Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Amlanjyoti Goswami about his latest poetry collection A Different Story.

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl, talks to Amlanjyoti Goswami about his latest poetry collection A Different Story

 

Thank you Amlanjyoti for talking with The Wise Owl about your book.

 

AG: Thank you for making it happen.

 

RS: Your poems in A Different Story are filled with ghosts, elephants, chai, Basho, Fellini, and even the dead who quietly wander in and out. What draws you to these liminal spaces between the real and the imagined, the remembered and the present?

 

AG: I live in the liminal because that’s where freedom exists. It is easy to break out of, and break into, these boxes we live in, if only you acknowledge the liminal. It makes you feel that something more is out there, but you are spared from the endless expectation of reaching a destination. The hard wired reality impressed upon us by the empiricism of science is not all there is. Trespassing into worlds that are yet to unfold is a never ending adventure.  There is no separation of real and imagined, the remembered and the present. The liminal is eternally present.

 

You might ask if this is indeed true. But what is truth anyway, in poetry?

 

Truth is what comes unannounced one evening, when everything is silent, when the birds have come home, in that twilight hour when it’s not night yet. Truth is what shakes you awake suddenly in the morning.

 

Sometimes truth constantly murmurs into your ears like a jaded record but you don’t pay any attention. It speaks in a language beyond words, a subterranean sphere, not celestial but not pataal lok either.

 

Liminality is embedded in the life worlds we live in. I am not unique. We are all hopelessly liminal.  

Welcome to the world of liminal.  

 

 

RS: Several poems draw on mythology and epic figures—Karna, Kunti, Krishna, Arjuna—and reframe their stories with contemporary ethical questioning. What made you turn to these characters, and how do they speak to our modern predicaments?

 

AG: Myths are always relevant and contemporary. They do not belong to a bookmarked past. We are a myth making species. We myth, therefore we are. Ethics is a way to get there, towards freedom and perhaps some solace. Myths provide a common language of understanding, which breaks barriers of elite and low brow. Myths are folk. I enjoy folklore, except when it is boring and giving out sanctimonious homilies in the name of wisdom.

 

Karna is a tragic hero but he is also a son who asks his mother Kunti what really happened. Perhaps he had that conversation (the one I mention in the poem) with his mother, perhaps he didn’t. But the conversation is important. I ask existential questions through a conversation between a child who never knew his mother, and his mother who knew but didn’t let on. Krishna is omniscient but he didn’t say it all. That would change the epic and if you change the epic, all that remains is dust.

 

I find myths real and true to what we are, who we are becoming. This is not limited to Indian myths.

 

I enjoy reading the Greeks too. Hubris and nemesis live there, but also something very elemental, bare and alone in the sunlight.

 

Both Achilles and Krishna had a weak heel which the archer targeted. ‘He can see his deep blue ankle, slowly turning red’ in my poem.

 

 

RS: There’s an easy, playful levity in your poetry—odes to kebabs, cucumbers, and the joy of first bites. How do you see the role of humour and everyday sensuality in poetry that is otherwise deeply contemplative?

 

AG: Poetry is the spice of life, play on. If it is dull and humourless, even I won’t read it. It needs to be something more than what prose can offer. It needs to tease out meaning, perhaps one bite at a time, not all at one go. It needs to be lively, something vital must accompany it.

 

Kebabs are better than a line of poetry. Cucumbers, I am not sure. Fried hilsa in the monsoon is currently competing for attention with a line that speaks of love at first bite.

 

One cannot take oneself too seriously. Life is too short.

 

Poets are levitating creatures who cross mountains with flying feet. They dive into deep waters without gorgeous fins. I’d rather that they stayed close to the ground. Yes, but not too close. The best poetry is underground anyway.  

 

Poetry can be humorous and fun.

 

Poetry apprehends the everyday world through the senses. Eros accompanies the art of writing. If it doesn’t provide pleasure, why do it?

 

Reading and writing are difficult pleasures. One must turn up at the desk every day. Rain or shine. I feel the world with the five senses I have been given, but there is certainly a sixth one. That is the one we tend to overlook, that the Enlightenment doesn’t allow. Sometimes a glance says more than a thousand words.

 

Writing poetry is such a gift. I treasure it and am grateful.

 

We are born with a funny bone. Sometimes, like the coccyx, we just can’t find it.

 

RS: Your work often moves between places—Guwahati, Delhi, New York, Natore—without losing its rootedness. How has geography and displacement shaped your poetic voice, and do you see place as metaphor in your work?

 

AG:  I am embedded in place. It is in my topological DNA.  Place is not a geographical or cartographic location. It is phenomenological. Poems string places into feeling. New York, Guwahati, Delhi, Natore - each is a place, a concatenation of places, a pastiche, a bricolage, an assemblage, a jigsaw puzzle.

 

I am forever displaced as a poet. I am at home everywhere and I have no home anywhere.

 

Perhaps home is who you are with, not the place you are in. Maybe we got it wrong all along.

 

My poems provide me a home but then I want to break away. Sometimes I want the poems to stay, but they too need to wander, like birds (or maybe cats). I grew up in Guwahati and a part of me still lives there. I have lived in Delhi longer than I have lived in Guwahati and yet a part of me is never here. I have lived elsewhere too, in colder places where it snows so much you long for the tropical sun. Cold, lonely places in more ways than one, when you stare down the abyss and find a way to come back.

