DH Radio | The Lead: Poetry during the Covid-19 lockdown

In this episode of The Lead from DH Radio, Prof K Srilata reads her poetry about the lockdown and tells us the various facets of her poetry.

L Subramani: Today we are gonna talk literature and specifically about poetry. They say that poems are seeds sown in the depths of the human soul and nourished by imagination. Maybe that's why poems talk to us in a way no other form can. Who else but a poet to explain to us how poems are being composed and the creative process of making them. Today we are joined by Prof K Srilata. She is a professor of English at IIT- Madras and also a published poet and an author. Srilata, welcome to the podcast.

K Srilata: Thank you, Thank you so much, Mr Subramani. Thank you for having me.

L Subramani: You published the unmistakable presence of absent humans, that was the anthological collection that you published last year. It is a sort of a prediction by looking at the title, of the things to come. Today we are talking about lockdowns, social distancing, social media and breaking down of the human connectivity. Obviously, you may not have hinted at it when you collected and published the anthology a year back.

K Srilata: Yes, Yes. That's right. You are right that the present times were nowhere in my mind at the times of writing the poems or titling the collection or publishing it. In fact, in a sense, what we are going through now is beyond everybody's collective imagination. It's sort of almost uncanny now that you are saying it. The title seems to almost foreshadow what many of us are experiencing, which is we are not able to meet people or visit them. In that sense, there are absent humans but their presence remains with us in a very unmistakable way, so the title does resonate but having said that I must also add that the poems are about other kinds of absences beginning from the personal absences from my own life to some more political issues like disappearances, forced disappearances and so on. There was really no conscious attempt in a sense to thematically link the poems in the collection...

To know more about the conversation, listen to the podcast.

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