T.S. Chandra Mouli: Namaste. Thanks for sparing your time for this interview. 

Murali Sivaramakrishnan: Vanakkam! You are most welcome. Some interviews could turn out to be innerviews!

TSCM: How and when did you start writing poetry,sir?

MS: I see that you would like to start off from the very beginning! Perhaps as in all other cases of art there is neither beginning nor end—we occur somewhere at the middle, that’s about all. As I had always felt there is only art and poetry; artists and poets come and go. Well, but to answer your question in a much more concrete manner, I recall that I started writing quite early as a boy, but they were not good poems but mere exercises in writing verse. I had tried on some other occasion to recall some early verses of which I don’t have any records. One went like this: Sleepy ways are strewn/with flowers of diverse hue….

Perhaps I started writing poetry in English while at school and was too timid to send it to any publisher. Come to think of it although I had been brought up in a laid back village my father was generous enough to send me to a city school from the seventh standard onwards. And it was indeed a model school in those days. Our classrooms were styled like the British public schools of gallery type and there were high windows looking out into the park. There were double desks that opened outwards and two of us had to share them. I had a seat next to the window and I often kept looking out into the sunlight. I could also hear all the noises of the living world outside when classes were on full swing. I also recall that our teachers were of fairly good quality and they encouraged us to converse in a style and elan in English. Some of them still retained their old colonial manners and westernized idioms and styles both in dressing and behavior, although this was the seventies. But the sudden exposure to all this urban way of life for a boy eager to absorb everything new was godsend in many ways—lines came to me both by way of drawing and poetry. My love for poetry was inculcated Murali Sivaramakrishnan,2012

by none other than my father. Even as a child I recall he used to recite long narrative poems by heart. He was in the police department—and he strongly resented having joined this—and thus was so very preoccupied almost always that seldom did we children get the benefit of being with him while he was still in service. But then he kept moving all over the place and we all travelled with him. His profound love for literature was perhaps what triggered the sprouts of poetry deep within me. And as I said some of the teachers in my school were also there to get me involved in the world of reading. During our seventh standard we were not allowed into our school library but our teachers brought us books of their choice and got us to read them and make short reports. Eventually the library doors were opened to all of us and a new world was there for us to explore.

My friend and I used to walk to school together. How I cherish those walks. We had so much fun together. My mind was alert and eager for new and newer experiences. I wanted to record those experiences and frame them into verses simply because that appeared to be the nicest way to me then. Although our school, in those days, did not impose itself so much like the dreadful schools of the present, we did have to reach by around nine and we left fairly early. Those hours of sunlight and laughter were to remain with me as early poetry. There were flowers, trees, birds and people. Less of other people though, simply because I was a sort of inward-turning poet, if you may say so. I used to see everything with relation to my feelings and sensations. The blue of the sky was a sort of deep thirst for me. The dark road, with other people on it, was one perpetual movement. My friend’s chatter was like rain. Birds and insects on trees and grass were comfort and solace. Above all I had some deep feelings of sadness and loss—I don’t know why—but this was so abiding within me even from those early days—although I had such a happy and boisterous boyhood. Perhaps it was the feeling that everything was changing so fast about me. My world of fantasy and feeling was a sort of cocoon that I built to resist this outer change, perhaps. Or it could have been some sort of resistance to what was happening to the world outside. Poetry came as a solace. Poetry was a whisper of hope. And it kept me longing for more absences.

TSCM: Please tell us something about your childhood, studies etc.

MS: Come to think of it, childhood is certainly the best part of one’s life. The whole world is there for you to encounter and relish and change. One lived in an eternal present. There are no regrets about the past nor are there any worries about the future! One just lives. I was the fourth child in a family of five children; so I had two brothers and two sisters. My father as I said was one who ended up in the police force against the best of his intentions was always so busy until he retired from service. He travelled and we all travelled with him. My early schooling were all in village schools but as I recall almost all the teachers who taught me were kind and gentle hearted souls, caring and inspiring enough. Nevertheless I was never happy in any school whatsoever; I felt constrained by its walls. I always gazed outside windows and doors and the sunlight and breeze were regular companions. My mother once told me that as a first standard student I refused to sit facing the teacher and the blackboard; I sat turning my back to them and looking toward the door! Fear of school, love for the outdoors or longing for home!

