|
|
Ziaul Karim, the literary editor of Dhaka’s leading English-language newspaper The Daily Star, talks to the celebrated young poet Sudeep Sen. His bilingual English-Bangla volume -- A Blank Letter -- Ekti Khali Chithi -- was published in Bangladesh to much critical acclaim earlier this year. His last book, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) was awarded the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA). Four new chapbooks were published this year in the United States -- Retracing American Contours, Almanac, Lines of Desires, and, In Another Tongue. Sen was on a literary tour in The Balkans where his work was translated into Macedonian and Slovenian languages. He was invited to read at the world’s oldest poetry festival, The Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia, as well as at the prestigious Vilenica Writers Festival in Slovenia.
“Art in its purest form never reveals all”, writes Sudeep Sen, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Indian and international poetry circles, as evident in the unfathomable depth and beauty of a ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ in a poem by that name. This inspired line by the poet also serves as a fascinating commentary on his poems. Sen essentially loves to express himself in a clear, crisp, logical fashion, while building his ideas line by line, and stanza by stanza. The belief that ambiguity is at the core of poetic beauty is not true for Sudeep Sen. His poetic beauty works at a very different level.
However he may conceive a poem, the final result is always a well-knit fabric. If you try unravelling the threads of the fabric itself, it will gently reveal subtle layers which otherwise go unnoticed to an everyday eye. It is worth comparing his poems to a treasure-chestone that appears simple, concrete, and well-constructed but upon opening it, it starts to “slow-release” its many secrets, splendours, and gifts. The voice in his poems is soft, gentle, though persuasiveone which murmurs and hums its mantra into our ear, a mantra that is, to quote the end of the same poem, “poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.”
ZK: You have a penchant for digging deep into lifes experiences, or at least the Sudeep Sen as he appears to me as a poet, loves to discover the intricate mysteries of living. You are basically a poet whose voice is understated. Even though you are politically conscious and aware, you are not overtly political. Are you a cerebral poet?
SS: I try very hard not to sound too political or overly cerebral. In fact when I write poetry and revise them, this is an aspect that becomes very important to me as I dont want to sound either overly politicized leaning one way or the other, or consciously cerebral. I think that the whole point of a poem is lost if you cannot appeal to a wide cross-section of readers.
Different readers with different backgrounds bring with them a unique personal sensibility by which they understand and appreciate a piece of art and all of them have a perfectly valid point of view. I imagine my audience as anybody who is literate and culturally-inclined in the most widest sense of the words/he could be a banker, teacher, sports person, model, ice-cream seller, or working in the garment industry. I definitely do not write specifically for the English departments of universities, or students of English literature.
I write because I enjoy writing, because I enjoy language, because I enjoy how words sound when they are strung together in an interesting manner. If one consciously tries to insert sexy politically-correct terminology or jargon, references which largely an English literature student (or an academic/critic) understands, then I think I would be terribly limiting myself. I would feel claustrophobic if I just dwell in the inward world of academic discourse. My interests are serious, and at same time much widersports, popular culture, alternative music and drama, underground literature, and so on.
There is a lot of politics, comment, perhaps even a pinch of intellectualization in my poem show can one avoid what is around you in a daily sense. However, what I try to do is not make them obvious. And that can be quite hard because having written the poem/s, subverting the obvious is a serious challenge. Being understated and quiet is much more interesting to me than the other way around.
Often one reads poetry which sound like statements, as if the only aim of poetry is to give expression to a set of ideas or agendas. That in its own myopic terms does not interest me enough, as that can be done by a commercial political speechwriter or ad-agency copywriter. To me, if you have an interesting thought, then how can you write about it without being obvious or blatantthere lies the challenge for me. So, its a question of writing in a very textured way, with multiple levels, with various layers, all overlapping and distinct at the same time, as well as being lucid.
Back
to top
ZK: Are you obliquely referring to Coleridges maxim “poetry is best words in best order”, or is that subconscious when you write? From an architectural point of view, it seems Louis MacNeice has heavily influenced you.SS: The architecture of a poem is very important to me, partly because of my own inherent interest in architecture itself. Had I not read English literature, I would have been an architect now. In fact, it was very very close choosing between the profession of being an architect and teaching literature and film.
To me, a poem should not only be linguistically challenging, but how it appears visually is a fairly important factor to me. There are two kinds of structuresone of course is the use of rhyme and various rhyme-schemes, and the other is visual rhymes. And then, depending on how important structure is to that particular poem, it can have a considerably significant impact.
For instance, in the poem ‘New York Times’, I invented a rhyme-scheme abxba cdxdc efxfe ... and so on ... the middle line, i.e. the third x line, in fact is the mirror-line which reflects the first & second lines with the fourth & fifth lines of each stanza. The other reason I used the five-line stanza-format in the poem is because the city of New York itself has five boroughs Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, etc. The other thing about this poem isif you turn the poem 90 degrees on its central axis, then a different kind of mirror-line mimics the shape of the island of Manhattan itself and its reflection on the surrounding waters. Another poem, a long sequence, Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio as a verse-play, and premiered in London as a stage-play by Border Crossings) is based on a series of eight etchings of a British artist, Peter Standen.
The entire poem is set in rhymed couplets reflecting the presence of two principal characters -- man /woman, lover/other, life/death and the other essential dualities. But they do not appear as obvious rhymes (like the translucent choral refrains in the poem) -- they are wrap-around rhymes as opposed to end-stopped rhymes. The four stanzas in each section reflect the four seasons, the four side of a frame, the four corner of a visual space. I also use alternating line-indentation for each couplet and stanza with the idea that the entire poem works on a cyclical principle. So, if you join all the stanzas together using the left-justified margin as a reference plane, they in fact fit in a perfect dove-tail joint.
But in the end however, typography and structure of a poem is just as vital as the inner-spirit and content of any poem. Back to top
ZK: Right from the beginning of your career, your poems are brilliant examples of great control as regards rhythm and syntax, which is a testimony to your own interest in poetry as a craft. Later you went through creative writing programmes at American universities. Did your interest in the architectural aspect of poetry inspire you to go for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing?
SS: Thank you, those are very kind words.... The creative writing classes I took in the United States were much later. I first started writing during my boyhood in Delhi. In India in those days, creative writing was only deemed as a hobby, albeit a laudable one. Nobody took it seriously, certainly not in a career or an academic sense. So by the time I went to America and took my first creative writing class, I already had a typical South Asian bias against the teaching of creative writing itself. I thought that how can anybody teach you how to write poetryyou either had it in you or notor so I was led to believe until then.
But what I did learn when I was enrolled in these workshops were aspects of craft, prosody, stylistics, and technique. It is very important to know and learn these things, and I cant over-emphasize their importance. We also read sheaves and sheaves of contemporary poetry which is very exciting for me. A lot of bad name to modern poetry has come about because people think that they can just write a sentence, break it up, and then rearrange it in a column-format. It may be poetry for some people, but for most it is not. These amateur poetasters do not necessarily have the skill, technique, or the inclination to actually write in formal stanzaic patterns. When I say formal, I dont necessarily mean that it has to be always rhymedthere is blank verse, free verse, concrete poetry, other kinds of structures involved. I think creative writing classes are useful both if you are particularly interested in the aspects of prosody, as well as it teaches you to think seriously and critically about contemporary writing itself.
ZK: In the post-colonial literary scene, poets and novelists writing in English from the non-English speaking world, do suffer in most cases, from a sense of displacementthis is a strong phenomenon in the writings from the South Asian diaspora. You are remarkably free from such feelings of being uprooted. One discovers that in the pages of your various books, you move smoothly between one home to another.
