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Kushal Poddar(KP) has authored ten books, the latest being «A White Can For The Blind Lane.» His works have been translated into twelve languages. He has been a sub-editor of Outlook magazine and the editor of Words Surfacing. He does some illustrations and sketches for various magazines.

Amit Kamila(AK), the interviewer, is a pilgrim on a long vacation.

AK: You wait for the poetic moment to come to you and only then you sit to write? Or, it is the other way round….. You are continually putting your daily moments under your creative scanner and when you find something significant, you say, «Wah… there’s a poem in this!» Or, it is something else beyond my comprehension?

KP: If I might be crude, I would have said that my mind’s orifice has been loosened from vigorous exercise and it accepts inspiration from everything at any point of time. In truth I write everyday. It is a reflex. The entire time I keep my mind open and all the fragments I receive become alluvium – muddy, soft, right for shaping up whatever I want to create.

What I want to create is random. I have no control over it. Since I don’t know the parameters, I shall call it divine.

AK: Tell me when, at what age, and where exactly you met two thousand years old Poetry. How was that meeting?

KP: My medicines have been trying hard to obliterate memories but most from my childhood are quite clear. At the age of six, I began writing as a journey because the books I read raised a finger and invited me to extend them, join them. I often wrote as a continuation of something the book didn’t elaborate on.

AK: A young practising lawyer suddenly decided to hang up the black robe permanently and became a full-time poet. What led you to take this call? From the noisy court room to the afternoon tranquility hovering around your writing desk in a small cozy private room – will you please narrate this journey?

KP: I was never a lawyer, just an efficient but unwilling practitioner. I remember writing on the law brief, on my mobile while waiting for my turn to argue. I believe a poet writes a single poem throughout his life and the same comes out in instalments, chapters and verses. I have been writing it.

The conflict lies in the fact that I had to ask for the money. It always kills a part of me because I feel the need for the doughs but feels ashamed asking for it.

The other conflict lies in the process of argument. I can tell my logics, stories, truths but when I am contradicted, I shy away inside myself.

At one numb point of my lifelessness, I met my wife online. She made me realize life lies ahead. We decided to quit the profession, embrace the possibility of poverty and keep writing.

At first, mostly because people praised my words, but no academy awarded me, my wife was agitated, but we found Zen in the realisation that writing is life, and in life we have no choice but to live through it without expectations. My wife has been my editor, inspiration, amateur psychoanalyst. She says that I do the same for her. I doubt that.

AK: As a beginning writer what were the challenges you had to negotiate on the way? At that stage did you identify any poetic name who helped you navigate this tough terrain?

KP: As a beginner in the field of writing I swam in the sea of the words. It seemed everything already had been said but not in the manner they should have been. I wanted to rewrite everything I read.

The first set of the uphill tasks for the novice was to control his passion, be humble, ready to learn and to forget in order to learn again. The second and most important was to gain command over a tongue other than his mother’s. I remember a rejection letter asking me if I didn’t learn my law degree in English.

I met Franz Wright online. He was, at that point of time, hellbent against the system of MFA and academic world. He wanted to give me a loose guidance, more like a Zen monk.

Then there were Julie Kim Shavin, Alison Hedlund, Andrew Bellon and Barbara Maat and Salvatore Ala who showered me with help. Guidance? Life advice? Books? Oh, Barbara even sent me wooden bookends for the books.

AK: Who are the poets whom you would like to refer to today’s beginning writer?

KP: I would ask a young author to keep her/his window open, read Ted Kooser, Rae Armantrout, Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Wallace Stevens, W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, Frank O’Hara, Franz Wright, James Wright, Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, Charles Simic, Hecht, Tomas Tranströmer, Vladimir Nabokov, Jim Harrison from the contemporary era. I must have forgotten a forest of names who have somehow influenced me.

To be original, one has to read so much that no one in particular overwhelms him.

AK: You write in free verse, right? Did you ever essay to write in rhymes?

KP: Oh yes. I did. Those were learning methods. One has to instill the sense of rhythm and rhyme in his soul. Once it is there, even in his free verse there will be slant rhymes and internal rhymes.

By the way, the number of silly rhymes written for my daughter is growing, and I might begin sharing those.

AK: The Brits have ruled India for a good two centuries. English is one of the two languages under the Official Language Act of Bharat. Rabindranath was awarded Nobel for his original contribution in English literature. Even then what is lacking in the writers here to get our literature labelled as Indian English? To put it differently, how our English is different from US or UK English?

KP: To imagine that language is permanent and apolitical is delusional. The way regional languages seek their quota or reservation led by some writers and other practitioners fearing that their works will lose relevance if their medium, i.e. the language, wanes and ebbs, Indian English too desire to maintain a tag, the westerners first handed to them. Language dissolves in the stream. US English or UK English or their Australian cousin shall be one with the Indian English. Words will be used by non-academic people without the knowledge of its origin. Perhaps English too will dissolve in some futuristic medium. The important writings shall remain as alive and bold as Beowulf or Mṛcchakatika.

AK: Is it possible for you to take a few contemporary names unhesitatingly, who are noteworthy in the Indian writing scene? And in the global arena?

KP: Most Indian writers I read are unfortunately no longer with us, Atin Bandyopadhyay, Satinath Bhaduri, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Jantananda Das, Sudhindranath Dutta, Shakti Chattopadhyay are no longer here. I love reading R. K. Narayan again and again, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai.

Indian English writers need no regional quota. They belong to the vast gobal English writers.

AK: Are you also the one of the majority living in West Bengal, who cannot isolate creativity from left liberalism? Do you also see the shrinking traces of left hegemony across the globe as a cause of concern for a creative mind like you?

KP: What is left of the leftists has nothing to do with liberalism. Liberalism, in my humble opinion, is so wide that even accepting Nationalist leniency is a part of it.

My regret is that in my green days I tried not to read many writers because they were not peer approved. I left out much and hence stunted my growth until I faced the world at large and stepped outside one region and a specific dogma. I don’t owe anything to anyone. Thankfully the travel was light.

Again, art has a divine purpose. To confine it in your leftist goldfish bowl will not change it.

About leftist liberalism I wrote once «Ask the Jews thrown out from a Soviet train running away with the bones of warmth.»

AK: Albert Camus, albeit his admission that life is not worth living, issues a clarion call to live, love and create in his Myth of Sisyphus. Nearly a century past, do you still believe that in the universe of human longing and discontent, only art has the possibility for redemption?

KP: Art has a purpose. Its purpose is to exist and exist so that whoever is drowning can hold it as a reason to float and learn to swim.

I don’t write for anyone but hope someone somewhere will find hope or reason to cope up with her or his life reading a random line scrivened by this humble poet.

Art is what it is not. It is not inhuman. Humanity, both Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, tried to express it. They tried to express or leave memories through it. Art is the codified history. Perhaps divine too.

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If you’re interested in reading Kushal’s books, go to:
amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet