Life kindles the flame of poetry, the poet as the ‘wick’ burns to shed warmth and light”. One of the most significant poets of ‘today’, Keki N Daruwalla sheds light through his work, illumining the contemporary world of English poetry. His collection of poems ‘The Keeper of the Dead’ received the Sahitya Akademi Award and his ‘Landscapes’ won the prestigious Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia.
His other important works are ‘Under Orion’, ‘Crossing of Rivers’ ‘The Map Maker’ etc.
Excerpts from an interview follow—
You are known as one of the finest poets writing today. Comment on your poetic trajectory spanning more than 35 years.
Anyone who has been writing poetry for 35 years, or painting for that many years, would evolve. Styles, concerns, obsessions change— so do literary or artistic trends. I started writing very down to earth poems in my first two volumes.
Poetic craft was not secondary (never is) but subconscious. My poem on a riot, comes refracted through water. The imagery is aqueous. Reality, or rather a documentary depiction, would have been too brutal. Yet my first book, ‘Under Orion’, carried the seeds of my later work— my play with myth and debunking of didacticism, as witnessed in the poem “Dialogues with a Third Voice.”
Landscape came to me as something living, as something that gave human life and even destiny, a dimension. That developed over time, and has turned into a focus on ecology as seen in my latest poems “Fish”, “Of Moss and Ledges”.
I have also been writing on other poets— Roethke, Mandelstam— poems that have absorbed their poetry as well as their lives, though it was their poetry which attracted me first. I started writing on dreams: There was a time I maintained a dream–log. I have a sequence of such poems in my volume “Night River”. And my last single volume “The Map-maker”, consists almost wholly of monologues. There is also, naturally, an engagement with map-makers of yore.
Your poetic craft, combines deep erudition and creative eclecticism to make your work come alive. How does your writing process evolve?
Much of craft is sub-conscious. In longer poems, sometimes sequences, craft, plotting becomes overt. Even in sequences, poems often tumble one after the other. I can’t claim to be erudite. Poets who are academics can. But lately I have put my reading to use— especially history.
Sometimes one has to research, for instance on glass (for my poem “Glass Blowers”). I read Nadia’s “Hope Abandoned” and the poems on Mandelstam came out of it. (Of course they also stemmed from a reading of Osip Mandelstam’s own poems).
Your ‘Riding the Himalayas’— written in lucid prose, was hailed as a unique travelogue of Himalayan Odyssey. Did the experience bring out the poet too in you?
Firstly it was a tremendous car trek. We (14 of us) drove from Himachal, Ladakh, the base camp of the Siachen Glacier, Nubra Valley, through Garhwal, Kumaon, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Darjeeling, Meghalaya, the Naga Hills, right up to Kibithu— the eastern most point of the Himalayas. We did all this in 78 days. By the evening we were exhausted.
The pace was hectic. For poetry you need slower rhythms, except for a gompa poem, “Epiphany”, where a traveller speaks to a lama at a monastery. Six months earlier than this trip I had been to the Tawang valley— and that gave me a sequence of four poems on the legend of the Tawang Monastery.
What are you working on now? Can you talk about your forthcoming projects?
I am working on a historical novel and it has taken the life out of me.
What according to you are the new challenges for Indian English poetry?
Leaving Salman Rushdie aside, I think the Indian poets in English are writing as well as the novelists. The challenge I suppose would be to write better!! But seriously, it is difficult to define the issues. Getting the reading public to take to poetry would be the first challenge. Secondly the English poets are criticised for not relating to contemporary reality, as they should and they are sniped at by Indian language poets.
That would be one challenge. (Of course each poet has to decide whether such a challenge is worth taking up! Should the poet confine himself to his or her angsts and inner life or write about corruption, and filth and guys urinating on the road).
The other challenge would be not to ape the current fashions of the west. For instance poetry doesn’t have to be telegraphic— Morse is out of date in any case. This doesn’t mean we jump into the arms of the ‘nativists’. Nativism is an ugly word, used by Tommy Atkins to deride Indians, almost the way ‘nigger’ was used. The concept is a favourite of a savant from Bangalore and a Kerala poet. Both the term and the concept need a decent burial with the Last Post ringing loud and clear.
Another challenge, as I see it, would be to come to terms with rhyme, some time or the other. One is writing English poetry after all. (Most Indian poets in English don’t know how to write good rhymed verse.) You could have just one poem out of ten in rhymed verse— but at least prove that you have some control over the basics of prosody.
The last challenge would be to push back the boundaries that demarcate Indian poetry in English. Here each poet has to define the fence as he or she sees it, his field hedge, her sign post. (But don’t get caught up in the barbed wire) !
Can you mention your personal favourites from your prodigious corpus of writing, apart from the award-winning ones like ‘Keeper of the dead’, ‘The Landscapes’ which are called your landmark works?
My favourite volumes now would be— ‘Night River’ and ‘The Map-maker’. Also, the section of new poems in my ‘Collected Poems’ (Penguin) which came out last year. My favourite Poems would be “The Glass Blower”, “Poseidonians”, “Bypass”, “Easy and Difficult animals”, “To My Daughter Rookzain” and “Of Mohenjo Daro at Oxford”.
