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The Punch Magazine’s Special Poetry Issue, 2022

The Punch Magazine’s Special Poetry Issue, 2022
Poems by 40 poets from the Indian subcontinent/diaspora, prefaced by notes and essays on their poetics, curated by Shireen Quadri 

Afzal Ahmed Syed: “I had an affinity with poetry from childhood but started to write poetry late in life, at the age of 30. My genre of choice is prose poetry, but occasionally I write ghazals as well. There were a few Urdu poets writing prose poetry when I started writing in this genre. The recurring themes in my poems are psychic violence and political oppression. I am a bit of a storyteller. I write about everyday events and persons, fictitious or real. Rather than metaphors and similes, I emphasize surreal imagery. I love writing poetic parables.”

Alolika Dutta: “I approach poetry with a sense of devotion. There are rituals I like to adhere to. When I am working on a poem, my day opens with it and closes with it. I tend to think about it all the time, though I have other commitments too, not least accounting. I used to wonder if artists are all obsessive about their arts, but I have found that I am not that way when I am painting. Painting, to me, is not as compulsive a desire as poetry. When I paint, I can set the paper aside, but it is not so when I am writing, at least not with as much ease and forbearance.”

Anand Thakore: “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.”

Asiya Zahoor: “My poetry often reimagines the lives of women and revisits South Asian as well as European myths from the perspectives of women characters. History of the subcontinent in general and Kashmir, in particular, runs all through my poems. They try to demonstrate how life can simultaneously hold survival, revolution, and unquenchable love. Dreams, obsessions, and passions are at the core of all poems. The narratives of the poems are the privilege often given to women or trees and rarely even to inanimate objects such as a closed and a half-open file on a table talking to each other.”

Dibyajyoti Sarma: “I have read widely and discovered many poets that I admire (Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill), but Eliot remains the guiding light in my quest for poetry. If you ask me, the reason is simple. The Assamese poets that I read, those who inspired me to write poetry, they themselves in turn were influenced by Eliot and other modern poets. So, I discovered modernism twice and I could never shake its influence. Unlike other poets with a bilingual background, somehow, I am not interested in the function of language in poetry. I am old school. For me, poetry must tell a story. It must stir emotions. It must transcend personal for universal.” 

Ellen Kombiyil: “My practice as a poet is continually evolving. I feel most alive when I’m writing or creating in some way. It’s also easy to fall into a rut or staleness or let anxiety overwhelm me so that the blank page is scary. The way to deal with all of these pitfalls is to find a new way in, a new way of seeing, a new way of being with language. Usually, it involves playfulness. Those are the best days.”

Gauri Awasthi: “I like to think of my practice as worship. My writing has remained personal, but as my understanding of my privilege has become layered, my craft and voice have deepened to reach a space of looking inwards. Reflecting on the malleability of art forms and the intersection of ideas has, in turn, led me to pay attention to musicality in my work. I often return to my training as a Bharatanatyam dancer – my foremost education in encapsulating emotions – a skill that I continue to develop through poetry.”

Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla: ‘I love the mystery of a poem, I’m never certain of how the poem is going to end — I let the poem take its own journey. Some of my poems are peppered with images of dreams from the subconscious and unconscious mind- Poems have their own temperament I give them freedom to say what they want to. There’s nothing more gratifying than crafting a poem. I experience with forms like haibun, haiku, prose and found poetry because the newness of form intrigues me.”

Hoshang Merchant: “My hero is Anais Nin and by extension Kamala Das and Namita Gokhale. I detest the male swagger of the Bombay School and their women poets imitating the style of Nissim Ezekiel. Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which I imitate in my Paradise Isn’t Artificial (Red River, 2021) opened out the form to me as for countless others. I wrote ghazals before Agha Shahid Ali whom I admire as I do Suniti Namjoshi, a pioneer fabulist of lesbian experience.”

Ishrat Afreen (Translator’s Note by Raza Naeem): “One of my favourites among Ishrat Afreen’s poems is Intesaab (Dedication) for its ‘take-no-prisoners’ attitude and its direct evocativeness.  Another poem Gulaab Aur Kapaas (Roses and Cotton) positions her more in the tradition of the progressive writers, especially Makhdoom, who sought to see beauty in labour and valued women’s labour through traditional invocations of beauty. Afreen takes the metaphors much further, though, positioning them directly against the ephemeral concept of beauty associated with privilege.”



Jonaki Ray: “I don’t usually follow traditional forms or structures in my writing, especially poetry. But, I do enjoy and write poetry that has an innate rhythm interweaved into it. I write on the themes of migration and power imbalances, both in the natural and man-made world. I’m also fascinated by the cyclical nature of history and the impact of time on our memories and histories. Staying home during the pandemic has made me restart my music practice — I learnt classical Hindustani vocal music as a child, and incorporate the concepts of music into my poetry as well.”