SS: I think the reason why you dont see any sense of displacement in my writing is because Im actually a very rooted person. My rootedness comes from my family and the way I was brought up. Im first and foremost a Bengali writer, who just happens to write in another Indian language that is English. So, my cultural and intellectual spaces are very much defined by the fact that I come from a thoroughly Bengali milieu.
I am also fortunate to have grown up in a tri-lingual situation -- I spoke Bengali at home, Hindi on the streets, and English at school not by design but by circumstance. So, this wonderfully tripartite situation was such that I could slip in and out of several mother-tongues and languages at the same time it certainly made it linguistically richer, and we as South Asians are very lucky because of that.
I also come from a typically liberal educated middle-class Bengali family who have always been an immense source of strength for me. So, that kind jargon-ridden “post-colonial” displacement you are talking about is very alien as a concept to me, and even more difficult for a person with my background to rationally understand. The other aspect of this is that I grew up in the capital city of Delhi which is a very cosmopolitan place it has a curious mix of the First and Third World atmosphere depending on where or what you are engaged in at any given moment. So wherever I traveled subsequently, be it a cosmopolitan place or a rural one, I was in some manner or the other, somewhat familiar with that new place from beforeat least I was never in a state of cultural shock, however remote.
We, in India, have been exposed to the western culture, along with our very own, from our early childhoodso neither of them are unfamiliar to us. So, when one is actually inhabiting these so-called Western (and Eastern spaces), they are places one feels equally at home. In fact I quite enjoy being in both worlds. I love the taste of singara, sandesh, kabab and phuchka... at the same time I love blue cheese, meat roasts, wine and single malt. I dont personally see any conflict in these two worlds, rather I feel lucky and infinitely richer in experience, since my taste-buds as well as my intellectual and emotional terrain, can accommodate all of that happily and simultaneously.
ZK: Is it then, your trans-national self, that writes “I / am going home once again from another / home, escaping the weave of reality into another / one, one that gently reminds and stalls / to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul”? SS: The poem ‘Flying Home’ partly reflects the trans-national quality I have been talking about. Many writers and artists nowadays are in this sort of situation. When Im going from one home to another in a plane, which in itself is such a peculiar kind of controlled space, it is a sort of perennially-transitional home, a home that is elasticit all depends on how you visualize space and how you demarcate geography. To me, that in itself is an interesting concept, one that allows for an expansive canvas. So, I suspect there is something inherent in me that makes it very difficult for me to feel displaced. Back to top
ZK: Poetry and dance are constant sources for your poetic inspiration. Through your poetry you constantly refer to other forms of art and its architectural beauty, e.g. in the poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’. SS: Absolutely. It accurately reflects my penchant for various sorts of art-forms, in this particular case, the South Indian classical dance. But Im equally interested in music, film, theatre, live and performance art, and more. If a particular dance or a particular painting, or even a particular piece of dramatic writing moves me, I may write about it directly or obliquely. And this poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ is a clear case in point. An aspect of the poem that may interest you is the architectural and topographical mapping of its poetic structure. I invented another rhyme-scheme for this poem that reflects the actual dance-step pattern on stage that is in consonance with the bols and tals, in this case -- ta dhin ta thai thai ta -- abacca dedffd ... -- the actual rhyme-scheme of the poem itself. That of course is only one thing. The more important thing is that I was completely moved and entranced by the performance, skill and beauty of the dancer herself, Leela Samsom so I had to write the poem. It was almost written for me by her, I didnt have a choice... the whole process was quite magical really.
As is perhaps evident, I do enjoy writing about other art-forms which have inspired or moved me in some way or the other. In fact, my new collection of poems I am currently working is called Blue Nude. The title poem is a sequence that have been inspired by Henri Matisses cobalt-blue cut-out figures by the same name. Then there are other poems in the that book that were inspired by photographs, drama, film and other media. So one can say that the central unifying theme of this book-in-progress, comes from my pleasure and response to the genre of creative arts itself.
ZK: By the time Postmarked India was published by HarperCollins, you had already polished and crafted you own poetic voice. You were awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in the UK and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA bears testimony to that fact. But somehow I detect that Louis MacNeice’s influence still seemed to linger on.SS: I am not entirely sure whether I agree with that last comment, in fact I dontvarious critics have said various things I believe you in this case you are referring to the poet and literary critic, Angus Calder, who compared me with Louis MacNeice in The Scotsman. It was an interesting comparison, but Calder perhaps was referring to the “variousness” in my writing, its range and latitude. I never thought that I was ever inspired by him or wrote like him. Similarly, other people have written that they have found influences/similarities of T.S.Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Hugh MacDiarmid and W.H.Auden in my poems. This could all be temporarily very flattering, but at the end it is completely up to the reader or the critic as to how and what they feel about a particular piece of my writing. I dont think I have at all been influenced by any one of them, even though I admire their writing enormously.
No one poet has directly influenced me, and this is evident in the kinds of poetry I like which tends to be rather varied and eclectic I adore the poetry of Jibanananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, the French symbolists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Verlaine; Rilke, Neruda, Paz, Walcott, Heaney... it is too varied to list them all. Also the ticker-tape is so dissimilar and expansive that I cant think of any one or two who, could have possibly influenced me.
Again, if have to find one source or fountainhead of influence it would actually be Bengali culture that has affected me ultimately, directly and indirectly. For instance, my interest and sense of rhythm and rhyme comes from my very early childhood through my mother and grandmother. They used to recite stories or sing lullabies to me, and I regularly heard them chant their prayers with a typical Bengali rounded lilt. All these were very inherent rhythms which quietly slipped into my psychological system by a curious process of osmosis. So, these perhaps are my influencesvery localized and genetic, completely spontaneous. However, the received and learned knowledge as well as the exposure they subsequently lentwhat I was talking about earlieris a very different sort of thing altogether. Back to top
ZK: Your voice as a poet is very subdued. And your poems are soliloquies?
SS: I would just replace the word “subdued” by the word “understated” which is perhaps more apt. I find that there is a lot of power in understated writing. If you write in a dramatic fashion then you are just advertising the superficial, and often there seems to be nothing very much beyond that. To me, writing ought to be a quiet kind of a thing where the reader can read and then take in its effect in a slow-release fashion, much like time-lapse photography. It this sort of style I am personally attracted to. It is so much more effective, because once you influence a person gently over time, then the effect is a lot more permanent and effective, rather than someone who is impressive one minute and altogether forgettable the next minutelike certain fashions or trends, or even like a loud noise which soon disappears. A slow well-paced murmur, or an elongated baritone of a hum, actually stays in the sensibility of a human being a lot longer and is perhaps more meaningful.
ZK: Does emotion compel you to write? Or do you wait for the right mood to inspire you?
SS: I think it is a combination of both. Being a writer is like being a strange kind of a beast. Writers tend to have invisible antennas on top of their head which pick up radar-signals odd-things while you are looking at ordinary scenes, snatches of other conversations, a glimpse of something somewhereso the ordinary everyday scenario acts as a rich well-spring of ideas for me. Even as I speak to you, I might be simultaneously processing an entirely different idea or thought that might have just struck meit is a complex parallel process. These, of course, may be just fragments, or overheard figments, voices, or images. If it is something strong and compelling, I generally try and make an effort to write it down. I dont necessarily carry a note book, so it could be on the back of a bill, or on the palm of my hand. If I am in a restaurant I would write it down on a piece of napkin, or find an excuse to get some toilet paper to scribble on it.
