. It helps me define my deepest self along with its cluster of playful, raunchy, poignant, witty, joyful, raging and sensitive selves—all the while opening a path to a continuous, passionate engagement with the world and its rollercoaster of absurdity, hope, madness, joy, and despair. This has been so ever since I seriously put pen to paper. Hence, I’d say both Ferrying Secrets and Dropping Death, published only a decade apart while drawing on historical and cultural contexts separated by a whole generation, come from the same place and are marked by the same ultimate concerns.
They are, however, quite different in form, as you note. Of course, I’ve not entirely abandoned verse with its characteristic end-stopped or enjambed line breaks, but the use of prose paragraphs in Dropping Death, often compressed to the point of a tensile complexity, has been a fertile new direction for me in the last two years. Let me confess that I go through periods when I find the line break quite silly, or if not silly, all-too-predictable, possibly even feckless, in the worst cases, a flaccid bourgeois ploy, in short, a distraction, if not a curse, unless, of course, it has the whimsical brio of e.e. cummings, the technical savvy of William Carlos William or A. K. Ramanujan, the scattershot faux brilliance of Jorie Graham, or the magic of intensifying the deep reach of Carolyn Forché, or accentuating the long-boned discursiveness of Vijay Sheshadri.
I hesitate to call my blocks or bricks of language prose poems, which have a complex history. I’d rather not go there partly because that quarter of the poetry world is becoming crowded with cheap goods like a flea market. Sometimes I like to offer my coinage “paratactics” (echoing the literary device parataxis while noticeably departing from it) to suggest what I’m trying to do or the “game” I’m playing with these language units or shall I call them “stanzas,” stopping places, sufficient unto themselves yet opening windows onto universes. They are a tactic or (in the extended context of an entire book) a strategy, of trapping, capturing, or pinning down (pardon these violent images) elusive, mercurial, ineffable, complex, renegade, subliminal flows of perceptions and ideas as they bounce and ricochet, pinball-style, off the edges and boundaries of consciousness.
There was a traditional fluid consistency to the poems in Ferrying Secrets even when they differed from each other drastically in their subject matter. They were marked by a discernible music, a traceable logic, real joy, real sorrow, a suggestion of settled meaning under the overarching canopy of a humanistic vision. The paras of Dropping Death have all of these elements, yet in a form that can at best be considered tenuous or provisional, and forever poised precariously on the edge of an entropic blade. Readers ask me about my process. I tell them I’m basically working out being in medias res, nothing less, nothing more. In the middle of things… Ah, in the middle of things, I find myself… in the middle of things, I lose myself… No immigrant I nor native. Neither at home nor in exile. And what is known and what is yet unknown unravel, and even as they do, the spinning skein holds promise of all that we are and not, will ever be and not… But to speak thus is madness. Next question, please!
2. You have done some amazing work for the poetry community in the U.S., particularly in the tri-state area. As editor of Yuganta Press, you played a pivotal role in bringing so many brilliant minority poets into the limelight who might otherwise have been forgotten or relegated to the shadows. Apart from this, your teaching in the maximum security prison in Connecticut is something you have been passionate about. What are your thoughts about the poet's role in the community?
There’s a humorous poem in Ferrying Secrets titled “A Question for Vaclav Havel” which centers around the issue of whether poetry can save the world. At readings, after the audience has had a hearty laugh at the joke that drives the poem, some of them stick around to ask, “But what do you really think?” I’ve been known to give different answers depending on my mood at the moment. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” in his great elegy to Yeats is always a good starter. Most often, however, I say that if there’s anything that can indeed save the world, it is poetry. So, there you have my answer in brief: the poet’s role in the community and the world, I believe, is nothing short of being the last stay against anarchy, blindness, and a spiraling down into endless darkness. Ha, if that heavy mantle doesn’t kill him or her, tell me what will!
Seriously now, how to fill or play this role without being entirely consumed by the savior complex is our ongoing challenge. Have we prepared ourselves diligently to be the “legislators” Shelley had in mind? Have we looked squarely at the deadly fruit of hubris and resolutely turned away? Have we meditated long enough on Keats’ dictum about truth and beauty to be able to live our lives as if this is “all we need to know”? To be true to ourselves as well as be responsible stewards of creation? Do we have what it takes to help undo “the folded lie” that Auden warns us about? Or write poems which, following Milosz’s passion, “save nations and people”? Now, if THIS expectation doesn’t kill him or her, tell me what in the world can?!
