Whatever else poetry may be about, it remains importantly, for me, an attempt to make music out of life and language; an attempt to imbue language and life with the brief benedictions of a higher musical order. When I say ‘music’, I do not mean merely the various structures in sound and time that music comprises of, though these too, have always been terribly important to me as a poet. My obsession with those structures underlies my early experiments with forms like the sonnet and the villanelle or with poems arranged in rhymed quatrains or tercets and poems that revolve around chorus-lines; but my view of these structures has also changed with time. What I regard today in my work, for instance, as a dubious disregard for essential mathematics, was something I saw in my twenties as a valid and deliberate attempt to disenthrall the poetic line — while maintaining a steady beat — from the mathematical tyranny of syllabic and metrical uniformity. It is not our part, as poets, to be completely comfortable with our choices: Ours but to do and die, as dear old Tennyson once said.

While one makes music out of language, one is also making music out of life; which is to say that poems begin for me by asking: ‘What is it here, within and around me, that now calls for song?’ That zone of what is within and around, has been for me, since early childhood, one pervaded and animated by multiple languages and cultural traditions. I remain, and have always been, primarily anglophone; but along with the vast heritage of anglophone literature that came my way, my years of training as a Hindustani vocalist, and my experience as a live musical performer, have — for good or ill — also played their undeniable role in giving shape to my poetic strategies and literary aesthetics. The relative functions and the sudden, mysterious interchangeability of ‘improvisation’ and ‘pre-composition’, for instance — both fundamental processes in Hindustani music — are inextricable from my view of poesis. Poetry has involved for me, over the years, a gradual emergence from the paralysis of cultural dichotomy. I wasn’t sure about this in my twenties, but today, I can see how my verse springs from a fortuitous confluence of seemingly disparate cultural histories. When I cannot believe in myself, I must still believe in the power of that confluence. It is bigger than I am and I revere it.