So when I sit down to write, I have all theses ideas and phrases in front of me. Sitting down and writing requires discipline because writing doesn’t just come from the middle of nowhere that is just the inspiration perhaps. But having had the inspiration you need time to put it all together and build the piece brick by brick. I sit down with poetry two or three hours everyday and it is not necessarily that I write a new poem every time very often I dont, but I could be revising poems that I have written before, or maybe review a book of poetry, or simply just reading and enjoying a book of poetry. Its my own quiet way of staying with poetry. It is quite important to write things down when they first strike, because often I find that if I dont do that and try to remember it later, it might altogether leave me, go away or vanish. Sometimes of course, it might happen at the most oddest and inconvenient timewhen Im already in bed at four o’clock at night / morning especially if it is winter you really do not want to get out from under the duvet and go to the desk and write it down. Sometimes I feel lazy and postpone writing it down until the next day, and very often it has completely gone by then. It is always worth that extra effort to swiftly pen it down and keep it for later.
ZK: Does contemporary literary theory in any way come between you and your writing of poetry? Do theories influence your outlook?
SS: I find intelligently argued theory interesting and worth a rigorous read, but a lot of what is churned out does not inspire me at all. In some odd way, I even dislike theory especially when it is presented to a literate public making simple things overly complicated for no apparent reason. If theory has an intellectual positive base, original and rigorous, then Im keen on it, only then. But it certainly never influences my creative writing at all. In fact, it stays very very far from it.
Im constantly surprised when I read a review, critique, or an essay on my work, as to how much theory is being used these days, especially in the so-called post-colonial circuit. I am not impressed by writers who put polysyllabic jargon just for effect. Frankly this sort of writing is of no interest to me.
ZK: But certainly you have theories of your own. Just because you don’t adhere to contemporary literary theories, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a theory of your own? Certainly your responses to different stimuli are not passive. SS: You cant be passive when responding to different stimuli, especially if you posses the invisible antennas I had mentioned before if you are passive you cant be writing at all. All the writing I have done over the past fifteen years are responses to various stimuli. The published results are in front you, clearly then one is not passive.
But when it comes to literary and critical theory, of course I’m aware of what is going on around me. But I don’t let that tarnish or complicate my writing, because as I have said before they are completely separate categories and disciplines. Art should really exist independently on its own merit. Intelligent analysis and critique is surely exciting, but the two genres and purposes are entirely different. At the end, what excites me is a piece of original writing that is well-written, thought-provoking, intelligently argued. But ultimately it needs to move me, it needs to create quiet indelible waves that constantly haunts me, changes me in some slight modest way. Otherwise it is simply a cerebral exercise like playing and solving a Rubics Cube which only has limited pleasures.
* * *
ZK: You have a strong liking for fluids -- its intricate flow and glide. There are plenty of references to milk, wine, blood, juices of passion, in your poems such as ‘Single Malt’, the long poems ‘Line Breaks’ and ‘Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames’, for example. It seems you want to achieve some kind of linguistic fluidity in your poems. Your comments, please.SS: The concept of fluid itself is I think quite interesting. In a sense it is a cross-over phase, or point the of intersection, between the liquid and solid states. So, we are talking about an in-between state, a state that has its own definite rhythm, flow, deliberateness, and so on. It also is a state which typifies the unobvious. The clarity of liquid is very clear and the concreteness of solid is equally concrete.
But the fluid state is almost like a penumbra, a title of which is also a poem I have written. It is a space which allows you to do a lot because it is infinitely multi-layered -- it is much more textured, as much depends on the viscosity and density of the fluid itself. It is certainly a worthwhile, languorous, languid space to control and be creative with it.
ZK: Your taste as a poet is very broad, open, and wide-visioned. You are a poet who cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed.
SS: Is that a good thing or a bad thing, i.e. the fact that you can't put me in a pigeon-hole?
ZK: As a reader, I have enjoyed the varied landscapes that you portray, the stream of emotions and themes that you give expression to. The good thing about all this is that Sudeep Sen is not a prisoner of a specific style, or a set of images, or even an agenda.
SS: Well, I suspect you have answered your question yourself. Which is precisely why I was trying to ask you the question back. I'm glad that one can't pigeon-hole me, because my interest, my themes, my forms, my rhythms are very very varied indeed.
I still think inspite having written a fair bit for the past 15 years or so, I am still in the continuous process of growing and learning new things. Every time I work on a new book, I realise that there is so much more to learn, and so much more to explore.
When it comes to writing itself, it is always a progression -- you start from point A, to point B, and onwards. One of the most interesting grammatical punctuation for me is actually the ellipse, the three dots [...] which simply says --as such, nothing ends. It makes one's way of looking at things as well as one's own writing organic. I feel it is a good thing because otherwise if you work in a very myopic kind of a way then you are only narrowing your scope further and further. Whereas simply being open to growth, you have the entire canvas and palette open, to choose from. And that is very useful and at the same time unconstraining.
ZK: Your early interest in the external architecture of poetry, i.e. the overt formal construction of poetry over the years has grown and graduated into an internal, much quieter, perhaps spiritual, and sparer organization of poetry.
SS: You have put that quite well in fact. In my early poems, the architecture of the poem itself was visually much more apparent. Whereas as time has gone on, I have been able to be much more subtle in my writing. It is essentially because of a greater experience, both in life and writing itself. You learn how to use craft and words, and hopefully you get better and better to a point that you can in fact hide very complex formal-constructs in a poem to an uninitiated eye, one that is only apparent if you dig deep into the skin and tissue of the poem.
Of course, there is also a shift in sensibility, in the sense that I was much younger then. Life's circumstances change, with that your sensibility changes and grows. I think these aspects are also reflected in my later poems.
ZK: Your poems are visually rich, but they do not just end there. You have been influenced at the same time by ancient Prakrit poetry, Japanese haiku, Chinese poetry, Imagist and Metaphysical poetry. But you don't just try to stir your reader with only images. Your frames and conceits cast a deceptively soothing spell, one that goes beyond the physical as well as metaphysical reality.
SS: Certainly that tends to be very true. There is an immense visual quality in my poetry, partly influenced by the fact that I worked for many years as a film-maker. Besides, I do have more than a part-time interest in photography. As I mentioned before, architecture was an important area of interest of mine, a field I might have actually pursued as a career, but circumstances took a different turn. But I still am interested in visual and graphic art, and in the whole nature of light, photography, and fibre-optics. So all that somewhere along the line must permeate and stain my poems.
However, that's only one aspect of the poetry -- only the stretched-canvas, only the surface of the parchment where the colours you see are brightly dabbed upon. Once you go beyond that level, there is an intensely quiet, an inwardly deeper depth of field in my writing -- an aspect of my poetry which perhaps what you are alluding to. I don't know whether it is spiritual or not, but certainly it is an introspective kind of writing. So in that sense, you are right.
ZK: One of your recently published chapbooks, Almanac, contains poems corresponding to the twelve months of the year. What inspired you to write poems on the different months?
SS: It was completely accidental actually. At the time, I was trying very hard to write poems for my new-born son Aria, and I increasingly found that writing poetry for children very very difficult. One of the things that I was experiencing in my writing was -- when I was consciously trying to write for a child, I realised that I was speaking down at them rather than to them as a colleague. So, I thought the other alternative could be poems about each month of the year as a calender so that my son could learn the different months of the year in a creative way. Part of it was that.
Part of it was also that I realised that I had enough poems which had some reference to some month or the other. So, when I pulled all those poems together, some published and others unpublished, I realised there were poems which represented about eight of the months. Since I already had eight poems, I thought why not try and write four new poems relating to the remaining four months to complete the sequence. From reading the poems you would realise that not all the poems are directly related to month concerned as such. They are obliquely related to the months. For instance, there is poem called 'April's Air' which is set in Japan and about rice-harvesting that takes place in April. So, the poem conveniently fit into the April month-slot.
Similarly, ‘One Moonlight December Night’ obviously comes in the December section. But the poem, for instance, which refers to the month of May is a newish poem which I wrote for my son whose birthday falls on the 21st of that month. Even though the poem is titled ‘Aria’, the reference to people who are in the know is to the month of May. So, I had quite an enjoyable time putting this volume together.
