I write journalistic pieces, research papers, essays, memoirs, and reviews to explore what is known. Poetry is a realm of the unknown. Unseen. One has to enter its kingdom, live through its darkness, wander in its hidden valleys and be ready to shape one’s own thoughts and feelings disguised as images, lines, sounds, and at the same time decipher the music that words sitting next to one another exchange. And sometimes, you have to dive deep into the syllables, wade through their dark waters and set free from the deep tangles what sits coiled in your belly i.e., your fears, what you refuse to acknowledge and acquaint with. 

It is not an easy task to swim in bottomless worlds and fish out sunken ships with rusted hulls. The weight is enormous. However, once you are on the surface, the burden lightens, floats airlike, surrounds you like scent. And then, you see, as poet Nina Pick writes: “… the luminous globe behind / the poem’s dark ribs…”; you pluck it like a fruit putting your hands inside the tangled mess of your own heart. Mind you, you bleed in the process, get wounded, swearing never to go in that wadi again — but without it you cannot live for long, it is like breathing without oxygen. 

In 1985, Audre Lorde wrote in her essay ‘Poetry Is Not a luxury’: “It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within… ”Poetry is not a fancy time pass. It is the essential scaffolding to hold life. To act as the blank canvas to draw what you otherwise can’t. That’s why poems carry images that find home in many hearts and have power enough to wake them from the idle dream — to make them dream the real dreams and actualize them. Many of the poems have come to me when I actually did not have the strength to address my own feelings. Yet, they poured themselves in — sluicing forward and finding space I thought did not exist in my heart. 

I don’t write using strict schemes/patterns. I don’t endorse Western canonization and mix different styles that automatically create the frame of the poem. I allow the poem to glide by itself using one image or a cluster of a few. Many times, I write the draft and let in rest in my notebook as with time it gets filtered and you see it with a clearer eye discarding what no longer feels part of the poem. A lot happens to your writing when you are actually not writing. The perceptions, impressions, images silently go through distillation getting changed in the process. They are no longer raw, malleable. They take their own shapes ready to merge in words opening their seams bit by bit. I often try automatic writing when I get a writer’s block. I trash most of what I write during that period, but manage to save one word or an image that leads me to the doors of other words or images. 

You can never underestimate the power of a word. It holds so much intensity like vapour before it becomes rain and then turns into a storm. Writing cannot come without reading. You fill the vessel and what spills out is your creative writing. I often return to the works of Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jibanananda Das, Mahmoud Darwish, Allama Iqbal, Anna Akhmatova, Pushkin, Basho, Tomas Tranströmer, Miroslav Holub, Bin Ramke, Risto Ahti, Constantine Cavafy, Hafez, Kathleen Jamie, Tracie Morris, Wisława Szymborska and several others. Poetry like energy flows and must flow from one poet to another.