BENGALURU: Bengaluru poet Deesh Mariwala on the greats that have stayed with him over the decades:
Your favourite love poem:
Leonard Cohen’s ‘One of us cannot be wrong’ springs to mind. And Sahir Ludhianvi’s ‘Hum chalein to saaya bhi apna na saath de...”
A poet you keep going back to:
Leonard Cohen, Byron, Shakespeare for their mastery of building image and emotion, adhering to poetic form.
The first poem you remember reading:
As a beauty I’m not a great star / There are others more handsome by far. / But my face — I don’t mind it, / Because I’m behind it; / It’s the ones out in front that I jar!
Written word or slam? Or songs?
Poetry is meant to be spoken and heard, set to music or not.
Epics or anthologies? Or any other genre?
In prose, mostly non-fiction. But fantasy, humour, pulp, anything really. I devour words.
Poetry vs prose:
All great prose is also poetry, just as pleasing to the ear.
Influences / inspiration:
Cohen, Shakespeare, Villon, Frost, Hughes, Eliot, Dickey, Lorca, Ludhianvi, Ghalib, Kabir, Gibran, Amos Oz, Saint-Exupéry, Moraes, Kolatkar, Hesse, Rilke, Charteris, Janis Ian, David James Duncan, and I’m barely scratching the surface!
*Deesh Mariwala will be part of Bangalore Poetry Festival