ZK: The most difficult task for any reader of your poetry is that there is no one specific geographical location or boundary to associate you with. The landscape, seascape, and airspace that fill your poems are borderless and trans-national. There is practically no one central location that can be identified as your own personal territory in the broad sense of the term.
SS: That’s the way I have been brought up. I was brought up as a Bengali within a Bengali family-milieu, but in a non-Bengali landscape of cosmopolitan Delhi. I spoke English in school, Hindi on the streets, and Bengali at home. So, it was an essentially and inherently multi-lingual and multi-cultural space that I started from. Also the range of landscapes and topographies that influenced me were both Eastern and Western at the same time. Through literature, art, and film, I had access to the Western culture, but at the same time I was immersed in my own in India, and the East so to speak broadly. So, obviously it is very difficult to pin me down in one place. And I’m glad that is a difficult thing as it also relates to the earlier answer I gave you. As you travel both vertically and horizontally, perspectives change. It is not just the diverse landscapes in terms of different countries and topographies, but it's also diverse in terms of different levels we are talking about -- whether it is purely visual, purely cinematic, purely structural, purely architectural -- moving from one level to the other, moving from one plane to the other, some time it is two dimensional, some time it is three dimensional, some time it is much more.
The only thing that links me to some sort of centre is the ‘centre of gravity’ itself. Otherwise, the only tangible thing that links me to a centre is my own family and the Bengali culture, something that is either obliquely or directly omnipresent in my work.
ZK: The volume, Retracing American Contours, takes us back again to an American landscape, a terrain that you explored in your highly successful third book, New York Times. Why the return to the United States?
SS: The poems in Retracing American Contours are poems that were originally written in the period from 1987 to 1990, much of it around the same time as the poems in New York Times itself. Originally, I had planned for all these poems to have come out together as one volume. But since the book became very large, my British publisher thought it would be a good idea to cull out the New York based and New York related poems, to form one independent book. I went along with that idea and was very pleased about the eventual results.
So the poems in this new volume Retracing American Contours are the ones that I want to preserve from that original group that were not published in book form. Publishing them now, almost after a decade they were first born, is also a private way of visiting those places again. There are so many important events and significant memories attached to those places, that it is almost like a journey down memory-lane, but with a fresh considered perspective.
Back
to top
ZK: Your recently published volume, Lines of Desire, is stunning, quite a stylistic revelation. As a poet you strike similes and evoke metaphors that are original, cool, untainted, soothing, and the same time, urgent. In addition, they also remind one of conceits in metaphysical poetry.
SS: That is an interesting observation. Lines of Desire is basically series of very tightly written short erotic poems. In fact, I re-reading and savouring the poetry of John Donne quite a lot while writing some of the poems in this volume.
It is very difficult to write about love and passion in an original and fresh way because it is one subject that has been completely exhausted. So I wondered, how does one write about it without actually sounding old. My way of getting into it was to turn them inside out, rather than going from outside into the inside which is usually the case as it is a much safer and controllable route. I wanted to capture the raw passion and essence of the particular range of emotions, and at the same time be subtle and unobvious. Also I wanted to give these poems a meditative and chilling quality, an edge that is at the same time sharp and well as mesmerising. Back to top
ZK: Tell us about In Another Tongue -- an impressive volume of translations you have recently published, something quite new for you.
SS: In Another Tongue is my first volume of translations that gathers poetry from well known and lesser known poets from Hebrew, Macedonian, Persian, Hindi and Bengali languages. Since its publication, I have translated more -- from Dutch, Slovene, and others.
William Radice pointed out that this volume is quite a departure from what I have been engaged in the past. I have enjoyed this relatively new process a lot. Translation is at the same time very different and similar to writing original poetry. But the dynamics and energies are completely unusual and difficult to quantify when translating.
I especially enjoy translating from Bangla and Hindi -- languages I know well. It is so nice to be in a totally Bengali milieu, immersed in its people, poetry, and music. It is as though a part of me really wanted to blossom, but did not have the right context for it. Growing up in Delhi is and was truly trilingual -- Bengali, Hindi, and English are the languages I use (but understand quite a few Northern Indian languages -- Punjabi, Rajasthani, Urdu, even Gujarati and Maharastrian from Western India). When I am in the West, it is predominantly English that I am using. So when I am in Bangladesh, I absolutely enjoy being swathed in Bangla in more ways than one. One realises that English is so redundant in these parts, and thank god for that.
ZK: Your new work which is due to appear next year is a major book-length poem, Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent. It is an highly unusual and inventive work, a tour de force. How did it begin? Tell us something about its form, and the journey itself.
SS: The book-length poem -- Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent -- began on a wet August morning, as I sat in an half-sunken basement space of a partially restored fifteenth century mansion ‘Gartincaber’ in Doune (near Stirling, Scotland). Almost drunk under the spell of this space, both interior and exterior, dactyls were dictated to me by photons in the surrounding electric-charged air. It was here where my journey began. My journey continued leaving a winding trail of foot-steps, pug-marks I tried to hide, but could not. It is still an uncompleted journey, a journey that cannot be completed ... perhaps, it is part of one's own fallibility. This journey has infinitely long lines and many miles left to traverse, but I know my blood's inadequate crimson may prevent such an ambition. So I take all this as a gift, a dream. I feel constantly grateful that I have been allowed such a dream.
Along the way, I have been coloured by many sources, interests, passions, and obsessions -- some obvious and others oblique. Among them, there are overheard phrases, paintings, photographs, fragmented images, films, music, memory, poems, women, fluids, and the intoxicated air.
My alter-ego wanted to be an architect and a cartographer -- I have a more than part-time interest in science -- All these must have, in some way, influenced this poem.
I re-read many of my favourite poetry books at the time -- classics like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal; volumes by contemporary masters like Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and others. Walcott’s Omeros, Brodsky’s To Urania, Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, Donald Hall's The One Day, Jaan Kaplinski’s The Same Sea In Us All, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, Dom Moraes’s Serendip, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Middle Passage, A K Ramanujan’s Collected Poems, especially kept me company. I have used fragments from many of these poets' work throughout to punctuate the narrative, so that readers can get some sense of their world as parallel asides, just as it did for me on my journey. I was also immersed in Gray’s Anatomy, Encarta’s BodyWorks, Louis Kahn’s Sounds and Silence, Matthew Arnold and T S Eliot’s essays, John Frederick Nim’s Western Wind, .... At the time, I relied on my grandfather's trusted old compass that helped navigate my way, imaginatively plotting a course through my National Geographic map collection that lay in disarray .... My memory provided calm, as I struggled, translating Jibanananda Das’s ‘Bawnolawta Shane’ to recreate its music and passion. All of them have been guiding companions .... And so, the journey went on .... The sparse elongated structure of the poem partly reflects the strength and surety of the human vertebra and spine; much like Neruda's Odes that reflect the long-thin shape of Chile. The sections and sub-sections join together like synapses between bone and bone. The titles are translucent markers or breath pauses, not separators.
The short two-line couplets echo the two-step foot-prints, a pathway mapped on the atlas. The 12 sections correspond to the 12 bones in a human rib-cage, the 12 months in a year, the 12 hours in a day .... There are 26 bones in a human vertebrae, and the 26 parts in the poem slowly assemble themselves from a montage of tenuously strung lyrics. (The projected 206 page-length of this book would match the exact number of bones in a human body.)
This poem leaves a footprint from a perennial walk that meanders through public and private spaces -- making sense of the vicissitudes of our loves, losses, wants, desires, inadequacies -- as it maps the matrix of living and dying.