It was perhaps while in the high school that I came to settle down into a regular routine of a home and school and the world outside. Fortunately for me I was sent into the Model High School in Trvandrum, Kerala—a prestigious school in those days. It still held a colonial hangover although most of the students were a little indifferent to their studies. Now that I look back most of the boys who were around then have grown up into well-known figures in many fields in the present. Many years later, while in the US as a Fulbright professor, I came across an old classmate of mine who had made his mark as a reputed software expert in the silicon-valley and both of us were delighted at this meeting. We had gone to the same village school as little kids and we talked late into the night about our good old times. We even called up one or two of our classmates of those times who had settled down in the US and were involved in their own worlds by then. Well, life is so strange and the byways and highways it takes you down are never predictable.

To take up from where I left off, those days in the various schools offered me wonderful times and then there were the libraries. I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in Trivandrum during the seventies—the city was so homely in those days and the magnificent libraries within easy walking distance for a boy who wanted to read and read. There was this old world library—the Travancore Public Library with its wonderful disarray of strange books all stashed up as huge clusters on shelves and racks. Despite its disheveled appearance the library was a magical place to be in. There was always some discovery to be made each day. I still feel it is a charmed place to be in. And of course, each place had its own array of friends which added to the charm. Then there was this amazing British Council Library. It had an air of stiff Britishness and did easily put off many of my classmates and fellow readers of those days. But it opened up a world of books for me. It was here that I started reading English poetry seriously. There were many friends of mine who shared my interests too – we refereed books and authors to one another. In the eighties some of us used to gather there regularly and read our own poetry and debate. This also was my very first library enrollment—the library fee then was Rs 5/- Eventually it was raised to 10/- and later 15/- to 25/- until it came to Rs 300/- in the nineties. Somewhere along the way afterwards I lost touch with this magical place and a decade later they shut it down and the books were auctioned off.

The Kerala University Library was also a well stacked library and it offered us poets a place to congregate and discuss poetry. I remember many an occasion when several young poets who have now become celebrities of their own reading their early verses. These gatherings of multilingual poets helped me as a poet to sharpen my craft and become a little more self reflexive.

Yes, another small library I recall was the one tucked away in an unassuming corner of Trivandrum—it was the Mahakavi Ulloor Memorial Library. My brother who was an avid reader first introduced me to this lovely wealth of a library. They used to have thousands of books. And each day afforded new discoveries. Come to think of it, seventies in Trivandrum was a paradise for the literary mind, and poetry!

Later while an undergraduate student in the University College, I turned to poetry for comfort and solace and found new forms of self-expression. The politically stimulant times sprouted new fears and fantasies in my mind and I started learning to think like myself.

TSCM: What are your concerns as a poet, sir?

MS: Poetry is certainly concerned with the fate of humankind and the fate of the planet. And no poet can be free from the contemporary times. Just like everyone else I too am concerned with my present. But then when one reflects on influences and views that shaped one’s own vision one cannot but go back to one’s own early life. In many ways, there were three varied streams that proffered me with my genuine concerns—poetry, painting and nature.

I had started sketching and painting from an early age. And my interest in nature and natural history also grew side by side. I used to trek a lot in the western-ghats, and as an amateur bird watcher have also helped in bird surveys and bird studies. My prime interest was in sketching birds and writing about them. I filled up many note books and sketch pads with drawings and sketches of birds and animals. My reading into nature narratives and wildlife also helped me write poetry about nature. So then, line and forms, nature and life, transformed themselves into poetry. As a poet my major concerns came to be nature and life. And as a reflective poet I was always concerned with time and death. I cannot accept the passing of each second and yet I have to as I realize. Perhaps you might even call it a sort of nostalgia for the present. I have often felt that poetry breaks all bounds and swells from within—it speaks of truth and stands for justice. The genuine concern comes out in verse—and so what I have written should justify my own concerns: life, love, time, understanding, fear, loneliness, art, communication and communion with god. I do not want to overstate my claims. Because I am not yet sure of what I have learned of the art of poetry. More so because I write in the English. The origin history and vagaries of this language have a tendency to alienate the thinking soul of a south Indian based in the deep south of the Indian peninsula. However, our own  forbearers have struggled to make us inherit this language too. And so albeit with a little temerity I have also learned to compose verses in English and allow myself to express my own genuine concerns. I am quite serious in poetry as with all else I do. And so I take the business of writing quite seriously and even religiously. I am concerned with my own times. I am concerned with my own feelings and fallibilities. I am constantly learning to think and feel like myself. The learning process appears unending. Perhaps it would be best to state that poetry is just like any other sense: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Of course, it is a conglomeration of all these senses and something more.