Better come down from these Parnassian heights and step into the marketplace. That is, from the rarefied air of high ordination to the dirt and din of the world where poets apparently don’t matter or, at best, must sell their wares alongside other heisters peddling trinkets. For almost two decades now, I’ve been at the heart of a poetic community in downtown Stamford. We’ve met every week at Curley’s, a modest ‘little-engine-that-could’ diner, to share our lives in poems. One of the four anthologies we published over this tumultuous period of unimaginable national and local political chicanery and predatory corporate practices designed to wipe out the small guy is titled Eating Our Hearts Out. That says it all. It names poetry and poetic activity—what it is, what it does, how it helps when nothing else will. It stands in strong contrast and opposition to the power and privilege of the rich as well as to the Hallmark culture around us with its bland, sentimental, partial truths and airy nothings. Our group welcomes all and sundry—from would-be poets to wounded people, men and women in rehab, the old and young seeking community. It enables the emotionally and spiritually disabled to regain a measure of their humanity. Therapeutic? Incidentally so, perhaps. There’s always healing, isn’t there, in opening oneself to the truth and beauty of one’s elemental self?
Speaking of which, there’s nothing more stripped down, raw and ground-zero than the self in prison. Following a Dostoyevskian insight, the Russian rebel rock group Pussy Riot routinely asks its hosts on their international concert tours to take them directly to the local prison. They have rightly decided that we as a society reveal who we are by the way we treat our fallen brothers and sisters. Prison is a dark place. It is where humans are warehoused, entombed, silenced when not killed. Generations of artists and poets, skilled in the use of self-expressive tools, have helped them reclaim and recover their voice, their name, their self. I’ve had the rewarding experience of working with these men for the last decade and a half. I often wonder if whatever I give them as a poet can ever come close in value to what I receive from them: not just an insight into resilience—how deep must a man dig to summon the strength to face a life term, cut off from life?—but also into human depth. There’s a deepening of the soul in some of them that one may ascribe only to mahatmas. How many of those do we see walking under our open skies? A young man in one of my groups wrote: “I haunt myself daily, waiting to be revealed.” How does one begin to unpack the implications of this statement? Where does one end? The poet certainly has a role to play in this “disappeared” community. It won’t do to romanticize the men behind bars. But it may serve us all well to listen to them should the opportunity present itself. The news we bring back from the edge of their darkness may well turn out to be a vital part of the news of the universe, news that saves us.
As in the case of my work at the diner or in prison, the small press I’ve run since 1986 has also striven to help individuals find their voice. The communitarian aspect of this enterprise is self-evident. The writers we’ve had the privilege of publishing have gone on to shine and occupy an important role in their respective communities. You, Pramila, are a sterling example of this. Following the publication by Yuganta Press of your first book of poems Thirtha, you went on write powerfully as a prolific, totally engaged poet, your voice, especially as the Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, speaking for others while at the same time exhorting them to find their own in a world sorely in need of culture, clarity, beauty, justice, and healing.
That was a long response to your question regarding my sense of the poet’s role in the community. Obviously, it has many aspects to it. If I were pressed to cite a crucial one for me, I’d say that I often see myself as an agent provocateur. Not a pestilential ideologue, I hope, but one who seldom misses an opportunity to question the status quo. To do this with conviction, force, wit, humor, and elegance, that is, without lapsing into a propagandist rant, is a challenge, but one worth taking on.
3. Some people believe that poetry cannot bring about social and political change. Yet we see in countries like Nicaragua, poets are front and center in the attempts to bring about change. Do South Asian poets in the US have the capacity to do this?
Only poetry that’s sentimental frippery fails to bring about change. Earlier I mentioned the Hallmark card. Despite the pleasure or solace it may afford a class of people, on the whole it’s an irrelevance, if not a potentially harmful distraction. But serious, engaged poetry has always been at the heart of significant change, be it personal or collective, be it social or political. The history of revolutions and freedom movements all over the world provides ample evidence of the crucial role writers have played in bringing about a transformation of consciousness. The names of Whitman, Tagore, Bharati, Neruda, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Darwish, Marquez, Ginsberg, Szymborska come readily to mind. Your experience in Nicaragua and mine in Colombia and other Latin American countries attests to this basic cultural fact.
South Asian writers, poets, and teachers in this country already have an impressive track record as agents of change, be it in their communities or among the generations of students they’ve taught. They have the ability to bring about change just as effectively as members of any other ethnic or racial group in the U.S. Their continuing influence in affecting thought and sensibility, however, will depend on the depth with which they feel and assert their difference from the mainstream or the dominant cultural norm. This is important to note. Movements such as Black Lives Matter or #MeToo bring home to us the need to clearly define and hold on to one’s identity, not let it be whitewashed or broad-brushed into a homogeneity, into a flattened-out global culture. It’s the identity that refuses to be defined by outside forces and reigning cultural powerbrokers. It names itself. It claims itself. It owns itself. South Asian writers in America need to do more than merely point to a common geographic origin. We need to write from that place within us where South Asia, through its own rich, tortured, multivalent and diverse stories, collective myths, and history, shapes a unique sensibility and vision which has the capability of inseminating American culture, goading it, so to say, into newness—away from its parochial thinking to one that sees difference and diversity as nourishing sources without which we will all die a collective cultural death. What about our common humanity? one might ask. Of course, there’s nothing more important than that. Yet, the only way that idea can be rescued from vacuity is by exposing it to the specific textures and contours of our experience as South Asians. For instance, a visiting Dalit poet, who by throwing light on the oppression of her people in India as well as in the immigrant communities in the US, has the power to provoke and stimulate a re-evaluation of racism, classism and casteism in the U.S., opening the door to reform. A South Asian feminist drawing powerful parallels between the painful marginalization of women in South Asia and their counterparts here in the western world may radically politicize and possibly help write desperately needed change into legislation.