 

Nowadays I just try to live in the everyday, its light and glancing shadows. The neem tree in front of my house. The water trough in the street. The magazine vendor in the market who is slowly becoming an endangered species, for people don’t buy magazines these days. The missing radio that plays in the background, songs from 1970s Bollywood. All happening, inside the corridors of my mind.

 

The noise of time, said Osip Mandelstam, but sometimes the music is so smooth, you don’t need to time travel. It comes like rain.

 

We are losing touch with beauty. That is why we suffer.

 

Perhaps we are now reaching for place as a way to root ourselves in an increasingly disembodied world, where your best relationship is with a machine. Place makes us feel alive. The skin burns or shivers. Something happens in those synapses. Life is born.

 

RS: The poems are steeped in nostalgia, but it’s a “strange” kind, as you describe—neither cloying nor entirely melancholic. Could you speak to the kind of memory your poems inhabit? Is it personal, collective, imagined?

 

AG: Pradip Acharya says nostalgia is an inadequate justification.  Strangeness is my home. I live in it. I am not a sentimentalist and am allergic to melancholia. My memory is personal, collective and imagined. You are a part of my memory. If you let me in yours, I will be a part of your memory. When we are gone, only the words will be left of those memories. Memories are present tense and they are lived out every day. Tomorrow’s memory is being written right now.

 

I plunge into the present where I live. Perhaps a poem is forming in the deeper recesses of the mind right now; perhaps the subconscious is at work even when we are sleeping.  The memory is scattered, fragmented, and each fragment is whole.

 

The best poems have a strange music. Readers like the strangeness and the music. It’s hard to explain. Perhaps one should revel in the mystery. Where does it all come from?

 

Strangeness is at its best when it comes home, when the familiar becomes strange. Ever stepped out of an art gallery into the street where every wall starts looking like a painting? Ever stepped out of a page after reading a lovely poem or a great story, and finding characters everywhere? Ever listened to a Salil Chowdhury song, and then asking where were you all along?

 

 

RS: One poem mentions a bonesetter who can ‘right the universe if the angle agrees’. It feels like a powerful metaphor for the poet’s role. Do you see the poet as someone who aligns broken or disjointed worlds—however temporarily?

 

AG: Yeshwant Rao, in Arun Kolatkar’s poem, can fix bones because the spirit can take care of itself.

 

I think of the poet as a fractured spirit who needs a bonesetter. Possibly a spirit setter. Then he discovers there are none. Poems rescue him, make him whole (at least on good days).

 

The juices flow, when a poem speaks for itself.

 

As for the bones, some are best left the way they are, but they should not pain too much.

 

We write the truth slanted. The universe comes in various colours. Sometimes the sky sees me. Sometimes I see nothing. Even when nothing stares back, something happens. Perhaps we long for connection, and then we want to distance ourselves. It’s Tom and Jerry.

 

We are the only ones who can make ourselves laugh and cry. We should take responsibility for ourselves, when we stand on our two little feet in the face of the vastness of the universe, eternal and indifferent. Do you think the universe cares? But we do, and that is where the universe comes around.

 

RS:  There are many literary references—Basho, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Banalata Sen—woven into your verse. How do you approach intertextuality in your poems? Do these literary ghosts visit uninvited, or do you consciously make space for them?

 

AG: They are gurus. One should respect one’s gurus.  Basho is who I go back to, when I need some mind clearing. Vinod Kumar Shukla is a recent discovery and he is doing fine in my library. Banalata Sen has travelled far beyond Natore, even in Jibanananda Das’ poem. There are others. They are there when I need them. That is enough.

 

I don’t consider text and reality separate. I don’t think that context and text cannot live together.  Why should text be any different from life?

 

I make a fine paste – masala – pasta – with my imagination. They speak to me not as characters but as living breathing creatures. They leap out of the page, like Edwin Moses hurdling across the reaches of time. Remember him? There was a time when there was no one like him. He wore goggles too.

 

Ghosts visit me all the time. I guess I provide some hospitality. I make space for them. Sometimes a ghost is just a whisper.

 

But they can fight if they get too close to each other. It’s good to keep a distance. They speak a different language. Respect your gurus and move on.

 

RS:  The collection reads like it’s in conversation with itself—poems echoing others, characters recurring, food and memory intertwining. Was this circular or layered structure intentional when curating the book?

 

 

AG: It is a book that does not worry about reception, acknowledgement or acceptance. It is what it is. Poems talk to each other. It is a world in itself. Things move together and then apart, much like life.

 

I use the nine rasas of classical aesthetics as emotional foundations. It is also a way to cut through the mind- body binary inaugurated by Descartes.

 

I organised the poems into nine rasas later. They have to be organised in some way, so that it is not one congealed mass of words. I want the reader to dip into the book from time to time and find something in it that speaks to the condition of living. Something that stays with her. The book should make her smile, at least sometimes.

 

Layers are who I am, and how I write poetry. I do not believe in binaries. Perhaps I was a Deleuzian before I read Deleuze.

 

Breaking binaries is making poetry. In a flash of insight, before you realise what happened!

 

Thank you for talking with The Wise Owl. Wishing you the very best in all your literary & creative pursuits.

 

AG: My pleasure.