Back to top
* * *
Invention, Fusion & Balance in Sudeep Sen's Poetry
Ziaul Karim, the literary editor of Dhaka’s leading English-language newspaper The Daily Star, talks to the celebrated young poet Sudeep Sen. His bilingual English-Bangla volume -- A Blank Letter -- Ekti Khali Chithi -- was published in Bangladesh to much critical acclaim earlier this year. His last book, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) was awarded the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA). Four new chapbooks were published this year in the United States -- Retracing American Contours, Almanac, Lines of Desires, and, In Another Tongue. Sen was on a literary tour in The Balkans where his work was translated into Macedonian and Slovenian languages. He was invited to read at the world’s oldest poetry festival, The Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia, as well as at the prestigious Vilenica Writers Festival in Slovenia.
“Art in its purest form never reveals all”, writes Sudeep Sen, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Indian and international poetry circles, as evident in the unfathomable depth and beauty of a ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ in a poem by that name. This inspired line by the poet also serves as a fascinating commentary on his poems. Sen essentially loves to express himself in a clear, crisp, logical fashion, while building his ideas line by line, and stanza by stanza. The belief that ambiguity is at the core of poetic beauty is not true for Sudeep Sen. His poetic beauty works at a very different level.
However he may conceive a poem, the final result is always a well-knit fabric. If you try unravelling the threads of the fabric itself, it will gently reveal subtle layers which otherwise go unnoticed to an everyday eye. It is worth comparing his poems to a treasure-chestone that appears simple, concrete, and well-constructed but upon opening it, it starts to “slow-release” its many secrets, splendours, and gifts. The voice in his poems is soft, gentle, though persuasiveone which murmurs and hums its mantra into our ear, a mantra that is, to quote the end of the same poem, “poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.”
ZK: You have a penchant for digging deep into lifes experiences, or at least the Sudeep Sen as he appears to me as a poet, loves to discover the intricate mysteries of living. You are basically a poet whose voice is understated. Even though you are politically conscious and aware, you are not overtly political. Are you a cerebral poet?
SS: I try very hard not to sound too political or overly cerebral. In fact when I write poetry and revise them, this is an aspect that becomes very important to me as I dont want to sound either overly politicized leaning one way or the other, or consciously cerebral. I think that the whole point of a poem is lost if you cannot appeal to a wide cross-section of readers.
Different readers with different backgrounds bring with them a unique personal sensibility by which they understand and appreciate a piece of art and all of them have a perfectly valid point of view. I imagine my audience as anybody who is literate and culturally-inclined in the most widest sense of the words/he could be a banker, teacher, sports person, model, ice-cream seller, or working in the garment industry. I definitely do not write specifically for the English departments of universities, or students of English literature.
I write because I enjoy writing, because I enjoy language, because I enjoy how words sound when they are strung together in an interesting manner. If one consciously tries to insert sexy politically-correct terminology or jargon, references which largely an English literature student (or an academic/critic) understands, then I think I would be terribly limiting myself. I would feel claustrophobic if I just dwell in the inward world of academic discourse. My interests are serious, and at same time much widersports, popular culture, alternative music and drama, underground literature, and so on.
There is a lot of politics, comment, perhaps even a pinch of intellectualization in my poem show can one avoid what is around you in a daily sense. However, what I try to do is not make them obvious. And that can be quite hard because having written the poem/s, subverting the obvious is a serious challenge. Being understated and quiet is much more interesting to me than the other way around.
Often one reads poetry which sound like statements, as if the only aim of poetry is to give expression to a set of ideas or agendas. That in its own myopic terms does not interest me enough, as that can be done by a commercial political speechwriter or ad-agency copywriter. To me, if you have an interesting thought, then how can you write about it without being obvious or blatantthere lies the challenge for me. So, its a question of writing in a very textured way, with multiple levels, with various layers, all overlapping and distinct at the same time, as well as being lucid.
ZK: Are you obliquely referring to Coleridges maxim “poetry is best words in best order”, or is that subconscious when you write? From an architectural point of view, it seems Louis MacNeice has heavily influenced you.SS: The architecture of a poem is very important to me, partly because of my own inherent interest in architecture itself. Had I not read English literature, I would have been an architect now. In fact, it was very very close choosing between the profession of being an architect and teaching literature and film.
To me, a poem should not only be linguistically challenging, but how it appears visually is a fairly important factor to me. There are two kinds of structuresone of course is the use of rhyme and various rhyme-schemes, and the other is visual rhymes. And then, depending on how important structure is to that particular poem, it can have a considerably significant impact.
For instance, in the poem ‘New York Times’, I invented a rhyme-scheme abxba cdxdc efxfe ... and so on ... the middle line, i.e. the third x line, in fact is the mirror-line which reflects the first & second lines with the fourth & fifth lines of each stanza. The other reason I used the five-line stanza-format in the poem is because the city of New York itself has five boroughs Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, etc. The other thing about this poem isif you turn the poem 90 degrees on its central axis, then a different kind of mirror-line mimics the shape of the island of Manhattan itself and its reflection on the surrounding waters. Another poem, a long sequence, Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio as a verse-play, and premiered in London as a stage-play by Border Crossings) is based on a series of eight etchings of a British artist, Peter Standen.
The entire poem is set in rhymed couplets reflecting the presence of two principal characters -- man /woman, lover/other, life/death and the other essential dualities. But they do not appear as obvious rhymes (like the translucent choral refrains in the poem) -- they are wrap-around rhymes as opposed to end-stopped rhymes. The four stanzas in each section reflect the four seasons, the four side of a frame, the four corner of a visual space. I also use alternating line-indentation for each couplet and stanza with the idea that the entire poem works on a cyclical principle. So, if you join all the stanzas together using the left-justified margin as a reference plane, they in fact fit in a perfect dove-tail joint.
But in the end however, typography and structure of a poem is just as vital as the inner-spirit and content of any poem. Back to top
ZK: Right from the beginning of your career, your poems are brilliant examples of great control as regards rhythm and syntax, which is a testimony to your own interest in poetry as a craft. Later you went through creative writing programmes at American universities. Did your interest in the architectural aspect of poetry inspire you to go for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing?
SS: Thank you, those are very kind words.... The creative writing classes I took in the United States were much later. I first started writing during my boyhood in Delhi. In India in those days, creative writing was only deemed as a hobby, albeit a laudable one. Nobody took it seriously, certainly not in a career or an academic sense. So by the time I went to America and took my first creative writing class, I already had a typical South Asian bias against the teaching of creative writing itself. I thought that how can anybody teach you how to write poetryyou either had it in you or notor so I was led to believe until then.
But what I did learn when I was enrolled in these workshops were aspects of craft, prosody, stylistics, and technique. It is very important to know and learn these things, and I cant over-emphasize their importance. We also read sheaves and sheaves of contemporary poetry which is very exciting for me. A lot of bad name to modern poetry has come about because people think that they can just write a sentence, break it up, and then rearrange it in a column-format. It may be poetry for some people, but for most it is not. These amateur poetasters do not necessarily have the skill, technique, or the inclination to actually write in formal stanzaic patterns. When I say formal, I dont necessarily mean that it has to be always rhymedthere is blank verse, free verse, concrete poetry, other kinds of structures involved. I think creative writing classes are useful both if you are particularly interested in the aspects of prosody, as well as it teaches you to think seriously and critically about contemporary writing itself.
ZK: In the post-colonial literary scene, poets and novelists writing in English from the non-English speaking world, do suffer in most cases, from a sense of displacementthis is a strong phenomenon in the writings from the South Asian diaspora. You are remarkably free from such feelings of being uprooted. One discovers that in the pages of your various books, you move smoothly between one home to another.
