“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
May be this is the reason why most of us find ourselves deeply immersed into the emotional landscape, while pursuing heartwarming pieces of poetry.
Sukanya Mohanty, is one of the renowned poetess who has exquisitely crafted a blooming insight into a collection of poems titled ‘Cacophony and silence’. These cohesive verses are an eloquent of her reverberating loudly-voiced thoughts. Each discrete element of her poems propounds the cumulative multiple noises, discordant voices brimming in our lives, and making our efforts even more futile. Her narrative style, her visualization and range of ideas produces intuitive reaction among readers, adverts you, makes you feel something, if not everything. Moreover, it educes a deeper world of dissenting metaphors.
In conversation with Sukanya Mohanty
1) You refer yourself as a lover of puzzles, riddles and details of mundane things. Can you elaborate on this description?
I like de-tangling a puzzle or riddle and laying bare its core. But I also like looking at commonplace things up close to discover the smaller, almost invisible parts of complexity that make them up, like veins on a leaf, dust on windows or looking at something through a bottle. They help in shifting perspectives. One keeps up the analyzer side while the other simply cherishes something for its simplicity or attempts to estrange it so that it is no more mundane. It’s like looking at the world upside down. Makes you see things differently.
2) In your poems, you have fathomed more about the hubbub sullying our inner voices and about the daily cliches we dwell on. Why did you choose this theme?
l don’t think I chose this theme as much as it chose me. When things become cliche we take them too much for granted and don’t question them. They become part of the background. Only on looking at them from another angle does one realize what Rene Margritte implied: a painting of a pipe is not a pipe. As for the other part about the hubbub – the noise – while I did think about how external noises and sounds disturb one’s inner thoughts (like Mumbai’s Wake Up Call) or dull the sensitivity to recognize one’s own voice (like The Haunting Lullaby) there was a flip side to it. The mind itself is making so much noise with so many thoughts flooding and crashing against each other. It is a constant ebb and flow of paradoxes. The jarring noise from an alarm clock or people chit-chatting can snap you out of clarity. However, there can be pin drop silence around you and your mind could be a war zone, that then spills outside. I guess I wanted to write about the disparity one could feel between their environment and their mind, and how much they can influence each other.
3) “Words are a never ending galaxy and when we choose the right ones, it is as if the stars have collided with one another, exploding and forming the most magnificent sight, the perfect sentence.” Being a poet you must be a lover of words, finding them insanely beautiful and amazed how exceedingly heartbreaking they can be when put together, right?
I cannot deny that spoken word poetry has influenced my writing, and even made it acceptable to read as poetry today. The feeling is indescribable when all words string together perfectly. It feels like opening a drawer you didn’t know existed. I read and re-read Emily Dickinson, Rilke and Siken multiple times and find myself in more awe of their words each time. William Blake’s words “To see the World in a Grain of Sand/ And Heaven in a Wildflower/ Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand/ And Eternity in an Hour” keep ringing in my ears every now and then. Reading someone else’s work lets you inhabit their worldview a bit.
4) Usually writing a poem needs hours of contemplation, packing metaphors and themes that go all over the place, jogging in their jumps, making them sound melodious within themselves. But coming to your poems they offer an emotional insight of what you see, how you feel! How did you come up with these poems, is this your way of enunciating your thoughts?
I used to take piano lessons when I was younger. I tried really hard to correct it, but it didn’t work. Too much structure pressurizes me, so I did away with it and wrote in free verse. It’s like Federer’s backhand. He has a one-handed backhand because he could never do the conventional double-handed one, that isn’t the most efficient backhand. Regardless, he makes it look elegant and with enough adjustments within these limitations, in the recent years he made it stronger over time. I like to think of writing that way. I could keep refining the way I write until it’s passable. One of the reasons I wrote in the preface “This is not a book of poems” is because I was aware that a lot of it read like prose but it was too short to be considered so. It could be sketches, but again, this was also a time when I was afraid of writing prose and not all of them read like prose. I wrote prose poetry only much after I gave the manuscript. The structure of verse, as loose as it was, made me feel comfortable writing. It has form but because it doesn’t abide by the rules of verse, it does give the illusion that one is merely reading my thoughts. I think that what I’ve done in this collection is more of dropping the reader in the middle of an instance, letting them watch it only turn the general assumption over its head by the end. They’re glimpses with a lot of irony. Writing is work. But if you stop enjoying it in trying to play by someone else’s rules and it’s not working, then do what writing was meant for: create.