The first poem that appears in my first collection of poems Night Heron is somewhat like a manifesto:

Nothing But the Truth
poetry is
all lie; it’s
the after word
of happening --for me
it’s
a confession
of conceit,
inconsistency
an account of
misbegotten emotions—
the remains of
a
state of being
my poetry is nothing but
the truth
as I make it out to be

Here, as elsewhere, I state clearly one of my concerns: the struggle to make and remake truth—because, after all, we make up our own truths and in many ways that accounts for most of our problems since we tend to generalize the same, which itself is never true! No poet anywhere in the world would ever be satisfied with truth as we have it because true poetry veers between truth and untruth, between what life is and what it ought to be; and this makes them inconsistent and all poetry is bound to the remains of a state of being. It might be a happening it might be a game but poetry is tied to truth, forever. Further, I have often felt that I was a mood-poet. Some moods and fleeting feelings sometimes suddenly overpower me and make poetry happen.

I am concerned with certain other things too as almost like all poets: with language, love, and laughter. When the mood for poetry overpowers we need to recognize the order of words on the page and rearrange the same; because no poetry flows on itself it flows through the poet, and that’s why I cannot write in Mandarin or Korean and I write in the language I know. Initially a larger amount of intellectual or cerebral activity was there in order for me to shape and reshape the poetry as it happened. Eventually it has become natural. As Kamala Das has set it out:

The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions…

The language I write eventually becomes mine own. And then I like to pick it up like a kaleidoscope and look through it at the wondrous designs as I reshape it to be. And love is all there is to life and all the pain and suffering makes us realize that. Pleasure and pain are just scribbles on both sides of the same paper: tear one you tear another.

In another poem I have said this:

I like to let the word fly about
Not tied down to its meanings
Like a dog on a leash
And be walked on the beach. 

But let it prance around, flip and turn
And perch on the tiniest branch
Of suspense and dream
In the balmy glow of a rainbow
Like a crazy cormorant
Caring not a fig for gravity.

I like to let the word
Make mouths of mockery
At those who take it to mean
Like sea and sea weed moth-green
I like to clutch them and scooping
Fling handfuls into the sky
And watch them rain
Poetry.

[I like to let the word fly about, Conversations with Children, 2005]

I cannot suffer any affronts to the dignity of humanity: and the politics of power that men engage with these days hastens to my mind the image of the Saviour in arms, Jesus Christ with the whip in the temple. There is also the child in the tale who screams out that the Emperor is naked. The Buddha is half in and half out at the threshold to liberation: how can I sleep when there is so much injustice, so much unfairness, here where ignorance is paraded on the shoulders of giants as wisdom, where the unholy is marketed as holy, where the Orwellian double-think is pronounced as perpetual truth, and where children are taught to grab and gain what is not theirs?

A lone seagull might at last find its voice
but not its way back to this shore.
And soon it will drown.
Later some child playing on another shore
will pick up a bundle of cold feathers
and dash back to its mother.
Another Sophocles.

I also think of the fate of poetry and the fate of earth when I write, the first one because I hold poetry to be sacred and genuine, and second because I guess without this third rock from the sun none of this is possible! In our own times I believe that the prime function of all art is to bring back the sacred and to retrieve our misplaced life. When ignorance and pleasure are marketed as a one-package-deal it is the vocation of the poet turn into a weathercock and turn eastwards.

I have a poem in The East-Facing Shop and Other Poems:

The Quick, the Easy, and the Blue
A lot of stuff on earth is quick to deflect
Its own extinction—at least some are often doing so
With such frequency that we are able to live together
As a living community—do we end up with an evening
To spare to look up toward the blue, blue expanse,
sometime? Perhaps all living things
Are never quick enough not to be killed.

We make sure a lot of them do—so much so
For our space ensured safe on the globe.
Water and earth are easy to strangle
Under dams and rotting garbage—we can
Reinvent the plastic disorder to disrobe the living mantle
Of any left over star for that matter. Air is
Snuffed out like a huge candle. Fire cannot
Prevent its own disaster. Only the deep, deep blue
Gasps for survival. We are reaching for you, we are reaching
For you. Ah! That our greed should exceed our grasp
Or what is disaster for? We be quick, we be nimble.