SS: I think the reason why you dont see any sense of displacement in my writing is because Im actually a very rooted person. My rootedness comes from my family and the way I was brought up. Im first and foremost a Bengali writer, who just happens to write in another Indian language that is English. So, my cultural and intellectual spaces are very much defined by the fact that I come from a thoroughly Bengali milieu.
I am also fortunate to have grown up in a tri-lingual situation -- I spoke Bengali at home, Hindi on the streets, and English at school not by design but by circumstance. So, this wonderfully tripartite situation was such that I could slip in and out of several mother-tongues and languages at the same time it certainly made it linguistically richer, and we as South Asians are very lucky because of that.
I also come from a typically liberal educated middle-class Bengali family who have always been an immense source of strength for me. So, that kind jargon-ridden “post-colonial” displacement you are talking about is very alien as a concept to me, and even more difficult for a person with my background to rationally understand. The other aspect of this is that I grew up in the capital city of Delhi which is a very cosmopolitan place it has a curious mix of the First and Third World atmosphere depending on where or what you are engaged in at any given moment. So wherever I traveled subsequently, be it a cosmopolitan place or a rural one, I was in some manner or the other, somewhat familiar with that new place from beforeat least I was never in a state of cultural shock, however remote.
We, in India, have been exposed to the western culture, along with our very own, from our early childhoodso neither of them are unfamiliar to us. So, when one is actually inhabiting these so-called Western (and Eastern spaces), they are places one feels equally at home. In fact I quite enjoy being in both worlds. I love the taste of singara, sandesh, kabab and phuchka... at the same time I love blue cheese, meat roasts, wine and single malt. I dont personally see any conflict in these two worlds, rather I feel lucky and infinitely richer in experience, since my taste-buds as well as my intellectual and emotional terrain, can accommodate all of that happily and simultaneously.
ZK: Is it then, your trans-national self, that writes “I / am going home once again from another / home, escaping the weave of reality into another / one, one that gently reminds and stalls / to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul”? SS: The poem ‘Flying Home’ partly reflects the trans-national quality I have been talking about. Many writers and artists nowadays are in this sort of situation. When Im going from one home to another in a plane, which in itself is such a peculiar kind of controlled space, it is a sort of perennially-transitional home, a home that is elasticit all depends on how you visualize space and how you demarcate geography. To me, that in itself is an interesting concept, one that allows for an expansive canvas. So, I suspect there is something inherent in me that makes it very difficult for me to feel displaced. Back to top
ZK: Poetry and dance are constant sources for your poetic inspiration. Through your poetry you constantly refer to other forms of art and its architectural beauty, e.g. in the poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’. SS: Absolutely. It accurately reflects my penchant for various sorts of art-forms, in this particular case, the South Indian classical dance. But Im equally interested in music, film, theatre, live and performance art, and more. If a particular dance or a particular painting, or even a particular piece of dramatic writing moves me, I may write about it directly or obliquely. And this poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ is a clear case in point. An aspect of the poem that may interest you is the architectural and topographical mapping of its poetic structure. I invented another rhyme-scheme for this poem that reflects the actual dance-step pattern on stage that is in consonance with the bols and tals, in this case -- ta dhin ta thai thai ta -- abacca dedffd ... -- the actual rhyme-scheme of the poem itself. That of course is only one thing. The more important thing is that I was completely moved and entranced by the performance, skill and beauty of the dancer herself, Leela Samsom so I had to write the poem. It was almost written for me by her, I didnt have a choice... the whole process was quite magical really.
As is perhaps evident, I do enjoy writing about other art-forms which have inspired or moved me in some way or the other. In fact, my new collection of poems I am currently working is called Blue Nude. The title poem is a sequence that have been inspired by Henri Matisses cobalt-blue cut-out figures by the same name. Then there are other poems in the that book that were inspired by photographs, drama, film and other media. So one can say that the central unifying theme of this book-in-progress, comes from my pleasure and response to the genre of creative arts itself.
ZK: By the time Postmarked India was published by HarperCollins, you had already polished and crafted you own poetic voice. You were awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in the UK and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA bears testimony to that fact. But somehow I detect that Louis MacNeice’s influence still seemed to linger on.SS: I am not entirely sure whether I agree with that last comment, in fact I dontvarious critics have said various things I believe you in this case you are referring to the poet and literary critic, Angus Calder, who compared me with Louis MacNeice in The Scotsman. It was an interesting comparison, but Calder perhaps was referring to the “variousness” in my writing, its range and latitude. I never thought that I was ever inspired by him or wrote like him. Similarly, other people have written that they have found influences/similarities of T.S.Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Hugh MacDiarmid and W.H.Auden in my poems. This could all be temporarily very flattering, but at the end it is completely up to the reader or the critic as to how and what they feel about a particular piece of my writing. I dont think I have at all been influenced by any one of them, even though I admire their writing enormously.
No one poet has directly influenced me, and this is evident in the kinds of poetry I like which tends to be rather varied and eclectic I adore the poetry of Jibanananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, the French symbolists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Verlaine; Rilke, Neruda, Paz, Walcott, Heaney... it is too varied to list them all. Also the ticker-tape is so dissimilar and expansive that I cant think of any one or two who, could have possibly influenced me.
Again, if have to find one source or fountainhead of influence it would actually be Bengali culture that has affected me ultimately, directly and indirectly. For instance, my interest and sense of rhythm and rhyme comes from my very early childhood through my mother and grandmother. They used to recite stories or sing lullabies to me, and I regularly heard them chant their prayers with a typical Bengali rounded lilt. All these were very inherent rhythms which quietly slipped into my psychological system by a curious process of osmosis. So, these perhaps are my influencesvery localized and genetic, completely spontaneous. However, the received and learned knowledge as well as the exposure they subsequently lentwhat I was talking about earlieris a very different sort of thing altogether. Back to top
ZK: Your voice as a poet is very subdued. And your poems are soliloquies?
SS: I would just replace the word “subdued” by the word “understated” which is perhaps more apt. I find that there is a lot of power in understated writing. If you write in a dramatic fashion then you are just advertising the superficial, and often there seems to be nothing very much beyond that. To me, writing ought to be a quiet kind of a thing where the reader can read and then take in its effect in a slow-release fashion, much like time-lapse photography. It this sort of style I am personally attracted to. It is so much more effective, because once you influence a person gently over time, then the effect is a lot more permanent and effective, rather than someone who is impressive one minute and altogether forgettable the next minutelike certain fashions or trends, or even like a loud noise which soon disappears. A slow well-paced murmur, or an elongated baritone of a hum, actually stays in the sensibility of a human being a lot longer and is perhaps more meaningful.
ZK: Does emotion compel you to write? Or do you wait for the right mood to inspire you?
SS: I think it is a combination of both. Being a writer is like being a strange kind of a beast. Writers tend to have invisible antennas on top of their head which pick up radar-signals odd-things while you are looking at ordinary scenes, snatches of other conversations, a glimpse of something somewhereso the ordinary everyday scenario acts as a rich well-spring of ideas for me. Even as I speak to you, I might be simultaneously processing an entirely different idea or thought that might have just struck meit is a complex parallel process. These, of course, may be just fragments, or overheard figments, voices, or images. If it is something strong and compelling, I generally try and make an effort to write it down. I dont necessarily carry a note book, so it could be on the back of a bill, or on the palm of my hand. If I am in a restaurant I would write it down on a piece of napkin, or find an excuse to get some toilet paper to scribble on it.
