Where do you start with an edition of collected poems? At the end of a poet’s career? At the beginning? Do you dive in randomly and hope for the charms of stichomancy? Wherever the reader treads in Jeet Thayil’s gorgeously produced Collected Poems (Aleph), there’s an air of “collective hallucination” as we’re led through multifarious lives and cityscapes via sonnets, sestinas and saints. Thayil calls himself a “poet of small buildings.” He entreats us to raise our arms “in praise of love’s racing anapaests.” But he’s also the kind of poet who tells you about the old punctures on his arms, how grief rises, wearing feathers. He brings a list 20 years long of all the unforgivable things he’s done. And still, you follow.
Was there ever a moment when you thought ‘I’m going to be a poet’?
Absolutely not. I just got into it at the age of 14. I started to read Baudelaire and Bob Dylan and the other Dylan. My father had a collected edition of Dylan Thomas. I read all three of them around the same age and just sank into it as you would into a warm bath. It was that easy. And, of course, I started to write poems in imitation, and I’m sure they were terrible, and I’m happy there’s no record of those early efforts. The thing about poetry is that once it chooses you, once it picks you up and rescues you from your pathetic life, nothing is the same again, you know?
You mention Bob and Baudelaire, but you’ve got a lot of other B ghosts in this book — Brodksy, Bolaño, Berryman… Have you ever felt part of a poetic lineage?
God, I don’t know if I should even answer this because it might make me sound a little insane, but yes, I absolutely feel part of a lineage, and again, it’s insane to say that you feel like you’re related genetically by blood, to use another B word, with poets like Bolaño and Berryman and Baudelaire but I do. I do.
There’s a person who is referred to as Jeet in your poems. He pops up frequently, and yet, one would hesitate to call any of these poems confessional. Who is the “I” in your poems?
The “I” is a fictional creation. It’s kind of a mask, a disguise that allows you to say confessional things and personal things without actually saying that they’re confessional or personal or that it’s true. Using the guise of fiction you’re able to see often very painfully true things, very painfully private things. In fact, I put in secret information that you’d not be able to get away with otherwise.
When you were living in Bombay as a young poet, was there ever a sense that you were living in an age, a moment?
No. The funny thing about that is you never feel that except retrospectively. While I was in Bombay I never thought I was in a moment, but now, I look back on it, of course it was! There were extraordinary Indian poets at work, and poets you’d meet socially, and at readings, and compared to now it was so much less organised, on a much smaller scale. Those were amazing times, but I had no idea while it was happening. In fact, I felt obscure, and outside history. Certainly in Bombay I felt I was outside history.
Did you feel closer to the centre of things in New York?
I think that’s why I went there. I had a dream where somebody said 'How can you be a poet without living in New York?' And I woke up with this line in my head and I went there in 2008. I was there when 9/11 happened. I left in 2005, but I have to say that in New York I felt more outside history than I’d felt in Bombay.
John Ashbery once said that he felt poetry was going on all the time inside, an underground stream. “One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up”… has that been your experience?
[Laughs] How lovely. That’s such a beautiful image. Yeah.
Do you have a bucket? Talk to me about process. Where do your poems come from?
I don’t know if I can say it’s a bucket. The thing is there’s so much quotidian everyday stuff that happens in life, especially if your name isn’t John Ashbery, who I’m sure lives in a very protected space with a group of assistants to do all his banal stuff. In my case, I don’t have an assistant to apply for a visa, for example. I do all that stuff myself. I run a house by myself, pretty much. And, you know, all of that does take time out of the time that you’d be working on a poem. But even in the middle of that, I’m sitting in chaos and I’m absolutely immersed in writing something, and those are the best moments when no matter what’s happening around you, the thing in your head is the poem you’re working on and you continue working on it day after day, fixing it and making it better. When you’re immersed in the writing of a poem, time no longer exists, and it occurs to me this is the same reason people take heroin, to obliterate time.
