The practice of poetry

Author, poet and dancer, Tishani Doshi, speaks about her latest collections of poems

Tishani Doshi discovered poetry as a 20-year-old college student when she embarked on a creative writing course. It was a discovery that altered the course of her life and career. Since then, she has authored columns and full-length novels and worked as a dancer, but poetry remains her first love.

Her debut collection of poems, "Countries of the Body," launched in 2006 at the Hay-on-Wye Festival, won the Forward Poetry Prize.

In 2021, she released a new anthology of poems, "A God At The Door," which addressed politics and gender.

We spoke to her about the book and what it takes to pursue poetry full-time.

What sets "A God at the Door" apart from your other poetry books?

It's more immediate and directly related to events around us. I wrote it faster than any other book I've written. Many poems are responses to news headlines ranging from the horrific to the comic—from a shooting at a maternity clinic in Kabul to the comeback of Speedos. There's a litheness about the poems in this "pandemic" collection (most of it was written in 2020).

How have you addressed politics and gender issues in this compilation?

I've been writing about the experience of the female body since my first book, "Countries of the Body." The construct of gender and the experience of female bodies in society is important to me as this has been one of the primary ways I have experienced the world. The hope, of course, is that with poetry or dance, there are ways of transcending gender altogether.

How did you balance playfulness/humour and anger?

I like the element of surprise in poetry, that feeling of a sudden transformation or leap, how a poem can move from one idea to another, one emotion to the next, in the way that musical scales can, or melody. There's so much to be upset about all the time, but if you keep ringing that high note of despair without any change of tone, without the injection of necessary humour, then the work becomes very one-dimensional. And I really do believe this is our true nature—the absurdity of the human condition: beautiful but horrible, desperate but funny.

How personal has this collection been to you?

I don't know whether it's possible to be an impersonal writer. Everything I write is personal. A sense of immersion happens with writing—whether it's poetry or fiction, this parallel world you create as you continue to exist in the "real" world. And so, you put your entire self into whatever you write, even as you continue to do the laundry and feed the dogs and buy vegetables. Life carries on, and you must keep feeding this other life alongside it with yourself.

Take us through your process of writing a poem.

I'm always finding my way into a poem, and the ways have changed over the years. It's a mystery, and I like to keep it that way. There's an element of recognition when you start something, of an idea or an image; it's the hint of a poem, and as you keep writing, it solidifies, and you begin to understand that this is a real poem. You keep going until it becomes one.

Is poetry more challenging to market?

Poetry has a long life. Recently, I performed 'Girls are Coming out of the Woods' at the Sydney Opera House, and that book is over four years old now. I still perform poems from my first collection, and in a sense, there's this 'ongoingness' about poetry that I love. There is a small but dedicated audience for poetry, and I think it has been the most rewarding of pursuits, even though it doesn't have the fanfare of great advances or bidding wars.

Do you still dance? Are there any projects in the pipeline?

I'm doing experiments at the moment. Small choreographies in conversation with my poems or fiction, with the idea of performing them as small-scale production. Solo pieces for which I collaborate with a musician friend, Luca Nardon. The first was 'Girls are Coming out of the Woods,' which I have performed several times worldwide at festivals, and I've since done a companion piece for 'Small Days and Nights.'

(Neeti Jaychander is a journalist, writer and lecturer based in Chennai, India)