5) “This city – immune- sleeps, living between its irritable traffic, jamming itself into tiny corners of people’s privacy.This is a place that never sleeps nor is it awake, caught betweem insomnia and peaceful slumber! ” These lines perfectly depict the city of dreams i.e. Mumbai. What made you to write about this city, do you find yourself having propinquity with that place?
I’ve been to Mumbai a couple of times over the years. Apart from how much Mumbai is romanticized as the “city of dreams” on media, I’m also surrounded by people, who don’t live there but talk about it often. Almost everyone I know who has visited Mumbai has had a homesickness for it even though they’ve never stayed there. In many ways, I find Mumbai more charming than Delhi in terms of weather (floods aside) and shifting architecture and scenery. However, I don’t share the same dreams that others’ have. Perhaps because whenever I’m in Mumbai and it’s raining, blue tarpaulin sheets, which are also found in the slums of Dharavi, I see them covering Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia tears through that dream. It’s a reminder that every dream is fragile in this city of dreams, even India’s richest man’s house towering over the city.
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6) Heard that you are a visual artist and have a predilection for photography. Is that true ?
Well, I’m in not a professional photographer. But I’m fascinated by people’s perspectives in photography. There’s a lot you can find out about them there. So that way, the way I take my photographs is a way of cataloguing my worldview too. The highest level of art I’ve done is IB higher level Visual Art in my 11th and 12th. Since then I’ve been on my own. Coming to visual art, when I was little I struggled writing the correct way in kindergarten so I had to ask my friends to write for me while I drew for them. Before I could read, art was my own corner to escape to from the rest of the world and I took it very seriously. I learnt oil painting when I was thirteen after having learnt sketching, water colour, and acrylic before. I enjoyed art a lot so I’d mix up different media before I knew mixed media was an actual thing. Art defined me. I would make patterns and break them through it. I would hide puzzles in my artwork and ask them to decipher the hidden meaning or alternative perspective. Meaning was very important to me, which helped me when I took up IB Visual Art. I still make artwork but I’m not consistent anymore. One day suddenly I feel the urge to paint then I’ll pull out a canvas and paint jars and spontaneously work on it. Sometimes it’s just on paper and then, I may not do another canvas for a few months.
7) “I fear blankness in things. Blankness is vacant space staring at me, nagging at me, pulling me in towards it, and compelling me to fill it. But if the world is my canvas, what if I ruin it ?” What did you want to exude through these lines actually, is this about the prospect of not knowing if something good or bad will happen to us, fear of our unknown future populating in our souls?
Like Stephane Mallarme said “Poems are not made out of ideas. Poems are made out of words”. So for me, the piece started from the title. It’s a statement within itself, which the body of the poem turns it over its head. While inshort, the piece explores the complexity of fear. It starts from something as concrete as blanks left on a line to fill to the anxiety of blank, vacant spaces, which implies this three dimensional hollowness, and wanting to occupy them to the turning the idiom “the world is your canvas” over its own head. It can mean several things. Contrary feelings of desiring completion while being afraid of the impact that completion can have over one’s own life and others’ too in an irrevocable way. That completion is a decision or a task. But what this piece does is put an oxymoronic twist on the last two lines, implying everyone is a creator and a destroyer. We have the ability to destroy much more around us with what we choose to fill up the “canvas” with.
8) At what age did you start writing and what was that about ? Who incentivized you to start your writing journey ?
I began writing much later than I did visual art. There were moments when I wrote down phrases or a poem here or there; maybe a few stories too. But I didn’t really follow it up until I was 19. But I did have an inclination for literature. I used to read a lot and I analyze them, look out for hidden symbols that I would incorporate in my art. I hardly thought of writing for the sake of writing. But it was a close friend Aj Agrawal who tried to push me into writing at least by starting a blog. I entered the blogging world because of his prodding and I got to read a lot of people’s writing and poetry. That pushed me into the act of writing, but I would look at their poetry, appreciate it and then get demotivated that I could never write that way. So I never tried to push the envelope until when I was faced with a situation of losing art.
