Rachna Singh, Editor The Wise Owl talks to Siddhartha Menon about his poetry collection, Lone Pine, longlisted for The Wise Owl Literary Awards 2026

Rachna Singh, Editor The Wise Owl talks to Siddhartha Menon about his poetry collection, Lone Pine, longlisted for The Wise Owl Literary Awards 2026

 

Thank you Siddhartha for talking with The Wise Owl.

 

SM: Thank you Rachna for this opportunity.

 

RS: Lone Pine feels deeply attentive to landscapes—not as backdrops but as presences that think, remember, and even resist. When you write, do landscapes arrive first as places you have known, or do they emerge as inner terrains shaped by memory and listening?

 

SM: That’s an interesting question. I’m inclined to say straight off that it is the former, and that would be certainly true of Lone Pine whose poems are mostly set in Banaras, or at any rate a portion of Banaras that I am familiar with. (It would I believe be true of my earlier books as well, which drew heavily on settings that I happened to be located in.) And yet, in poetry one isn’t depicting a landscape (or a riverscape, as many of these poems do) entirely for its own sake. One isn’t trying to leave a photographic record. What finally makes it into the poems is indeed, as you’ve put it, shaped by memory and listening. 

I especially like the implications of “listening”, because of the attentiveness and receptivity that it suggests. In that listening, landscape becomes both metaphor and mirror, the terrain both opening out to include concerns of various kinds and shifting inward. I should say, however, that the poems were rarely, if ever, begun with a clear design for how this should happen. Thus in the ‘River Mornings’ sequence, for instance, each poem started out as an observed experience, with no prior knowledge of where it would be taken. Yet implicitly, and even at the outset, there was always a concern for it to be taken somewhere, for its potential not to be limited or lost. It seems to me that the landscapes we traverse in poetry are invariably internal, appearances notwithstanding. This isn’t to say that a kind of one-to-one correspondence between external and internal features of a landscape always exists (though that can happen too) but rather that how we see the external is shaped by the internal, and vice versa.

RS: In poems like ‘Settings’, the river and the trees seem to hold tensions of belonging, conflict, and flawed beauty. Do you see nature in your work as a moral witness, an indifferent force, or something more complicated—perhaps a mirror to human contradictions?

 

SM: Nature has a prominent place in the poems in ‘Settings’ (and in the other sections of the book) but the poems are hardly the record of a botanist, an ornithologist or even, for that matter, a nature lover. Again, as I said of the landscapes, the nature poems were invariably begun because of something that caught my eye: a tree that seemed out of place, the river’s variability, flowers on trees or fallen off them, a pond’s eeriness, birds that stayed just out of reach, and so on. Noticing these things got me started each time, with no notion of where the poem was going. Eventually, nature became all of the things you mention. 

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I think I am especially interested in how the natural world comes to mirror, indifferently as any good mirror does, aspects of human nature. It is hardly surprising that it does, unless you think of humanity as separate from nature. In addition to mirroring, it also seems to draw things out that might otherwise have remained latent: coming to terms with death and “imperfection” for instance, in poems like ‘The Lesson’, ‘Amaltas’ and ‘Semal’. I should say not merely coming to terms with, but recognizing the necessity and beauty of natural (including of course human) phenomena, even when they appear flawed. And nature, though we see it as beleaguered by forces of various kinds, is always compelling in and of itself. One knows this in moments of attention, however uninformed one might be.

 

RS: ‘Stirrings’ turns inward, tracing intimacy, time, and the quiet negotiations of relationship. How do you approach the challenge of writing about connection without sentimentality, allowing feeling to surface while keeping language spare and exact?

 

SM: In part, this is a matter of style. Keeping language spare and exact is to me a virtue, especially in poetry. And style is an outcome of both temperament and literary influence. I find that when I am reading a poet closely for an extended period of time, something of that poet’s voice or manner begins to come into the way I write and revise (a lot of writing is in fact revising). Having said that, over time I see that my writing has tended to become more spare and allusive. It’s as if I’ve been learning to allow words and the spaces between them to speak for themselves. Of course there is a shaping presence behind them, but one that is increasingly laconic and can sound somewhat detached, unlikely to take pleasure in wearing its heart on its sleeve. 

My very sensitive editor at Hachette noticed this, and we wondered whether more of myself should be visible, or audible, at least in some of the poems. In fact, as she also knew, I am there, as are human and non-human connections of various kinds. But poetic voice is not so much self-exposure as it is a way of looking at the world and at oneself. Thus sentimentality has no place in the poems, though I believe that there is feeling in them. Without feeling, there would be no poem. But a poem, if it is to outlast the feelings that occasioned it and the surface events, must also be mediated by what I understand Wordsworth to have meant by recollection in tranquillity, and be honed to a finely crafted object. Which brings us back to questions of style…

 

 

RS: In ‘Bearings’, questions of seeing, turning away, and bearing witness—especially to violence, personal and planetary—come sharply into focus. As a poet, how do you decide when to speak, when to remain silent, and when silence itself becomes an ethical stance?