You say in your preface that your poetry books are out of print, that being an Indian poet writing in English this is how it should be, implying that the poet’s fate is somehow to be obscure…
Well, also, I had the fortune or the misfortune to have been schooled by poets such as Dom Moraes and Adil Jussawalla and Arvind K. Mehrotra and Arun Kolatkar, and you know, that is a very severe, very strict school. I wouldn’t recommend that school to anybody, but it’s a school that takes some kind of honour in not publishing. You’re kind of encouraged not to publish. I took that lesson very seriously.
Why was that encouraged?
Well, it’s something to do with that whole generation of Indian poets. There was a kind of unspoken thing that you had to pay your dues to belong to this club. And, of course, it was a boy’s club, with the exception of Eunice de Souza. You had to pay your dues to even be allowed to sit on the porch. Never mind come in the door to the clubhouse and maybe have a drink by the fire. No, no, no. Even to just sit on the steps outside you had to pay your dues. A very tough, unforgiving club.
I take it you have no nostalgia for that kind of honour?
Unfortunately, I think I do. [Laughs)]. You know, perversely, I do.
I’m interested in the communities you belong to — poets, fiction writers, musicians. How are they different with basic things like, say, generosity?
Well, look, there’s generosity and generosity. I feel very fortunate to have met the poets in Bombay that I met in my 20s because they were incredibly generous, and I don’t just mean that in a literary way where they’d help you out by introducing you to a publisher and an editor. I mean in a very practical way. Because when I was a young poet in Bombay I was broke, and I’m talking about people — Dom and Leela, for example, who invited me into their home and made me part of the family. I always knew there was somewhere I could go for a hot meal, you know? It’s a tremendous thing. It really was as if I’d found a new family.
When you look back at your childhood now, what’s your sense of it?
Sometimes I think it’s when you hit about 12 or so that happiness ends. By my late teens I realised that happiness was not even something to aim for, that happiness is just another word for freedom and not having to worry about anything, and really, that only happens as a child, when you’re looked after and when you know that your day pretty much stretches out before you like some golden afternoon in a James Wright poem with horses walking into the distance and bells jangling and all you see is the horse droppings and you’re on that hammock and you see the sun shine and you’re beginning to see the sun go down, and you hear all of that and, of course, the poem ends with the line: “I have wasted my life.”
Do you feel more tender or more distant towards any of your books? Gathering them together forCollected,has it forced you to re-examine your work?
Yeah, very much. I had to look at Apocalypso , which is not a favourite book. I had to go through those poems and remember who I was, that I was reading somebody that lived decades ago, and as I began to rewrite some of those poems, I did feel a kind of tenderness and a caretaker’s responsibility not to stray too far from the truth of those poems. And now when I read them I feel far better about them than I’ve done in the past.
When we were walking in Wales recently, you declared you weren’t a country boy. You didn’t want to walk the fens, you wanted to be walked to the pub. But your poems feature a helluva lot of birds, trees, flowers... How do you reconcile this allowance for nature in your poems?
To truly appreciate nature, you have to be a city person. I live in an apartment in an old Delhi neighbourhood, usually pretty quiet. The main road isn’t too far, the city is very close, but I’m surrounded by trees, and I have a little garden and sometimes the birds land on the terrace and when you see a bird in a city context, it really seems like a visitation from another planet, and it makes you look at it with such wonder. I think you see it in a way that you never would if you were living in the woods. It’s a kind of a gift really, when you see a tree or a bird or a patch of water in a city context.
Do you believe in the Devil?
Is that a way of asking me if I believe in God? Of course! What other reply can there be? How can you not?
Auden was asked the same question.
And?
His answer was a monosyllabic “yes.”
I knew the Devil existed the first time I looked into the eye of a rooster. It was at my father’s ancestral home in Kerala, in my teens. And I think of something Tom Wait’s said: “There ain’t no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk.”
Here is an exclusive reading of Mr.Thayil's poem "Dear Prime Minister"
