Macro Minds, Micro Talks with Mandira: Writer and Poet Abhinav

Abhinav

Interview by Mandira Pattnaik

"I like poems that feel like a fever dream, and I like poems that feel like a snapshot of eternity."

Abhinav is from Kanpur, India. His work has appeared in trampset, Tahoma Literary Review, Chestnut Review, and Gulmohur Quarterly among others. You can find him on twitter and instagram @abhii106.

Please tell us about your early life and how did you decide to become a writer/poet?

Whenever I look back and try to connect the dots, things don’t add up, then I realise I am too young for that, to hell with it. Mostly I was a curious kid, I liked too many things, and I could never choose one over the other. So, I decided to go after all of them and wait for life to force the choices on me, which it did. I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was 13 and had the hunch that this entire thing of a person all alone trying to articulate themselves on the page might work for me too. Then a couple of very cool English teachers, a few great books, and a whole lot of experiences later I found myself at a point in life where I realised that literature was the only thing keeping me alive. I was comforted by the fact that people like Emily Dickinson, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Plath and others had gone through thoughts and feelings very similar to mine at the time. Writing had inadvertently become a part of me, as more of a need than a choice, so I decided to dial it up a notch. If I am gonna write so much anyway, why not commit to it?

Your poems frequently reference specific, transit-heavy settings, such as in “Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station” (trampset) and “Enroute Kodaikanal” (TBLM). In these pieces, emotional tension and a sense of unsteadiness perform coercive functions to draw attention. What makes these spaces of constant movement so important to your poetry, and how often do you travel?

I have lived a lot of my life on the move; my father’s job was one of the reasons. The others were my own. In a previous life I was trying to be an athlete; it was a long shot that didn’t come through. Through the ages 16-19 I was travelling thirty kilometers almost every day for practice, matches, things like that. It was a border district, so I was travelling between two states and three districts five times a week. People were different enough that you could actually hear the various inflections in their language. They spoke a certain way in school in the afternoon, a certain way on the bus and a certain way on the ground. It was physically exhausting, but I loved it. I had so much stress because I was trying to balance this naive dream of mine with my studies, but I remember the sense of freedom I had while looking out the window through those thirty kilometers, the world all blur and vague, almost liquid. Over time I made acquaintances with so many regular commuters, taxi drivers, bus conductors—they’d look at me, smile and nod. There was an unusual warmth in that. I was very young. I think I was bewildered by everything, I still am. I used to tell myself again and again that all this life and all this world, it has to add up to something, it cannot possibly be for nothing. I do believe it is an essential part of me now; sometimes I subconsciously generate movement in a poem by putting the speaker on the road or a railway platform simply because I so often am in these places. Railway platforms and bus stands are very interesting phenomena by themselves—a vantage point as good as any. I still travel a lot for one reason or another. During a relatively static time in my life, I used to just board random buses, go wherever and then find my way back. It’s a strange thing to crave, but someone’s gotta do it.

In “Cling” (Chestnut Review), you explore the painful intersection of physical distance, failed digital communication, and the burden of memory. “Across three time zones you said you’re kissing my forehead and I said you’re only doing it because you have to.” Distance is a terrible reality felt by many in India as often families and friends live in other parts of the world, forced by reasons of livelihood or education. Would you like to share the inspiration behind “Cling”?

The inspiration behind “Cling” was someone I loved. I guess I was trying to wrench into language the specific everythingness and yet nothingness of a long distance relationship. There is so much in it to believe in, and yet it all exists mostly as electronic strings in the vague. We were, as the poem says, “the comma of a lost language.” I just quoted myself there, I think that says a lot about who I am. In that specific situation, I was also interested in how the medium of technology that made intimacy possible would also put constraints of its own. So many misunderstandings arose from misinterpretation of tone, lack of overlap in our timelines, network issues and things like that. All these were inherent to the medium that made it possible in the first place. Which goes on to speak to the larger truth that so many wounds of our age are inherent to the miracles possible only in our age. The world will never be resolved in that sense, there will forever be a lack—Andrei Tarkovsky told me that.

Both “Limbo” (trampset) and “Solo” (Tahoma Literary Review) deal with stasis and momentum, where existing between two worlds, the dilemma of it and the ultimate confusion are explored. Do you view poetry as means to find solid ground, or is it a tool to explore that liminality and blurriness?

