“I think when the poems came back to me, there was a kind of a lightness, a recklessness that I hadn’t experienced before”, Jeet Thayil remarks.
When he published his acclaimed 2008 collection, These Errors Are Correct– an intimate meditation on grief in its varied forms– he publicly announced that it was the last book of poems he would publish. And for seventeen years, it was. In the meantime, Thayil wrote book after book of prose, with his first novel Narcopolis being shortlisted from the Man Booker. He could very easily have continued with his work in prose – poetry is neither the most profitable, nor the most widely read genre in India. In the preface of a recently reprinted edition of These Errors Are Correct, Thayil admits that his “sweeping pronouncement” about never publishing poetry again was perhaps premature. After his long hiatus from it, Thayil has recently released his newest poetry collection, I’ll Have It Here, which ranges thematically from fascism and political strife to meditations on art.
On what has changed for him as a poet after his time away from the form, he says “The feeling never changes. When you’re actually working on a poem – which is, I guess, the only time you can call yourself a poet – that feeling never really changes.” When I ask to elaborate on what the feeling he refers to is, he says, “It’s a way of being fully alive and fully engaged, a way of stopping time. Time is annihilated – you don’t realise that it’s there or that it’s passing. And that’s one of the great gifts of being able to practice any art, really. It’s a way of stopping time.” When I ask him how poetry returned to him, he identifies the writing of two political ghazals in 2020 as the moment he began writing verse again. “‘Waapsi’ and the two ghazals which were written around the same period. I think that was the beginning, and then I thought, if I can do three, I can probably do a collection, which happened over four years”, he says. His history with ghazals goes back a long way. The first poem of Thayil’s that I ever read was “Malayalam’s Ghazal, which presents a delightful interplay of language and lived experience, proclaiming “When you’ve been too long in the rooms of English/ Open your windows to the fresh air of Malayalam”. But where “Malayalam’s Ghazal” flows gently like a stream, “February 2020” and “December 2020”, two ghazals in I’ll Have It Here, are jagged, chaotic and sharp-toothed. These poems are marked by a certain ferocity and brashness with which Thayil writes about the current state of Indian politics. “February 2020” addresses the repressive nature of contemporary Indian politics, markedly ending with the lines “Jeet, if you don’t like it here, Pakistan isn’t far away/ if you want to stay, shut up, learn to make in India”– speaking to the various crackdowns on freedom of expression in the last few years. “December 2020” thinks similarly about the unequal impact of the mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic in India– declaring “The poor and the powerless were first to be forgotten/ And last. How else do you play the game of the plague?”.
On whether the form of the ghazal itself allows for a more explicit political expression, he nods emphatically and says, “For those of us who live in India, there is a certain political history associated with the ghazal. Because the ghazal is seen as an Urdu form at this historical moment, even to write a ghazal is a political statement. And to write a ghazal in English is another kind of political statement, because a lot of the people who write Urdu ghazals don’t think a ghazal in English is a legitimate form. So you’re in opposition to two political forces. A ghazal in English is right in the middle.” This speaks, more generally, to the position that Indian writers writing in English are in– caught between colonial legacies and contemporary politics.
I’ve always wondered, with such explicit reflections on politics, in an age of censorship, fascism, and repression, how writers like Thayil negotiate with the censors in their heads– of deciding what stays and what might be too provocative. For him, it seems like the question of politics was unavoidable. He says, “ I just couldn’t imagine not engaging with that, because we are at a moment in history, as Indian writers, that feels new and menacing in an unprecedented way. I mean, I was alive during the Emergency, but I didn’t experience it the way I am experiencing this. I don’t know how to avoid that question. I don’t know how you can be a writer and look away from that. And similarly with events happening in other parts of the world, with what’s going on in the US and with Israel’s pogrom on the Gaza Strip. Yeah, I think that there will come a time when people will look back at this moment and ask, were you not aware that this was happening? How were you writing only about clouds and dandelions and your love life?” Here, I’m reminded of a 2015 interview with Scroll, where Thayil quotes Auden, saying “poetry makes nothing happen.” I ask him whether, in this political moment, he still believes that. He tells me that he never really expects poetry to change things, but also says “ Poetry may make nothing happen, but it helps you to endure what is happening. As a reader, it helps you to endure, and as a writer.” This idea of art as a salve– or as a way to understand political horrors– is one that’s become increasingly important in a polarised world.
