CHENNAI: WH Auden once said: ‘A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language’. Here is someone who perfectly fits that description. Ranjani Murali, a post-graduate in poetry from George Mason University, speaks to CE about her fascination with the world of poetry and why it brought her to ‘Poetry with Prakriti’ all the way from the US.
“While doing undergraduation in Coimbatore, I read a lot of AK Ramanujan and Dileep Chitre,” says Ranjani. She also read a series of British romantic poetry and contemporary American poets like Sylvia Plath and TS Elliot. “I felt diversified after reading all the contemporaries and I think that’s where all of it began.”
Arun Kolatkar, Jayanta Mahapatra, Eunice D’Souza and Ranjit Hoskote, and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Sylvia Plath’s Daddy, Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool, almost all of John Ashbery’s work were some of her early influences. “Charles Creeley, Janet Holmes, John Donn, and also my mentor Susan Tichy are some of my other favourites.”
Her prose piece On Lighting Up published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, has a homely touch to its pulp. “Of course I am nostalgic about home and I have this ‘where do I belong’ question all the time inside my head but I did not add that homely metaphor to the prose just so that more people will connect to it. I gave that blend because readers tend to get the flesh and bone of a poem when it is expressed metaphorically,” she explains.
Ranjani believes it’s important to read the classics, regardless of whether we are studying history or classicism. “Beowulf, Homer, Milton, Sappho, Sangam poetry, Aandal and others are part of our legacy and deserve to be studied. It’s proportional to patience and that is an essential investment in poetry.”
She has a unique perception about non-fiction and poetry. “I do enjoy writing non-fiction but I don’t believe non-fiction is raw compared to fiction or poetry. What I understood is that non-fiction is fiction tending to be real. Same goes with poetry too. It is not just imagination for me, it helps me reimagine myself,” she explains.
It is the first time she is featuring in ‘Poetry with Prakriti’ but was a regular follower of the event. “I believe there is a huge amount of young talent in the country that has invested both emotionally and physically into poetry. The community is getting stronger every day, thanks to all the poetry festivals and accolades that motivate the youth to push themselves farther,” she says.
Ranjani agrees to the common claim that poetry is a form of meditation but also adds that it’s subjective. “Poetry helps me process my daily life. It makes me ready to face life with more confidence than the previous day. But, it differs from person to person.”
What’s her goal? What gets her going through the day? “My dream is to be in a community of poets and write poems all day long. It should be an artistic haven with music, painting and poems,” she smiles.
She encourages everyone to read poetry regardless of nationality, race and language. “We don’t have to look far. It is here, we have a lot of tradition and legacy here. But its poetry, it is beautiful irrespective of the language. Get lost in that world and that’s the best advice I can give to the new generation,” she says.
Ranjani Murali will recite her poems
tomorrow at 7 pm in Amdavadi restaurant. For details, call: 43313353