No easy answers
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GOWRI RAMNARAYAN interviews the `inaccessible' bilingual poet, Arun Kolatkar.
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GOWRI RAMNARAYAN
"He has no telephone, doesn't answer letters, shuns the press. Publishes in little magazines and small presses. Designs his own slim volumes." A meeting with the reclusive poet did take place six years ago, through the agency of a friend of his friends. It was to be the start of a series of interviews to profile ARUN KOLATKAR, the bilingual poet, equally at ease in Marathi and English.
Kolatkar looked me over, seemed disappointed that I didn't know the Tolkappiyam. He agreed to talk more at his long-term haunt, a restaurant in his favourite part of Mumbai, the location of his new anthology Kala Ghoda Poems (2004). On the appointed day, he was at the corner table, framed in leonine gaze and grey mane, turning gold in the slanting beams. The unmatching bland voice took time to shed wariness. Sadly, there were no further talks as planned. But the prelude tantalises in what it reveals, and represses. Excerpts:
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HOW do you manage to express a sense of wonder in your visuals of people and places, and yet make them ironic?
Somebody may have a quick answer to that. I don't.
(Nervously, playing for time) For many contemporary poets, the arrangement of the lines on the page are as important as the poem itself. Once you "drew" the words up and down to create the harvest dance of fowl in a jowar field. Did you visualise the pattern before you wrote the poem?
That's a minor thing, excess energy. Not my normal style. At least so far. The poem is complete without it. This is bonus pleasure for the reader. Somebody may be irritated by it also. I probably had a disordered, psychic typewriter that jiggled the words up and down.
Even when the typewriter is not disordered, your poems can reflect a taste for play.
Possibly. If it's there, it should be obvious. Some people find it cold and cynical too. So I don't know if it's warm and playful or chilly and grim. I don't disagree or vehemently agree with personal reactions.
In "Jejuri" the pilgrimage to the old shrine starts with a bus ride, nausea...
(Cutting in) I thought it was claustrophobia! Were you reminded of some personal experience of nausea on a bus ride, or do you think the poem itself evokes nausea?
It's the structure of the poem, of the feeling of being penned in, and the images. The mind of the rider is open, it is the world that is rocking around him. A sense of movement without the distance diminishing. It made me think of tamas, spiritual torpitude.
I'm not sure I want to talk about individual poems. I feel they are transparent. If not, no use adding gloss. What is your feeling?
How can a poem be completely transparent? For me "Jejuri" is as intense, as iconoclastic as some of the bhakti poets I read and sing.
Strange. I keep coming across conflicting reactions so I find it more interesting to see people react than me reacting. Some are disturbed by the cynicism, lack of faith and roots, a sense of dispossession, or find a kind of gimmickry, sort of cleverness... and no true feelings. Touristy they say (falls silent). I think "Jejuri" describes the surroundings, establishes my position at the outset quietly. You said that the poem about the ruins was a personal experience. Where?
In a derelict wayside shrine near Thanjavur. The sanctum had no doors, lizards and squirrels were scurrying over the smiling, cobwebby goddess. If your Jejuri priest hands out visiting cards, our Pondicherry priest speaks French to tourists.
(Smiles) Many people, and reviews too, find it shocking that I don't respond to the magic of the place, or what the deity means to the devotee.
Isn't the sacred feeling in your images of nature? In a butterfly, or the puppies around their mother in the ruined shrine?
Sure. The miracle of life itself becomes a divine sort of thing. The tumbled bricks and broken slabs are not what make the spot holy, but wherever a bitch gives birth is probably a holy place. This is the kind of feeling that hopefully one has the potential of conveying.
Do you feel that a poem is complete only when someone responds to it?
I don't have any clear theories on the subject. I try not to limit myself with theoretical speculations about what poetry should be. I keep my ideas and attitudes in a limbo, in suspension, without firming them up, so that when I write, I feel free, not restricted by ideas of what it should be... If a reader has intuitions I haven't had — well and good.
Lack of firming up has reduced the effect of some poems...
So? Indecisiveness is my nature, lots of things I can't make up my mind about, whether politics, economics or poetry.
Is it a challenge for an Indian poet to write devotional verse in English?
For an Indian poet to write a devotional poem in an Indian language today will be equally a challenge. You can't write as if you belonged to Basavanna's close circle. Clichés will make your work phoney, imitative nostalgic, falsify the sentiment.
Language shapes emotion and structure. So how are your Marathi poems different from the English?
Not something I particularly want to know. My Marathi poems were written in different times and periods in my life, and that could have made the difference rather than language. They are probably more dense texture wise, and opaque. At least that's a common complaint. Anyway it's futile to form a judgement of what I'm doing in Marathi in English.
Does Marathi have a tradition of tight, graphic imagery, the kind of strokes you make?
Probably not. Good or bad, my Marathi poems are of their own kind. Some use exaggerated imagery, far too much, which puzzles people.
Why are the English poems easier?
People want to know. I don't know. Why shouldn't they be?
Why did you take 10 years to complete your painting course at the J.J. School of Art?
I was doing other things.
What?
Painting.
(Giving up) Why did you start writing then?
Found it more interesting. Fortunately I'm not writing War and Peace. Or blockbusting fiction. That would be terrible, tied down for years, nose to the grind. And trying to get out your novel...My God! I write just poems and things, small time stuff. I'm not all that productive either. Why? Natural laziness I suppose. There's a lot to be said for regular writing. I don't (do that).
May be poetry is not something that you can do regularly.
It's variable. Individual decision, attitude, circumstances, all come into the picture. A surprising number of novelists write poetry. Half of them probably write poems when they're not doing other serious stuff, knocking off a few sonnets now and then.
You studied in Marathi, and learnt English from books, comics and films. No early travels abroad. I'm curious about why you write in English at all, especially as you are not interested in a foreign market, (inaudibly) or in any market.
All I know is I have always written poems in both. Why I write one group of poems in one language rather than the other — the answer may be interesting but I don't have it. As long as I'm writing, I'm fine. Don't care in which language. At the moment I'm writing one group of poems in English, another in Marathi.
Are the themes different?
I see what you're getting at. The Marathi poems are located more internationally, in multiple cultural backgrounds. A challenge. I have to continually find out the pronunciations of words I'm shaky about. I asked you about Kannaki, I'm writing a set of poems on her. I'm searching for the pronunciation of a Greek name.
Which one?
Do you know Greek? No? It's Hypatia, a woman lynched in 5th Century Alexandria. I want the name of the naked girl on the highway in the Vietnam War photographs. I'm dragging non-Marathi themes, feelings and traditions into Marathi. Having problems. Language should be capable of expressing not just what's in your lane or village, but happenings anywhere in the world.
How do you react to being taught in the classroom?
(Laughing) What do you think? Must be bad? Once a few students wrote to me saying they disagreed with their teacher's interpretation of my poem. I almost replied. (Guffawing) Some school children actually went on a picnic to Jejuri and had puran poli there. They shouldn't be reading prescribed texts anyway, I never did. Funny, my poems were prescribed in British schools too, and the BBC was here filming background material. I read a few poems, but refused to talk.
About the "Boatride" (pausing) I think they've shut shop here. Should we leave?
(Unhurriedly) Hanh...
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