Karuna Ezara Parikh: “The actual act of creation is done in silence and wonder. In complete surrender, in fact. In those moments there is only rawness and healing, a blizzard of feelings. There is light and nature, extraordinary and bountiful suddenly the world emerges as a constellation with all parts connected via death, via joy, via stories. And through the poet, the planet and all that is secret and known about it, emerges. And maybe that, there, is my final understanding of my work and my presence as a poet — to be a medium. To bear witness and to tell the endless record of what makes for stirring and what for stillness.”

K. Srilata: “Though I have experimented with a range of forms, free verse remains my preferred form. Part of this, I suspect, is because free verse lends itself readily to storytelling, wrapping its contours over where ever the human story takes one. Lines breaks in free verse are intuited and follow the breath. Oftentimes, they appear quixotic, their logic not immediately apparent. I enjoy the go-with-the-flow nature of free verse and what it enables.” 

Kishwar Naheed: (Translator’s Note by Raza Naeem) “Kishwar Naheed is identified as a distinct voice in modern Urdu poetry. Her tone is individualistic but it has the echo of the widest collective experience: ‘Meri aavaaz, mere shahr ki aavaaz hai/Meri aavaaz, meri nasl ki aavaaz hai. Her work not only reflects her own personal journey as a poet and feminist, but also acts as more than her autobiography — it is the voice of a whole generation which came of age in the 1960s (both during the dictatorship of Ayub Khan in Pakistan and broader currents of resistance across the Third World). In her poetry, Naheed has universalized her Pakistani identity by striving to gather together the sorrows and travails of all the women of the Third World.

Leeya Mehta: “I love the narrative poem. The poems that particularly interest me as a reader and writer have possibly three attributes. The first is details and characters, like in the title poem of Louise Glück’s National Book Award-winning collection Faithful and Virtuous Night and many of Robert Frost’s narrative poems. The second is historical context, where a line in the poem places us within the guardrails of history, like in ‘September 11939’ by WH Auden or ‘Telemachus’ by Ocean Vuong. The third is the lyric poem, expressing the writer's emotions. The elegiac form of the lyric brings both insight and empathy to writer and reader like in Dom Moraes’s ‘A day in Ayodhya’.”

Maaz Bin Bilal: “Growing up between the words of English and the music of Urdu, it was upon reading Agha Shahid Ali that I discovered the possibilities available to me in the English ghazal. Since then, the English ghazal has been both my creative release, and, as I have lately felt, my pet peeve, against which I increasingly seek to rebel. Also, having dividing my time for the last half a dozen years between Delhi and its northern suburb, I have grown enamoured of birds, and bird imagery and mythology are beginning to find their way into my poems. I would like to let my selection of poems here say the rest.”

Meena Kandasamy: “My journey as a poet was fairly run of the mill. I was shy and writing secretly —partly to process what I couldn’t write in my day-job as the editor of a small alternative magazine that folded up in six months, and, later as translator. Those who read my work were full of praise, and the one person who I will always single out for giving me confidence in my own work was S Anand, who now runs Navayana.... I returned to poetry after many years — partly as a response to what was happening politically around us, and personally, to capture the inner-world and feelings of being a mother of young children.”

Meera Nair: “I write when I am moved/disturbed. Poetry is no doubt a cathartic process and from darkness comes light! Post turning 30, I wrote a whole bunch of love poems! They kept coming to me like the raging storm. That was also when I compiled my first book of poems. My poems are almost always first drafts. I like them raw. I am aware they may become finer poems if edited. But I believe they will also become something else if tampered with. So I let them be.   I am nearing 40 and have calmed down.  But yes it continues to rain in my world.”

Navkirat Sodhi: “I am enamoured by the idea of inhabiting multiple planes at any given moment, an idea I explored in my collection If and I. There, I swim through the notion of the plurality of an instance. The poems question, ride and revel in the mystery of being present in different places at the same time — physically, subtly, really. This spiritual bent takes a more concrete form in my translation of the poetry of Guru Nanak (considered the founder of Sikhism) from Gurmukhi to English, verse to verse.”

Nibedita Sen: “Primarily, an artist I work with colours. Yet I paint rarely, and write even less …and whenever I do so, in both cases, I go into a spell…as if possessed by some creative inertia … Most of the time I am fine without even having the least urge to paint or write unless when I am forced to, when I feel solid silences creeping in and lying low between words and sentences… and there is no other way I know of, that could express and explain the meanings of all these…  Painting and writing are a kind of ‘monologue’ … I break silences, I talk to myself…”

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