My earliest influence for writing poetry has to be my late aunt, Prof. Reshma Aquil, who was a published poet. I was given the task of proof reading her works while I was in my teens and her writing style fascinated/influenced me to a great extent. Her bookshelves were lined with poetry books by contemporary poets from across the world. And much as I would try to understand their works at that age, they baffled me a lot. It wasn’t till I was in college that I revisited many of these works, including the ones that we were studying in our English Hons. programme back at college and later on during my Masters that I realised an important thing about writing poetry — it is never about who you are writing for; it is always about what are you writing it for. I had been scribbling verses since my school days and I thought of sending my poems to the only publisher that I had read about in those days — Writers Workshop, Calcutta. I never expected a response but was quite surprised when late Dr. P. Lal called me up and spoke to me, informing that he would like to publish my work without charging me anything for it. Moments like these make you begin to take your work more seriously. The faith that Dr. Lal showed in my work helped me write more. I am indebted to him. I have always kept my writing style simple and I try to keep my literary background and knowledge to a minimum and avoid letting it enter my poems.

 

For me, poetry is a room where I find myself defining/recreating the self. The idea behind writing poetry is never to try to contain or rather, try to reduce my feelings, ideas, and perceptions to just a few lines. It is to discover in/through those lines many unsaid things. At times, I feel safer when I express myself through poetry rather than through fiction, as fiction tends to unravel the mind of a writer in front of its reader. That is not to say that a similar thing cannot happen in poetry, but for me, personally, I feel I remain well hidden behind the lines I write. The multiple interpretations that can come up for a poem and the varied discussions that can revolve around those lines are best suited for people like me who do not want their works to be defined by a single strand of interpretation. And interestingly, it is in those multiple interpretations that I at times discover parts of myself.