4. What is the value of making South Asian American poetry part of the curriculum in literature and creative writing in the community college and in the 4-year schools?
What I’ve just said about poetry and social and political change contains the core of the answer to this question as well. But let me add a few further observations.
Multiculturalism and diversity have occupied an important place in liberal arts education in colleges for at least thirty years. You’ve been yourself actively involved in this movement toward change. It goes without saying that South Asian American poetry would be a vital addition to all that our students are being exposed to these days. I can’t overstate the importance of the need for its inclusion. I say this because we’re at a juncture in American politics and history where there seems to be a vicious reactionary trend against inclusion. The Other is being increasingly portrayed in some quarters as the bogeyman, the enemy. Walls are going up everywhere. In view of this dangerous development—although not entirely new, it’s taking a particularly virulent turn these days—it’s all the more important now that we find ways to bring the world to our students in all its multiplicity, difference, beauty, and wonder. What better way to do it than to add South Asian American poetry to the mix?!
5. What is your advice to emerging young poets in the South Asian diaspora?
The last time I heard a group of young Indian rappers in Queens, I was bowled over by their passion. What I found stirring about their virtuoso verbal fireworks was that while venting their frustration and anger, they didn’t seem consumed by rage. What they were doing was hammering away for peace and justice, for the dream of an embracing family of brothers and sisters. If I have any right to advise the young poets of the diaspora, I’d say, “Keep on keepin’ on”!
I might also urge them to find their unique, unrepeatable South Asian self. This takes work. They must know who they are before than can write or sing out of a productive and creative difference, one that does not alienate as much as advance the rich complexity of human community.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, I’d hope that as they attempt to tell their stories in this hyper-fast, noisy global culture, they’d find a sanctuary of inner stillness. Our best poems rise from a depth beyond culture and politics where words strive to give shape to the mystery at the heart of things. Poems that deliver this, paradoxically, ripen on the bough of silence. I believe it is important to be attuned to it if our poems are not to be mere passing things.
6. Do you think poetry can transform us? Can you give us an example from your own experience?
Of course, it can. It does. Obviously, I’m biased. However, there are so many people to whom poetry doesn’t speak at all. Perhaps, it’s partly because, even though it may not appear to be so, poetry is a special language. If we don’t get it instinctively, we must be taught its ways. But once we understand its unique character—the magic of words shaping, containing, and expressing worlds, big and small—there’s no way we wouldn’t be deeply stirred, entertained, provoked, touched, and changed by it.
The year I came to the U.S. in 1968 as a twenty-three-year old was clearly not “a very good year” for the Vietnamese who were being bombed to hell. But for me, out of my motherland for the first time, it was a year of profound discoveries. I was fortunate to have the best poets of the generation troop through Stony Brook: Ginsberg, Lowell, Duncan, Levertov and others. Among them was Gary Snyder, fresh from his experience as a Buddhist practitioner in Japan. Amid the sound of music and smoke of weed, Snyder spoke of his love of nature. He spoke so movingly about trees that I was inspired to join a small group of students to go stop a bulldozer from razing a grove of trees for the projected new Administration building. Snyder’s poems had raised our consciousness and impelled us to do whatever we could to protect nature. The fact that our small, idealistic act finally ended in failure is a different matter. It has little to do with the real transformative power of poetry.
Lest I go on interminably about a subject dear to me, let me end with this little story of an experience when I taught poetry to ten-year-old children in Stamford in the late 80s. One morning a severe case of laryngitis made me lose my voice. In class, I mimed my way to a question: How does it feel not to have your voice? The kids wrote in response. One little Black kid piped up: “I feel like a cow with no moo”! He’d nailed it! Without poetry, without my essential voice, I too feel like a cow with no moo. Poetry is my moo. When I’m happy I walk around the house saying Moo, moo. When I’m sad, I do the same. Moo, moo! You understand this, Pramila. That’s what I meant in response to your first question when I said poetry is my way of life, part of my deepest self and the arena of all transformation.