Another intersection of poetry and politics that Thayil seems interested in is the gradual seepage of identity politics into literature– something he certainly doesn’t endorse. In “Gender Fluids”, Thayil assumes the voice of a woman, thinking through problems of appropriation. He observes, “Something very interesting happens when you change the gender of a character. For example, if you turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man, you’re immediately freed from the tyranny of what actually happened. It opens up the work and then it becomes free and much more resonant.” In “Let’s See Now, F.N. Souza”, he adopts a satirical tone to deride the “cancellation” of politically suspect artists, responding to the contemporary idea that reading works by “problematic” artists equals endorsing their sins. Taking the example of a book of artwork by Eric Gill, sculptor extraordinaire, infamous for the sexual abuse of his children, Thayil says “ I looked at it and it was an object of beauty. Should I not have looked at it because it was created by a problematic or monstrous person? For example, a painting by Picasso, or a painting by Souza, or a book of poems by Anne Sexton? Do you deny yourself the pleasure and instruction of looking at their work?”. Speaking of Ted Hughes, poet and abusive spouse to Sylvia Plath, Thayil remarks, “There are a couple of generations of writers in the US who will not read Ted Hughes, for obvious reasons. But, as a poet, if you don’t read Ted Hughes, there’s a gap in your education.” Continuing, he says “So many of Hughes’s and Plath’s books were intertwined, they were working off each other, it was mutual. They were reading each other and they were each other’s best critics, in the time that they were happy together. They don’t care, whether you read them or not. They’re dead, they couldn’t care less. The only loser in that equation is you.” This speaks to Thayil’s investment in other poets’ works as a mode of learning about form– and learning about the lineage and tradition one becomes a part of as a poet.
And lineage and references are certainly something we see Thayil grapple with in this collection. This collection is teeming with invocations of artists that have influenced Thayil. For example, “Dinner With Rene Ricard” paints an intimate and detailed portrait of Thayil’s friendship with the American poet and artist. Similarly, “Poem Written with Dom Moraes, Twenty Years After His Death” chronicles the poet’s life from the viewpoint of a friend and student left behind, with great proximity and care. The collection, as a whole, is dedicated to Adil (Jussawalla), Arvind (Krishna Mehrotra), and Eunice (De Souza)– all stalwarts of Indian poetry in English, and significant influences on Thayil. “What do these invocations mean to you as a writer?” I ask. “I’m glad you asked me that. It’s not just a way of paying back a debt, because those debts are impossible to pay back, that’s how much I owe Adil, Arvind, Eunice and Dom. So it’s not a way of paying them back, but a way of placing these poems within a very specific context of Indian poetry. And there are poets who have done it in other parts of the world. For example, the New York School, right? They all wrote for each other, and kept referencing each other. They kept talking about each other’s work. They might have even disliked each other, but it was a very clear community.” And community, for Thayil, goes hand-in-hand with knowing one’s literary history. He asserts, “I think, it’s important for us to do the same and look at where our ancestry lies as writers. Who are our forebears? Who did we read, who shaped our language and vision? I don’t see the point of looking constantly to America or Europe.”
And Thayil’s latest collection, indeed, is rooted in a kind of contemporary Indian-ness– with poems reimagining Gandhi as a gecko, poking fun at political events, and infusing the very real and serious concerns about India’s sociocultural landscape with wry humor. Thayil tells me that the lightness that he was able to access in this collection manifested in many ways. “I personally have a lot of fun with titles, and that’s something new with this book. There are titles here that I would never have had the courage to use earlier. Some silly titles. But a title isn’t arbitrary, it’s not there because you found a pretty phrase or you have a random thought. The title has work to do, and that work is to contextualise the poem. It says something the rest of the poem does not say.” Similarly, speaking of rhyme choices in the collection, he says, “in the first few poems, some of the rhymes feel so contrived that they don’t seem to care what you think. They’re sometimes mispronounced and misspelt just to make an outrageous rhyme. That’s a kind of lightness, I’d say, or a kind of recklessness that I don’t think I knew as a younger poet.”
As a writer and musician who works in different genres, Thayil jokes, “In fiction, I have to stop myself from rhyming. Sometimes I catch myself doing it unconsciously, and then when I’m editing, I have to change those words, so I don’t have six rhymes inside a single paragraph.” I then wonder and inquire how his process differs while writing prose versus while writing a poem.
“With the writing of poems, it doesn’t really feel like work. It doesn’t feel like work and it happens usually in a single burst, or in several bursts. But when I’m working on a novel, it’s every day, around the same time.”
He continues, speaking of the moments of surprise and delight that come with writing, “In poetry, that happens so often and it happens almost instantly, almost the minute you start to write. If it’s prose, a short story or a novel or an essay, it goes along much more predictable lines, I think. Although there is the occasional glimmer of that unpredictable, subconscious iceberg peeping through. With poems, you slip into that ocean right away, I think it’s a joyous descent.” Thayil later speaks of this “joyous descent” as a “moment of self-discovery”. He says, “When you’re writing a poem, you start off with an image or an idea or a line, but as the poem progresses, you tap into things that you were not expecting to tap into. All kinds of strange things come up. And that is the subconscious at work, the inside coming out.”
