When Arundhathi Subramaniam paced around the Kannakakunnu Palace wearing a bottle green saree, sometimes absent-mindedly and sometimes with a contended smile lingering on her face, it was difficult to miss the aura of calmness she carried.
“If you feel so, it is due to Isha yoga,” says Arundhathi, whose latest book SADHGURU- More than a Life is about Jaggi Vasudev, a contemporary mystic.
Hay Festival attracted many aspiring writers, raising the question whether they lack a platform.
Arundhati has this to say: “There are lots of online journals publishing poetry like Kavyabharathi. And I personally believe that there should be more writer’s forums. My advice to young writers would be to not just read their own poems but also read those by others.”
Arundhathi, who is a voracious reader, believes that unknowingly we may be writing like those whom we admire. “It takes years to identify one’s voice,” she adds.
“Poetry doesn’t always flow. There are lucky moments when it is spontaneous but most of the time it has to be carefully crafted. And working on a poem is not a bad habit as it is sounds. Wordsworth said poetry is a spontaneous overflow of emotions; even his poems were skilfully crafted,” says the poetess.
Woman writers are often accused of being narcissistic.
“The self is the universe. A couple of years back, there was an instance when a critic responded to Vicki Feaver’s menstruation poem as being monotonous. Would they say that about war poetry? No, but when a woman writes about menstruation and half the population in the world experience it at some time every month, isn’t a universal topic?” she wonders.
Poetry can be creatively satisfying and overwhelming but it fails to be a means of income. Ask her about the most satisfying moment in her career, and she says: “Undoubtedly when my first book was published and when writers I admired started acknowledging me as a writer.”
Her first book was published when she was 33 though she started penning poetry since childhood. The delay helped her weed out certain poems and rework on many.
“In my recent book, Where I live: The New and Selected Poems, I have tweaked and altered certain poems that were published in my first collection,” she adds.