I think poetry begins exactly where Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus ends. He concludes that when science (hence language) has exhausted all the questions, the questions that really concern us, like that of death, or love, or soul, remain untouched. That everything that could resolve for us the mystery of life lies outside of language. I think of poetry as nudging at that precipice, trying to articulate the ineffable. Why? Just because.

I like poems that feel like a fever dream, and I like poems that feel like a snapshot of eternity. I love prose poems as much as I love the haiku form. I’d say I try to make liminal whatever has been static for too long, and I try to concretise things that are blurred in general. I don’t yet have a larger theory of poetics, I read a lot, I find all sorts of tricks other people pull on the page. I try to pull my own. "Solo" was inspired by Ryan Brod’s flash essay of the same name.

You have written across genres. Please enlighten readers if versatile writing practice must be consciously pursued to break monotony and push boundaries?

I believe that form informs meaning. When I am writing something that has no clear direction yet, I write and rewrite it in various shapes, and sometimes in one of those shapes, a possibility emerges that wasn't available in others. Robert Frost once said that to write in free verse is like playing tennis without the net. My contention is that even without the net, there is a great game to be had; it might not be tennis proper, but possibilities emerge that weren't there before.

In the written word, notation does a lot of work for meaning. I was reading Eros the Bittersweet recently, and Anne Carson talks about how the emergence of the written word, a letter perceived with its spatial limits, informs the early lyric poets' notion of desire as fundamentally animated by lack (you should read her, I am not good at paraphrase).

I study mathematics, and one thing I have come to learn is that a mathematical object exists on multiple registers. Often a single equation carries logical possibilities that would take an entire page of ordinary language to convey. Sometimes I can’t express a proof verbally, but the moment I put notations on the page, the logic follows. My writing practice is very similar. I don’t write much in my head, I need to have the feeling of the blank page, of pushing language against it, to see what happens.

What core themes or emotional landscapes do you find yourself drawn to lately that you haven’t yet explored in your published work? Also, please tell us about your next projects.

I never know the emotional landscapes a priori. I find them in the work. Growing up, I was very close to my grandparents, three of them have died in the last three years. I also had a stray cat I loved. He lived with us for more than two years and then did not return home one day. I find myself returning again and again to the nature of memory, of what it means to have something unresolved collapse into death, what it means to remember and to forget.

The form I am very interested in these days is flash— be it fiction or nonfiction. I read your own work regularly, because you predominantly write flash, and from a milieu similar to mine. The other thing that I have been interested in is a narrative that eats its own tail, like Satantango, or some stories by Borges. I am obsessed with Borges; I admire how ferocious of a reader he was. In his work, he constructs infinite labyrinths that collapse on themselves, much like this world. I am trying to make things that collapse on themselves.

As a writer of color based in Kanpur, India, and published in multiple international publications, your journey is inspirational. What advice would you give to emerging writers who are based outside of the traditional international publishing hubs like the USA and Europe?

‘Inspiration’ is high praise, I don’t really think of myself like that. Most of the time I feel like a phony. I think I have been very lucky in that sense, that this strange thing I do just for the hell of it means something to other people too.

‘Writer of color’ tag doesn’t mean much where I live, we are all of color, and one needs a decent amount of privilege to read and write as much as I do. No one in my neighborhood would understand most of what I write, and I am always bothered by that. The individual reason for picking English was that I wanted to put a wall between myself and people around me, because in my own language, there is not much space for what I am. But a writer has responsibilities to his own people, despite his individual grievances. To have the time to read and reflect is a basic necessity that most people are deprived of. Those who have it have an obligation to those who don’t. The obligation to understand, to offer a vantage point, a possibility that might not be available to them, in a register of language where meaning resides for them. As a writer of any color or no color, language is your forte, do the work. The work is all that counts, and the world is much bigger than the USA and Europe.

Apart from that, like every other field, this has its logistics. You have to find ways to learn. There are plenty of resources available for free on the internet, if you know where to look. My craft advice is a direct quote by Werner Herzog: “read read read read read read read...." Reading is the coolest thing ever. Read magazines, read novels, read craft essays and interviews of writers you like, read whatever you love and whatever challenges you. Once in a while, read things that you don’t like and try to articulate why you don’t like them, it’s good exercise. Living writers are doing strange and interesting things that don’t yet exist in the canon. Find the ones that speak to your sensibility. And keep trying. It’s just words on a page, what’s the worst that can happen?