 

SM: I wish I could answer this simply. How does one decide when to speak, when to remain silent? I think it would be fair to say, for me at least, that decision isn’t at the heart of it. Decision, that is, as a conscious (and self conscious) setting out or holding back. One writes when one is stirred by something and when writing appears to be the most natural outlet for it. This is not so much out of a need for self expression, or for others to know that one has something to say, but to try and understand what this stirring is. It is, as the poem ‘Prickly Heat’ has it, an itch. But it is also, as the companion poem ‘Writing In Winter’ would have it, a kind of skating on ice, veering between freedom and control and a fear of falling, when the best way to keep upright is to continue moving.

 

So one speaks out of necessity, and because, as one of the two Auden epigraphs in the poem ‘Paradise Flycatcher’ suggests, one has a voice. You’re quite right that many of the ‘Bearings’ poems are concerned with violence and with bearing witness, I would say the latter even more than the former. It is the act of attention that matters, whether it be to a flower or to the effects of war, or, for that matter, to whatever drama is playing itself out in the mind. This attention makes for a kind of space, possibly a silence, certainly a refusal to be drawn into propagating opinions. This refusal is, I suppose, a kind of ethical stance. And through this kind of attentiveness (to draw on the second Auden epigraph) poetry does seem to make something happen. What it makes happen is a kind of inner dynamism, both stillness and quiet movement, that has value even when it feels transient.

 

RS: Across the book, you often stand at a threshold—between stillness and movement, observation and participation. After several collections and decades of engagement with teaching and poetry, has your sense of what poetry can do in the world shifted, or has it deepened around the same enduring questions?

 

SM: It seems to me that a threshold is not a bad place to be! Perhaps for poetry it is even a necessary one, a kind of liminal space such as in the ‘Waking’ sequence that opens the book's second section (whose title ‘Stirrings’ also suggests liminality).  Yes it’s true that poetry seems to take me into a space that allows for opposites, for differences, to coexist amicably, or at any rate interestingly. Isn’t this a reason for poetry to matter, as a kind of alternative to the polarizations that have become the norm? I am not sure what poetry can do in such a world, and what it does is not my primary concern when I write. Yet one retains a conviction that poetry “in the interstices of war” (‘Skimming’) not only matters but is playfully, and at times desperately, persistent and necessary. Polarisation and conflict are not new, nor is poetry. Neither of them, it seems to me, is ever likely to end, because conflict, as well as the capacity to bear witness, are both ingrained in human nature. 

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Poetry is a stubborn survivor. I think for instance of the last poems of Miklos Radnoti, the Hungarian poet who died in the course of a forced march during the second World War. When his body was exhumed from a mass grave after the war, his coat pocket held poems scribbled in his last days, including one that seemed to foretell the manner of his own dying. The compulsion to bear witness persists no matter what, and this remains true even if Radnoti’s ‘Postcard Poems’ had never been discovered.

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I think this sense of what poetry is and does has evolved for me over time. When I was in high school I was intrigued by poetry but also somewhat skeptical of it: why, I wondered, say necessary things in fancy ways if they can be put in simple prose? Implicitly, every time I write or read poetry my mind continues to be engaged with this question. It is to my teacher’s credit that she did not try to persuade me that my question might be missing a thing or two. Instead she continued to discuss poems with me. She perhaps realized that I would need time to find my own responses to the question, and that anything she said would only go so far.

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As a teacher myself, I don’t know if I have been as patient and prescient! There are times I’ve found myself eager to have my students see something about poetry that I myself have only come to realize gradually. In spite of my possible missteps, I can only hope that poetry remains with them as a source of beauty and inspiration, as an attentive, non polemical way of engaging with the world, and as a way into their own hearts and minds.

 

RS: What next? Are you working on another book as we speak?

SM: Hachette is bringing out a volume of new and selected poems, selected, that is, from the five collections before Lone Pine, to which it will be a kind of companion volume. That should come out later this year. Apart from that, for the past year or so I’ve been working on a number of ten-line poems. This has been an interesting process, discovering the potential, as well as the apparent limitations, of a fairly tight form. It’s too early to think of publishing them, though a few are likely to appear as a sequence in the new book.

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RS: Thank you for talking with The Wise Owl. We wish you the very best in all your literary endeavours.

SM: Thank you very much.