BENGALURU: Mumbai-based Bina Sarkar, will bring her insights to Bangalore Poetry Festival, at Leela Palace, this weekend.
The poet talks about her muses.
Your favourite love poem:
Multiple poets and poems have touched my life and I cannot speak of only one that is significant to me.
A poem / poet you keep going back to:
Neruda’s iconic Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair, for instance, have haunted me for decades. There are many poets one keeps going back to... Jibananada Das, A K Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, K Satchidanandan, T S Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Derek Walcott, among others.
There are many lesser-known poets whose works also echo.
The first poem you remember reading:
Grasshopper Green (!!) ... anon. I was seven, perhaps, and enjoyed its hippity-hoppety cadences. That jolly poem nudged me to write my own verses, and thus began six decades of writing for me.
Poetry vs prose:
I prefer short poems that condense one’s thoughts with mathematical or lyrical brevity. Both poetry and prose can be arresting if written with depth and passion.
Inspiration and influences:
I am “with” Franz Kafka when he says, “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Inspiration comes from expected and unexpected sources... it could be everybody’s muse, the moon... or a city, war, blood, suffering, abstract thoughts that enter your head like anarchists. Dismantling the structure and coherence that you’d neatly stored...
What influences me is the ephemeral. And within this brief transition of time and space, to touch some lives, to share some joy.