The alchemy of poetry

Poetess Arundhathi Subramaniam says she uses words as a resource in her existential quest for a whole world

RAJKUMAR LEISHEMBA

To ardent readers of articles on dance, theatre and literature, the byline of Arundhathi Subramaniam is a familiar one. She has been a regular writer with various publications, including The Indian Express, The Hindu and The Times Of India. Yet, as she claims, her first love is poetry. So, when she decided to clean up her act and come up with On Cleaning the Bookshelves, her first book of poetry, the accolades came in plenty.

However, this lady, who heads Chauraha, an interactive arts forum at Mumbai’s National Centre for Performing Arts, refuses to be swept away by the recognition that has come her way.

In fact, ask her about how it feels to have her book out in the light of day, and all she says with a polite smile is, “I am just recovering from it.”

One of the flag-bearers of the younger generation of poets in India, Ms Subramaniam believes in spontaneity with control. “William Wordsworth once described poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. But if you read his poems, you will find a tremendous amount of control,” she reasons. How does she define poetry? She pauses briefly, then says, “I see poetry as a means, not an end. I see it as very much a part of a larger existential quest. A quest for a world that is whole, and in that quest, the word becomes the desperate resource.” She adds, “To me poetry is the art of hanging on to the word as the most significant and perhaps the only resource of making sense.”

Perhaps that is the reason why she does not consider herself a passive recipient of what the world is doing to her, and writes her poems when she intensely feels that she can fashion the reality around her and mould the world in which she lives. Hence, she does not allot a specific time to write her poems. Be it early in the morning or at midnight, she does it whenever she feels the urge to write. “5.36 Andheri Local, one of the poems in my book, was in fact written while I was sitting inside a local train,” says Ms Subramaniam, to prove her point.

But how does she start to write a poem? According to her, it all begins with a single line in poetic form, which then dictates the rest of the poem. “In the end, you may completely do away with the initial line, but that is the starting point,” says Ms Subramaniam. She hastens to add that there is a great deal of magic in writing poetry. “The magic is really about sitting down with the intention to write. And as I write, watching that intention get transformed and that alchemy is the reason why I write poetry,” she says.

Also a qualified Bharatanatyam dancer, Ms Subramaniam believes in intense quality relationships—”that is why I have a very few close friends with whom I spend time”. Married to a theatre director and in the same field herself, Ms Subramaniam has little free time, but whenever she does find time, she loves to spend it with her three cats in her Mumbai seaside house.

Be it performing on the theatre stages of Mumbai, writing her column
or reading her poems at international poetry festivals, Ms Subramaniam is fully occupied at present. Looking ahead, she says she does not know what she will do. “Perhaps find God,” she quips when I ask her.