I have also written an afterward to this volume. Here let me show you the extract:

It is seldom that the poet or artist feels happy at having accomplished something of worth after signing off a work of art—the feeling of having dashed off in haste something that needed to be cherished and savoured and pruned and reworked is a feeling that most would share, afterwards. After all, why do we write or paint at all? Who, if I cry, would hear me among the angelic orders? wrote Rilke in his Duino Elegies so many years ago. All efforts at the finer arts are doomed to end in despondency and sorrow. The art of poesie is no different. All it serves is to leave behind that immense hollow, that infinite dread, that magnificent sense of the tragic. Words, images, or lines are indeed absences,

traces of vague desires and hopes, of laughter and tears, of someone living in the streets of perennial faith under the unfriendliest of skies. And yet we poets hold on to this deceptive art of meaning-making. Delighting and relishing the touch of word with sense, quarrelling with the noun and verb for whatever it is worth, mixing adjectives with the sorrows and indifference of our own times. There are mango trees that flower when the biologist desires them to, tigers, lions and elephants would soon be museum pieces roaring and shrieking at the simple touch of a button, tiny, miniature cows would provide the same quantity of milk that normal cows would give after they are remade—everything, we men have always wanted to play with can be ordered, including a maid-to-order. The poet gasps at the wonder world of biotechnology and cybernetics and nanotechnology. Astronomy can soon penetrate to the other end of the multiverse; geologists and paleontologists have dug through and through the earth that a child from Tanjavur in Tamil Nadu could soon emerge on the other side of the deep hole in Buenos Aires. We have stashed explosives to blow the earth nine-times over, even if poor dharitri is like the fabled cat with nine lives! Each day brings us only news of disaster for someone somewhere—news papers and television apparently have so little to show of joy and cheer. We even warn our children not to befriend strangers or to pick up any toy in the streets or public places. No temple or church or mosque or synagogue or gurudwara or even a vihara is safe for the silent pilgrim anymore. We have so successfully managed to sow the seeds of disaster and calamity amidst our earthly spaces. Where is the silence we sense when we split the sesame seed? Where is the tang and taste of unripe mangoes that leave no trace? Where is the earthy brown of the tamarind fruit? Where is the makolam that decorates the portals of our finite destinies? And yet the poet and artist fiddles around with words and images. With emptiness for company in the darkness at noon. Which side of happiness are we? Each page written, each line drawn is an anguished scream languishing and wearying through memory and hope. All poems are doomed to remain incomplete. Each word is a silent searching for the other. Only the longing remains amidst the slashes, gaps and semicolons. That longing for more.

Having said all these I must also mention that poetry is something like an exorcism for me: I feel its magic when I have woven a poem and set it in place!

TSCM: What perceptible influences are there on your poetry?

MS: Good question! But then if the influences are perceptible why ask? Sometimes more than the poet, it is the sensitive reader who perceives those factors better. For me there is always a sort of frenzy in poetry, because in blindness lies this secret insight! In the art of writing I cannot imitate anyone else, because I become myself. Nevertheless there are always traces of those forefathers and foremothers who forged ahead. I have come across this Arabian proverb: Traveller, there are no paths; paths are made by walking. And sometimes we would also like to walk on our own away from the trodden paths.

As anybody else growing up in India in the seventies I have had my fair share of exposure to world poetry. I was also fortunate to have been exposed to a multitude of translations from various Indian languages as well—especially during and after the national emergency in the mid seventies. Poetry then I had always conceived was much more powerful than it is now. In many ways I guess I have been absolutely fortunate to have had exposure to some of the world’s greats during my sensitive years. As WB Yeats has said I hold myself lucky to have been living among with those truly greats! A long time ago I remember a conversation many of us poets had -- we were discussing our own influences and readings when one of us pointed out: look Murali, our concern and involvement has always been with the greatest! Yes, that is true. I recall with immense gratitude the greats among whom I lived—P Lal (I owe him my first volume of poetry), Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and the many poet friends writing in a variety of Indian languages like Satchidanandan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Nakulan—the list appears almost endless. Somehow the nearness and awareness of each poet and their poetry has left its invisible but inevitable trace, no doubt. Because we poets share a lot—call it influence or what you will. More than anything there has been innumerable friends and fellow poets in many languages among whom I have moved over the years.

TSCM: Do you feel social consciousness or ideological approach is necessary for a poet? Could you elaborate?

MS: I guess it is very important to be alive in ones times and be alive to the same. Perhaps no poet worth his/her own salt can afford to be less self-aware and less socially aware at the same time! In many ways true poetry originates from the world and from one’s self at the same time. Yeats said: ?Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry!

