I started writing nonsense poetry, in the manner of John Lennon’s In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Mangling words to convey ideas in slant, it was important to present my poems on the page in as conventional manner as possible, so readers are thrown on reading the poems. 

At the time there were no readers, only myself. The appearance of the poem on the page has remained significant for me ever since. Although I no longer write poetry like I once did, there is a certain lawlessness that has carried on, like an after-image. My moment of epiphany for my writing was reading Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri for the first time. I found freedom there — both in terms of form as well as what one can write about.

 

There has never been a settled time in what is generally called a ‘poetic practice’ that I can talk about with reasonable objectivity. What has changed is that my poems now have an audience. Some even say nice things about them. Writing has never been easy; I struggle with long bouts of nothingness and squeeze out poems like the last bit of toothpaste in a tube. I can’t say that I am comfortable with this, but this is what it is for the present.

One of the sheet-anchors in my ragged ‘practice’ has been translation. Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, others. Rahim, Mirza Ghalib, Muhammad Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Arun Kolatkar, Hemant Divate, Manya Joshi, Dinkar Manwar, Udayan Thakkar, others. Translating their poems has provided succor and some discipline. I am ever grateful to all the poets that I have translated. Once again, there is little method in my choice-making, just the pleasure of words in another language that I feel the special need to wrestle with, hearing them transform in English, looking at them side by side.