So when I sit down to write, I have all theses ideas and phrases in front of me. Sitting down and writing requires discipline because writing doesn’t just come from the middle of nowhere that is just the inspiration perhaps. But having had the inspiration you need time to put it all together and build the piece brick by brick. I sit down with poetry two or three hours everyday and it is not necessarily that I write a new poem every time very often I dont, but I could be revising poems that I have written before, or maybe review a book of poetry, or simply just reading and enjoying a book of poetry. Its my own quiet way of staying with poetry. It is quite important to write things down when they first strike, because often I find that if I dont do that and try to remember it later, it might altogether leave me, go away or vanish. Sometimes of course, it might happen at the most oddest and inconvenient timewhen Im already in bed at four o’clock at night / morning especially if it is winter you really do not want to get out from under the duvet and go to the desk and write it down. Sometimes I feel lazy and postpone writing it down until the next day, and very often it has completely gone by then. It is always worth that extra effort to swiftly pen it down and keep it for later.
ZK: Does contemporary literary theory in any way come between you and your writing of poetry? Do theories influence your outlook?
SS: I find intelligently argued theory interesting and worth a rigorous read, but a lot of what is churned out does not inspire me at all. In some odd way, I even dislike theory especially when it is presented to a literate public making simple things overly complicated for no apparent reason. If theory has an intellectual positive base, original and rigorous, then Im keen on it, only then. But it certainly never influences my creative writing at all. In fact, it stays very very far from it.
Im constantly surprised when I read a review, critique, or an essay on my work, as to how much theory is being used these days, especially in the so-called post-colonial circuit. I am not impressed by writers who put polysyllabic jargon just for effect. Frankly this sort of writing is of no interest to me.
ZK: But certainly you have theories of your own. Just because you don’t adhere to contemporary literary theories, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a theory of your own? Certainly your responses to different stimuli are not passive. SS: You cant be passive when responding to different stimuli, especially if you posses the invisible antennas I had mentioned before if you are passive you cant be writing at all. All the writing I have done over the past fifteen years are responses to various stimuli. The published results are in front you, clearly then one is not passive.
But when it comes to literary and critical theory, of course I’m aware of what is going on around me. But I don’t let that tarnish or complicate my writing, because as I have said before they are completely separate categories and disciplines. Art should really exist independently on its own merit. Intelligent analysis and critique is surely exciting, but the two genres and purposes are entirely different. At the end, what excites me is a piece of original writing that is well-written, thought-provoking, intelligently argued. But ultimately it needs to move me, it needs to create quiet indelible waves that constantly haunts me, changes me in some slight modest way. Otherwise it is simply a cerebral exercise like playing and solving a Rubics Cube which only has limited pleasures.
* * *
ZK: You have a strong liking for fluids -- its intricate flow and glide. There are plenty of references to milk, wine, blood, juices of passion, in your poems such as ‘Single Malt’, the long poems ‘Line Breaks’ and ‘Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames’, for example. It seems you want to achieve some kind of linguistic fluidity in your poems. Your comments, please.SS: The concept of fluid itself is I think quite interesting. In a sense it is a cross-over phase, or point the of intersection, between the liquid and solid states. So, we are talking about an in-between state, a state that has its own definite rhythm, flow, deliberateness, and so on. It also is a state which typifies the unobvious. The clarity of liquid is very clear and the concreteness of solid is equally concrete.
But the fluid state is almost like a penumbra, a title of which is also a poem I have written. It is a space which allows you to do a lot because it is infinitely multi-layered -- it is much more textured, as much depends on the viscosity and density of the fluid itself. It is certainly a worthwhile, languorous, languid space to control and be creative with it.
ZK: Your taste as a poet is very broad, open, and wide-visioned. You are a poet who cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed.
SS: Is that a good thing or a bad thing, i.e. the fact that you can't put me in a pigeon-hole?
ZK: As a reader, I have enjoyed the varied landscapes that you portray, the stream of emotions and themes that you give expression to. The good thing about all this is that Sudeep Sen is not a prisoner of a specific style, or a set of images, or even an agenda.
SS: Well, I suspect you have answered your question yourself. Which is precisely why I was trying to ask you the question back. I'm glad that one can't pigeon-hole me, because my interest, my themes, my forms, my rhythms are very very varied indeed.
I still think inspite having written a fair bit for the past 15 years or so, I am still in the continuous process of growing and learning new things. Every time I work on a new book, I realise that there is so much more to learn, and so much more to explore.
When it comes to writing itself, it is always a progression -- you start from point A, to point B, and onwards. One of the most interesting grammatical punctuation for me is actually the ellipse, the three dots [...] which simply says --as such, nothing ends. It makes one's way of looking at things as well as one's own writing organic. I feel it is a good thing because otherwise if you work in a very myopic kind of a way then you are only narrowing your scope further and further. Whereas simply being open to growth, you have the entire canvas and palette open, to choose from. And that is very useful and at the same time unconstraining.
Back
to top
ZK: Your early interest in the external architecture of poetry, i.e. the overt formal construction of poetry over the years has grown and graduated into an internal, much quieter, perhaps spiritual, and sparer organization of poetry.
SS: You have put that quite well in fact. In my early poems, the architecture of the poem itself was visually much more apparent. Whereas as time has gone on, I have been able to be much more subtle in my writing. It is essentially because of a greater experience, both in life and writing itself. You learn how to use craft and words, and hopefully you get better and better to a point that you can in fact hide very complex formal-constructs in a poem to an uninitiated eye, one that is only apparent if you dig deep into the skin and tissue of the poem.
Of course, there is also a shift in sensibility, in the sense that I was much younger then. Life's circumstances change, with that your sensibility changes and grows. I think these aspects are also reflected in my later poems.
ZK: Your poems are visually rich, but they do not just end there. You have been influenced at the same time by ancient Prakrit poetry, Japanese haiku, Chinese poetry, Imagist and Metaphysical poetry. But you don't just try to stir your reader with only images. Your frames and conceits cast a deceptively soothing spell, one that goes beyond the physical as well as metaphysical reality.
SS: Certainly that tends to be very true. There is an immense visual quality in my poetry, partly influenced by the fact that I worked for many years as a film-maker. Besides, I do have more than a part-time interest in photography. As I mentioned before, architecture was an important area of interest of mine, a field I might have actually pursued as a career, but circumstances took a different turn. But I still am interested in visual and graphic art, and in the whole nature of light, photography, and fibre-optics. So all that somewhere along the line must permeate and stain my poems.
However, that's only one aspect of the poetry -- only the stretched-canvas, only the surface of the parchment where the colours you see are brightly dabbed upon. Once you go beyond that level, there is an intensely quiet, an inwardly deeper depth of field in my writing -- an aspect of my poetry which perhaps what you are alluding to. I don't know whether it is spiritual or not, but certainly it is an introspective kind of writing. So in that sense, you are right.
ZK: One of your recently published chapbooks, Almanac, contains poems corresponding to the twelve months of the year. What inspired you to write poems on the different months?
SS: It was completely accidental actually. At the time, I was trying very hard to write poems for my new-born son Aria, and I increasingly found that writing poetry for children very very difficult. One of the things that I was experiencing in my writing was -- when I was consciously trying to write for a child, I realised that I was speaking down at them rather than to them as a colleague. So, I thought the other alternative could be poems about each month of the year as a calender so that my son could learn the different months of the year in a creative way. Part of it was that.
Part of it was also that I realised that I had enough poems which had some reference to some month or the other. So, when I pulled all those poems together, some published and others unpublished, I realised there were poems which represented about eight of the months. Since I already had eight poems, I thought why not try and write four new poems relating to the remaining four months to complete the sequence. From reading the poems you would realise that not all the poems are directly related to month concerned as such. They are obliquely related to the months. For instance, there is poem called 'April's Air' which is set in Japan and about rice-harvesting that takes place in April. So, the poem conveniently fit into the April month-slot.
Similarly, ‘One Moonlight December Night’ obviously comes in the December section. But the poem, for instance, which refers to the month of May is a newish poem which I wrote for my son whose birthday falls on the 21st of that month. Even though the poem is titled ‘Aria’, the reference to people who are in the know is to the month of May. So, I had quite an enjoyable time putting this volume together.