The reason I even took to writing at the age of 19 was because the need to create or at least discover is what keep me driven. One night, I picked up a pen and decided to put this frustration to words instead of attempting shapes and forms that I had grown all too familiar with. After a few minutes, I had written down the words “‘Hold your tongue”, they said” and it build up from there. That poem went on to be titled Cacophony and the Silence because of the interplay between wanting to scream and needing to keep mum. It’s not my favorite poem from the collection, but it was the turning point after which I went on to write more than hundred poems over months.
9) When and what made you to publish your poems? Was finding publishers for these poems was a crux of the matter? How did you come up with this title “cacophony and silence” ?
I’ve actually had a very strange journey with writing. All this was happening when I was at a very low point in my life. I had dropped out of DU because sociology wasn’t working for me. I didn’t have anything concrete to my name and I couldn’t see myself going anywhere. After having shared my work with my father over time, he suggested publishing. Then, I sent out my manuscript of 100 poems to 35 publications – well known ones and independent ones. I didn’t hear back from most of them, but I did hear back from a few, who considered publishing it. Eventually those deals fell through, but it was still pretty great for someone to think my work was worthy of being considered. Bloomsbury approached me and they were very serious about going through with it. This was a trial run for me, so colour me surprised. I probably sent 15 “final” drafts before I retracted them. Kind of drove my editor crazy in the process. On the up side, it helped getting me back into college at Ashoka to study English literature.
Deciding on the book title was excruciating I hadn’t intended to title the book Cacophony and the Silence. It was my alternative option if I couldn’t come up with anything better. Ultimately, I succumbed when my mentor Namita Gokhale told me a title that grabs attention matters and the theme of sound was best captured with that juxtaposition. She was right because when I tell people the title they play “Cacophony” on their lips almost as if they’re absorbing the word.
10) “If words are your life, make it your living..” people who are really into writing will surely relate themselves with this piece of quote, yet at times the thought of becoming full-time writer seems implausible. What’s your opinion on this?
I think it is implausible to bank on being only a writer if you want to stay financially afloat. Writers earn very little money, especially poets. At least if you write a novel there’s an off chance it may become a bestseller and your royalty will increase. Hardly anyone buys poetry so if you’re doing it, you’re really doing it for your love for words. In the long run, you’ll need another job to sustain this lifestyle. I soon realized this and applied to Ashoka University. The writers I know of are either working in publishing, journalism or have taken up professorship on the side. If you want to be a full time author, you have to have mastered craft and storytelling, and churn out multiple books in a year, like John Grisham or Eva Ibbotson. That requires a lot of practice but also, it’s genre fiction, which I like to read but not necessarily write. I need my time to write a story and more so, I need time to write it stylistically. Not to forget, you can get rejected by publishers and you need something to keep things going on the side.
11) In this age of dwindling attention spans, we barely agonize the physical beauty residing within the words or poems. Don’t you think so?
It depends, but largely I’d say yes. There are a lot more options available for distractions today. People, especially the youth, are being flooded with so much information that they have to bank on 140 character tweets or WhatsApp messages to back up a headline instead of going through an article. Content matters so much more than style today because people want you to get to the point. This is why Slam Poetry is immensely important today. It attempts to compress entertainment in such a way that you have to craft your words carefully in each line to earn more clicks or views, if you’re watching it online. It declares everyone a potential poet. There’s a downside to that. Few people start writing edgy poetry to seem cool. And some write slam poetry to make it fit what has become acceptable in it because it grabs the most attention. That’s why I think the first place to fall in love with words will always be creative prose. Through centuries poetry has been written for people who are conversant with literature. For e.g. – The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It is poetic but it doesn’t overwhelm the reader. There are a lot a more books like that. If these books were publicized half as much as Chetan Bhagat or Young Adult genre novels, we’d have people appreciating the texture and quality of beautiful words.