As for ideology I do not know. I guess it is implied in all our acts, and the act of poetry is no different. One thing I can be sure of myself and my work: I would not give my heart away to any ideology that ignores the inner life of humans. Wordsworth wrote in his grand style a long, long time ago:

We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Poetry is a certain kind of madness; it changes us and changes the way we perceive the world too. And we poets gladly succumb to its great touch!

TSCM: How do you employ images and symbols in your poetry?

MS: This is question of poetic craft. Many poets in India today, writing in English are barely aware of this aspect. I know for sure because I have been reading discussing teaching and reviewing poetry for over three decades now and I have many a time felt that even inadequate self-reflexivity in terms of the language is held to be matter of pure craft (read poor!) by many among us these days. Innumerable poetasters abound in our midst—some genuinely ignorant of the great traditions or history of poetry and prosody, some quite deliberately remaining so professedly to remain free from being influenced! Now, don’t take this from me as coming from a professor of poetry! I believe that the true poet works in the workshop for a long time and sharpens his/her tools before launching forth—there is a great need to spend long, long hours in study for a genuine poet to emerge. Images and symbols belong to these areas. There are of course automatic images and symbols that occur perhaps accidentally in some cases but for the most the act of image making comes fairly naturally to the mind that is exposed to the larger world of poetry and craft. I don’t subscribe to the belief that the genuine poet remains free from the rest of the world in order to work on his/her own in any uncontaminated fashion! Poetry requires acute sensitivity to one’s language as toward one’s own self, and such sensitivity to language also calls for a sense of one’s own history and poetic tradition. By deliberately remaining free from the others one can never shape great poetry. Any systematic study of poetry would certainly be a prerequisite—and then one becomes sensitive to the art and craft of image making as well.

As for me I do not always self-consciously create imagery or work in terms of symbols. In many ways I have become aware that some of my poems reach me in terms of certain images and crystallize around those eventually. Symbols are often too profound and subjective—some click some don’t. As for the more obvious there is seldom the need to work around those—they would happen alongside.

Further as a professor of poetry genuinely involved in the act of poetry in English in India in the present I would also add that resorting to obscure symbols and images deliberately for the sake of making your poem appear loaded and erudite is an act of desecration of the muse! In many ways the greatest of poems are simply narrated without any struggle with craft and concern. Like what the poet said: if poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all!

TSCM: What are the recurring themes and images conspicuous in your poetry, Sir? Could you give a few examples, please?

MS: Again, as I said earlier, if the themes are recurring and the images are conspicuous where is the need to elaborate? My themes as I had said earlier are language, love, and laughter! And my images are drawn from nature without doubt! The outer and the inner, I mean. I am a mood poet. Sometimes poetry pushes through and I have to make way for it. A little bit of shaping pruning and grafting will be there but for the most many poems are set forth as they appeared to me in all fairness. I am also a painter and I do sketch a lot. Where the words are inadequate my lines step in. I believe that the visual language is different from the verbal. Of course words and images have to go alongside each other but I do not like a representative one to one correspondence. Many a time I had found that I could not paint what I wanted to express and similarly where the words terminated I had found the painting space better facilitating the emotion and mood. Here is a poem from one my poetry volumes which Satchidanandan had marked off as ?an epitome of the poet’s struggle and hope:?

That one word says it all
So hard to get 
Trees in the moonlight
Sea by dawn
A bird by the wall
A long shadow
The sun breaking from the east
Perfect day.

Here as elsewhere I have tried a combination of the sensual and imaginative. There are visual and verbal images here: fairly common recurrent images throughout my poems would be river, tree, bird, dawn, love, death, I don’t know. Each poem is for me an incomplete experience. And nothing remains. So then, I need to go through everything I have written to pick out selected images and themes, I guess.

TSCM: Do you feel poetry festivals or meets promote creativity? Are they relevant at all?

MS: What am I supposed to say here? This appears to be the way of the world for the moment. Everything is a media-concocted hype. There is a tremendous insensitivity to the self and feelings—we suddenly appear to believe that indiscriminate hyping and gala festivities would hasten the great order of creativity. No doubt, some people get away with all these masalas for the many! And some organizers make merry and money too in the bargain. They parade these pratibha and do pranams! It is affair of giving and taking. So then I don’t want to make any statement here that poetry festivals are irrelevant. I too have gone for some and then come across a couple of sensitive ears and minds too. So then, all is not unwell with crowds and poetry—at least they keep the art alive. Let thousand flowers bloom and we can pick up the genuine from among the millions. Relevant? I guess these are part of our youth and partying culture. We need gala celebrations for anything and everything because the market is that which we live by. But then I have this thing against those who make a commodity of poetry.