ZK: The most difficult task for any reader of your poetry is that there is no one specific geographical location or boundary to associate you with. The landscape, seascape, and airspace that fill your poems are borderless and trans-national. There is practically no one central location that can be identified as your own personal territory in the broad sense of the term.
SS: That’s the way I have been brought up. I was brought up as a Bengali within a Bengali family-milieu, but in a non-Bengali landscape of cosmopolitan Delhi. I spoke English in school, Hindi on the streets, and Bengali at home. So, it was an essentially and inherently multi-lingual and multi-cultural space that I started from. Also the range of landscapes and topographies that influenced me were both Eastern and Western at the same time. Through literature, art, and film, I had access to the Western culture, but at the same time I was immersed in my own in India, and the East so to speak broadly. So, obviously it is very difficult to pin me down in one place. And I’m glad that is a difficult thing as it also relates to the earlier answer I gave you. As you travel both vertically and horizontally, perspectives change. It is not just the diverse landscapes in terms of different countries and topographies, but it's also diverse in terms of different levels we are talking about -- whether it is purely visual, purely cinematic, purely structural, purely architectural -- moving from one level to the other, moving from one plane to the other, some time it is two dimensional, some time it is three dimensional, some time it is much more.
The only thing that links me to some sort of centre is the ‘centre of gravity’ itself. Otherwise, the only tangible thing that links me to a centre is my own family and the Bengali culture, something that is either obliquely or directly omnipresent in my work.
ZK: The volume, Retracing American Contours, takes us back again to an American landscape, a terrain that you explored in your highly successful third book, New York Times. Why the return to the United States?
SS: The poems in Retracing American Contours are poems that were originally written in the period from 1987 to 1990, much of it around the same time as the poems in New York Times itself. Originally, I had planned for all these poems to have come out together as one volume. But since the book became very large, my British publisher thought it would be a good idea to cull out the New York based and New York related poems, to form one independent book. I went along with that idea and was very pleased about the eventual results.
So the poems in this new volume Retracing American Contours are the ones that I want to preserve from that original group that were not published in book form. Publishing them now, almost after a decade they were first born, is also a private way of visiting those places again. There are so many important events and significant memories attached to those places, that it is almost like a journey down memory-lane, but with a fresh considered perspective.
ZK: Your recently published volume, Lines of Desire, is stunning, quite a stylistic revelation. As a poet you strike similes and evoke metaphors that are original, cool, untainted, soothing, and the same time, urgent. In addition, they also remind one of conceits in metaphysical poetry.
SS: That is an interesting observation. Lines of Desire is basically series of very tightly written short erotic poems. In fact, I re-reading and savouring the poetry of John Donne quite a lot while writing some of the poems in this volume.
It is very difficult to write about love and passion in an original and fresh way because it is one subject that has been completely exhausted. So I wondered, how does one write about it without actually sounding old. My way of getting into it was to turn them inside out, rather than going from outside into the inside which is usually the case as it is a much safer and controllable route. I wanted to capture the raw passion and essence of the particular range of emotions, and at the same time be subtle and unobvious. Also I wanted to give these poems a meditative and chilling quality, an edge that is at the same time sharp and well as mesmerising. Back to top
ZK: Tell us about In Another Tongue -- an impressive volume of translations you have recently published, something quite new for you.
SS: In Another Tongue is my first volume of translations that gathers poetry from well known and lesser known poets from Hebrew, Macedonian, Persian, Hindi and Bengali languages. Since its publication, I have translated more -- from Dutch, Slovene, and others.
William Radice pointed out that this volume is quite a departure from what I have been engaged in the past. I have enjoyed this relatively new process a lot. Translation is at the same time very different and similar to writing original poetry. But the dynamics and energies are completely unusual and difficult to quantify when translating.
I especially enjoy translating from Bangla and Hindi -- languages I know well. It is so nice to be in a totally Bengali milieu, immersed in its people, poetry, and music. It is as though a part of me really wanted to blossom, but did not have the right context for it. Growing up in Delhi is and was truly trilingual -- Bengali, Hindi, and English are the languages I use (but understand quite a few Northern Indian languages -- Punjabi, Rajasthani, Urdu, even Gujarati and Maharastrian from Western India). When I am in the West, it is predominantly English that I am using. So when I am in Bangladesh, I absolutely enjoy being swathed in Bangla in more ways than one. One realises that English is so redundant in these parts, and thank god for that.
ZK: Your new work which is due to appear next year is a major book-length poem, Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent. It is an highly unusual and inventive work, a tour de force. How did it begin? Tell us something about its form, and the journey itself.
SS: The book-length poem -- Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent -- began on a wet August morning, as I sat in an half-sunken basement space of a partially restored fifteenth century mansion ‘Gartincaber’ in Doune (near Stirling, Scotland). Almost drunk under the spell of this space, both interior and exterior, dactyls were dictated to me by photons in the surrounding electric-charged air. It was here where my journey began. My journey continued leaving a winding trail of foot-steps, pug-marks I tried to hide, but could not. It is still an uncompleted journey, a journey that cannot be completed ... perhaps, it is part of one's own fallibility. This journey has infinitely long lines and many miles left to traverse, but I know my blood's inadequate crimson may prevent such an ambition. So I take all this as a gift, a dream. I feel constantly grateful that I have been allowed such a dream.
Along the way, I have been coloured by many sources, interests, passions, and obsessions -- some obvious and others oblique. Among them, there are overheard phrases, paintings, photographs, fragmented images, films, music, memory, poems, women, fluids, and the intoxicated air.
My alter-ego wanted to be an architect and a cartographer -- I have a more than part-time interest in science -- All these must have, in some way, influenced this poem.
I re-read many of my favourite poetry books at the time -- classics like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal; volumes by contemporary masters like Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and others. Walcott’s Omeros, Brodsky’s To Urania, Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, Donald Hall's The One Day, Jaan Kaplinski’s The Same Sea In Us All, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, Dom Moraes’s Serendip, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Middle Passage, A K Ramanujan’s Collected Poems, especially kept me company. I have used fragments from many of these poets' work throughout to punctuate the narrative, so that readers can get some sense of their world as parallel asides, just as it did for me on my journey. I was also immersed in Gray’s Anatomy, Encarta’s BodyWorks, Louis Kahn’s Sounds and Silence, Matthew Arnold and T S Eliot’s essays, John Frederick Nim’s Western Wind, .... At the time, I relied on my grandfather's trusted old compass that helped navigate my way, imaginatively plotting a course through my National Geographic map collection that lay in disarray .... My memory provided calm, as I struggled, translating Jibanananda Das’s ‘Bawnolawta Shane’ to recreate its music and passion. All of them have been guiding companions .... And so, the journey went on .... The sparse elongated structure of the poem partly reflects the strength and surety of the human vertebra and spine; much like Neruda's Odes that reflect the long-thin shape of Chile. The sections and sub-sections join together like synapses between bone and bone. The titles are translucent markers or breath pauses, not separators.
The short two-line couplets echo the two-step foot-prints, a pathway mapped on the atlas. The 12 sections correspond to the 12 bones in a human rib-cage, the 12 months in a year, the 12 hours in a day .... There are 26 bones in a human vertebrae, and the 26 parts in the poem slowly assemble themselves from a montage of tenuously strung lyrics. (The projected 206 page-length of this book would match the exact number of bones in a human body.)
This poem leaves a footprint from a perennial walk that meanders through public and private spaces -- making sense of the vicissitudes of our loves, losses, wants, desires, inadequacies -- as it maps the matrix of living and dying.
Back to top
* * *
Back to top
*
* * |