Vikram Seth on putting together his first book of poetry in two decades, seeking true reward in connecting with readers through his writing, speaking up against the intolerable and more
It is after a long hiatus that celebrated novelist Vikram Seth is publishing his poetry. A new collection titled Summer Requiem, his first new book of poetry in 20 years, has come as an unexpected gift even as we wait for his next big book, A Suitable Girl. Explaining why verse has come before the expected prose, Seth says, “If you think you have written a good poem, that it has the clarity and mysterious penumbra about it, don’t mess with it too much.
Another reason why I decided to come out with this book of poems is because people told me, now that you have written these poems, you are pleased with them, right? Why can’t we read them? I said, you can but some of them are very personal. So, they shot back, haven’t you published personal poems before? Well yes, I said, but I am rather lazy and I have a novel to write. That’s not very generous, they retorted. The muse has given you a gift and you have written these poems that have taken the edge off your grief, your pain, why can’t you share it? So I did.”
Melancholy figures prominently in Summer Requiem. The elegiac title poem, Seth says, is one he didn’t quite understand himself. “I liked the title, which casts a kind of light on the other poems in the collection. It hints at the depletion of light that comes at the end of summer and day. I have never written so incomprehensibly as I have in Summer Requiem and I am fascinated by it. If you can explain it to me you are the better man.” At 63, Seth says that he is more willing to bring out the darkness, “What am I afraid of? Has no one ever been sad? When I was younger I didn’t regret my lost youth! it is a relief that you can die or else you are stuck forever in this world. As an alternative to living forever, death is welcome.” Seth’s poetry has, of course, already been feted.
His second collection of poems, The Humble Administrator’s Garden, won a Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1983, three years before The Golden Gate, a tale of life in San Francisco written in sonnets, won him accolades. Besides poetry and novels, Seth has a huge variety of writing that includes travelogue, children’s literature and more. “I spent two nights collecting poems in this book because I had promised my publisher a book of poems, but I had forgotten because you don’t write poetry under contractual obligations. You write poetry under the pressure of your circumstances. Though putting on my economist hat, I quite understand that publishers do require some reassurance.”
Seth’s A Suitable Girl is eagerly awaited by the literary world, but he refuses to talk about it at the moment beyond saying that the tone of his current work will be different because he is older, the times have changed and the jump in the narrative is not as big as in the earlier book. He is perhaps hinting at his progress with it in poem titled ‘Can’t’ in Summer Requiem where he says, “I find I simply can’t get out of bed./ I shiver and procrastinate and stare./ I’ll press the reset button in my head./ I hate my work but I am in the red.” Seth reportedly returned the 1 million pound advance he was paid by Penguin to deliver the sequel to A Suitable Boy on its 20th anniversary, something he dismisses by saying, “The less said about that, the better! Forget about it.”
Talking about the current controversy over the returning of the Sahitya Akademi honours by writers and commenting on what institutionalised honours mean to men of words like him, Seth says, “Writers lead a solitary life, so it’s always nice to be recognised but it doesn’t make me think better of my writing. The real awards are if my poem means something to individual people, not institutions, not literary festivals — if there is some sort of solace, insight or empathy communicated across the membrane of our separate selves, it is that which makes me glad that I am not an economist! I will wait to see what the Sahitya Akademi does and then take a decision whether or not to return my award. I am not an activist, but as a citizen you need to speak out when something gets intolerable. I don’t see why we should demean or hate people in the name of religion, humane logic needs to be applied.”