Vulnerability– and a peek behind the curtain– has always been seen as central to poetry. I ask Thayil how he balances the need for truth with the demands of craft within particular poetic forms. He replies with an anecdote, saying “I once taught a series of workshops, this was a long time ago, when I first moved back to India. Around 2005. I taught a series titled “Poetry is Fiction”. The idea was that for the sake of the poem, to make the poem as powerful and immaculate as possible, you will change things, you will drop things, you will introduce things, you will make a father an uncle, you’ll make a puddle a river. You will change all kinds of things because you are at the service of the poem. The poem isn’t serving you– you’re serving the poem.” We also speak about the state of contemporary Indian poetry, specifically about the lack of craft in most popular contemporary poetry. He remarks of poets who don’t value reading as a mode of improving, “It’s so arrogant. And the self-defeating part of that equation is that it becomes immediately apparent in the work. You know immediately that this is a person who doesn’t read poetry, because if they did, there would be an element of craft at least.” Continuing, he says “ This is something I’ve seen over the years with Indian poets. They like to think that all you have to do is wear your heart on your sleeve and that’s all it takes to make a poem.”
Blending the ideas of truth, documentary, and fiction is something that Thayil has taken forth into his upcoming project, The Elsewhereans. Of this cross-genre project that utilises photographs of Thayil’s parents and letters written by them, he says “. I’m calling it a documentary novel, because it uses actual photos and creates fictions around them. It’s a story that has a lot to do with my parents. There are actual photos of my parents in different parts of the world, in Hong Kong, in Bihar, when my dad was arrested by the chief minister because he had been editing a newspaper and took the side of the student protesters. And then the chief minister threw him in jail. It was the best thing that happened to his career– made him famous. It was the first time a journalist was arrested for sedition in Independent India.” Explaining his fusion of visual and written media, he says, “ I used a photo of him coming out of Hazaribagh Central Prison. Of course, he treated it as a photo op, he was wearing a suit, he’d groomed his hair and beard. My mom, on the other hand, is wearing an informal sari draped around her shoulders, she looks distressed. And they’re surrounded by students, these young people who’d come to greet him as he came out of jail. It’s an amazing photograph, and it’s part of this novel, but it’s fiction.” Relatedly, he says “Although I mention his arrest, and reproduce a letter he wrote to my mom from jail, all that surrounds it is fiction and where it leads is a fictional reality. It blurs the line between the fictional and the real. As a reader, you won’t know which is which.”
When I ask him how the process of creating this new project has differed from his previous writing experiences, he reflects on the process of creating something so close to his real life, revealing “One of the first things I did was ask my parents’ permission, because I was using real names and real events, and talking about successes and failures and depressions, and my mother’s anger, at one point, which is fictional, by the way. So, I had to ask their permission and they said yes. I think they quite liked the idea that all these pictures would tell a story. My mother isn’t around anymore – she died in January and the book ended up with a new ending. And a new dedication, and some other enormous changes at the last minute.” I ask him a little more about the epigraphs he’s chosen for the novel, which have grown in number to a total of ten epigraphs. He expands, saying that earlier, it had two epigraphs. “One from the Upanishads and one from Czeslaw Milosz. He said, when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. Those were the only two epigraphs. I now have ten epigraphs and three of them are from characters in the book, including my mother. There’s a Taylor Swift epigraph where she says “I never grew up / It’s getting so old” followed by an epigraph from my mother saying “Old age is a shipwreck”. Although she never actually said this, I think she would agree with it. She didn’t want to grow old. But then, who does?” shrugs Thayil.
During our conversation, I constantly get the sense that Thayil has gotten to a place as a writer where he’s grown comfortable stepping outside his artistic comfort zone. Speaking of what has changed for him as he’s gotten older, he says: “Young poets in general, you feel you have a lot to lose and a lot to prove. Because you’re young and it’s your first or second or third book, you’re not always willing to take risks. At this point, I feel I have nothing to lose. Which is the great invisible benefit of accumulating losses over a life.” Thayil’s newest collection plays with form in an irreverent and cheeky way– the poems here are unafraid to be loud, to be bombastic. And even in moments of quiet and vulnerability, Thayil infuses these poems with a kind of confidence and clarity, in contrast to the instability of the world they describe.
Yamini Krishnan is a graduating student of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. She enjoys writing poetry and culture pieces. Her writing has been published in Vayavya Magazine and Scroll.in amongst others.
