Mani Rao’s latest book of poetry, So That You Know, may be strewn with personal pronouns and a conversational tone, title onwards, but with the preface clarifying ‘these days I’m craving privacy even from myself’, the frankness could well be a rearview mirror to make the poet appear closer than she is. A crafting exquisite enough to turn us confidant.
Mani’s workmanship allows only the apt in that factory of words where poets go honing. Poems that come from everywhere, with the titles revealing a non-stop engagement with the real world, with the practical. Tomatoes reply; I am not afraid of death, I am afraid; So Yes But No... Verse that tersely slips into spiritual nooks and crannies, where one marriage is an overcoat and another marriage a haunted house. Mani is nothing and no one but a poet, turning even the mundane into a lyric.
The poet recurs in multiple roles. Now, a daughter who says of her mother: No wonder I am so fearless / All the panic safe with her. Now an exorcist: Ghosts have no ends / no measurements / They scale walls / Collapse / into a lamp. It is perhaps in the asides that the real Mani lives: Maybe the highway robbers will have a special smile for me.
There’s the indrawn breath: each word ensouled, self-aware, mulling the power of pause. What Mani proves with So That You Know is her nimble footwork in the dance of language. Take ‘Kashi Triptych’. Did marrow fizz / Fire laugh / In three hours and a half / this human log / collectible / in a dustpan.
What words do to her and what she does with words is a secret she now seems ready to share. If words are your thing, this is your book.
Is this your most intimate collection yet?
Perhaps it feels more intimate because readers are relating to this collection more. Love, marriage, and ageing, everyone can relate to these topics. The subject matter is drawn from the everyday—encounters with a mosquito, childhood friends, the house with the wrong Vastu, and the jaded marriage.
In the Greek part of this book – Sing to Me – your language meets the legends perfectly...
I’m very interested in mythology and find many parallels between Indian and Greek mythology. Zeus’s ego, the unfairness to Helen, but this takes a twist: for instance, I’m sure it was the parents who put the snakes on Medusa’s head to keep the predatory men away! The tone in these poems is humour. I had written this set of poems in 2009, and many were published in Almost Island the same year. Then the chapbook Sing to Me was published by Recent Work Press when I was an invited writer in residence at the International Poetry Studies Institute in Canberra.
How do you always zero in on the right word?
I’m so glad the hours of work don’t show. Sometimes a poem may take hours or days to be ready. Some lines happen fully ready, but rough drafts tend to fill trash cans (yes, I write on paper). Once a promising phrase or line – or a seed – emerges, I develop that. Bit by bit, the actual poem takes shape.
On technique and line breaks, how does one train the ear for that?
Poetry is more known for measure and time, but it is air architecture, capturing everything. If the expression is mentally joined to breath, it automatically has a rhythm. One begins with a fragment or line, and then that becomes the rhythm of that poem.
You come back again and again to translations. Gita, Kalidasa, Saundarya Lahiri…How do you navigate between writing your poetry and translating?
Veda, tantra, mantras, and early Indian thought are my field of study (“scholarship”), and I love translating what I want to know and learn from. Even there, it is the poetry that attracts.