Because we have such short memories our young people might get the wrong vibes eventually once they are overexposed to these acts of blind celebrations! In the end poetry will survive despite these acrobatics.

TSCM: As a poet what is your view of the prevailing scenario?

MS: Scenario of Indian poetry or poetry in general? Poetry of the world is never dead of course! As for English poetry in India there is definitely a need to change. The times are unsuited for the poet. After all, if you really try to see it, there are a whole lot of people who write these days and so much gibberish is also published in the guise of poetry (no one distinguishes between verse and poetry!) But then who reads? Publications in the present have become so easy—one can get anything across on the web and the printer is a person who is hardly concerned with quality and value. Publishers are dime a dozen and they manufacture commodities for the market place. Everyone’s craze for publicity is catered to and everyone and anyone can parade as a poet with publications to her/his credit. No one listens to the sensitive critic and no one cares a fig for judgement. There are awards and kudos to be had on the go as well. If worse comes to worse you can yourself order a couple over your phone or email! Let us not allow poetry to die in all this crass commercialism and market frays. This would amount to dying ourselves. I am quite worried.

TSCM: What are the trends you notice in post-independence Indian-English poetry? Which trends have gained ground now? What is conspicuous now?

MS: You mean what I think is significant now in terms of Indian Writing in English poetry? I am a stickler for these terminologies and I guess this comes out of my systematic training. I have always stood outside the conventional but I have always been traditional too! There is the poetic paradox!

Indian poetry in English has certainly come of age: there are two ways of looking at this. Either we see it terms of poetry in general, or see it as a subset within the Indian writing. In general I guess we still are yet to break free. Too much constraint in terms of language and culture—we are like  those desi-bollywood films that are deliberately made with the flavor of chutney! Consumed as fashionable. Some make it to the other side for want of a discriminative eye from the other! Very few are genuine. But then within our own framework I guess Indian poetry in English is just like poetry in any other Indian language. It has made its mark— now it requires reaching into the mind of the discerning reader irrespective of caste, creed, class, coterie, and colour. For the most English in India still remains in the reach of the middle class—and poetry has deteriorated into being a fashion for the haves.

Trends? If you see the coming into form of Dalit writing and the breaking free of the subaltern self as a sort of branching off from the mainstream, then that appears to be the in-thing; this breaking free part. New voices are being heard. There is the sound of new eggs cracking. New grounds being broken. A great lot of women’s voices are heard. Other than these there is no organized movement in terms of strong ideologies or thought. No one singular voice or trend can be held to be in the lead. Everyone leads, no one follows. There is a sort of free for all market: however, the secret is no one sells. Even the greats of Indian poetry in English have on many occasions confessed to me that they themselves had to see their books through the publishers and markets. Can I offer you a few copies of my books here? —of course these are not self-funded publications! I have been a little fortunate in being able to get noticed through my publications periodically in journals and magazines. And eventually get good publishers to print and distribute. And then strong feelings and emotions have to be stated in strong language—that is happening in a few quarters.

However, what is conspicuous in the present is the tinkering of poetasters. The market is rife with the ridiculous.

TSCM: What is your prognosis about Indian English Poetry?

MS: Good possibilities. One needs to write and reach the reader. The wealth of publishers are no doubt good and healthy signs but they need to be a little more aware of quality. As with any art the art of poesies needs to be inculcated and absorbed. It is still a skill that can be shaped and pruned with schooling. In the world of commercial film industry any one with some money can manufacture any silly sort of stuff and market it and get noticed and win awards bribing jury and the media. Similar is the case with poetry and festivities these days. A sorry state for the present! But then true poets are a sturdy race—they will always survive and prevail.

TSCM: What is your message to budding poets?

MS: Keep your mind’s eye open and write boldly. Make as many drafts as you feel inclined to—do not worry about laboring your points—there is no end to the art. All writing is a process of learning. Know your time know your past and feel your present. Write with your heart. There are many forces that would keep you down, thrash your enthusiasm and put out your flare. Do not fall prey to these negative forces. On the other hand there are also these perpetually despondent minds that tell you that there is nothing to be gained by poetry, for after all, you may even feel tempted to agree with them that poetry makes nothing happen! It sure doesn’t, as we poets know—but then the poetry of the world is never dead! This is what we live by ultimately. Without poetry the world would be a barren desert. And how will we find our way about in the dark?

TSCM: Thanks for sharing your erudite views with us, Sir.

MS: My pleasure Chandra Mouli.