Rochelle Potkar is celebrating news of winning the Norton Girault Literary Prize in Poetry by the Barely South Review, Norfok, UK, for her poem ‘To Daraza’ and has just concluded her story collection ‘Hangovers from a Bombay Debacle’ and her third poetry book ‘Inglorious Coins of the Counting House’ both, releasing soon Eminent poets Rochelle Potkar and Sarabjeet Garcha will be in Goa for the launch of their books - ‘Paper Asylum’ and ‘A Clock in the Far Past’ respectively- on September 23 at Institute Menezes Braganza, Panaji at 5 pm where eminent poet Manohar Shetty will be in conversation with the duo. Bharati Pawaskar interacts with both the poets
Q Why do words make so much difference in our lives, when uttered or heard in different contexts?
A word has depth and dimension, a registry of music, colour, pace, mood, light and shade. When placed beside each other words combust, making fire, adding to more hues.
It’s alchemy.
Language is the richest instrument.
Words are weapons in mass destruction or mass construction. They can heal or steal. Psychological recourse but not perfect art. That’s why we need constant explanations. A word is not absolute but most of India traded by it. We still depend on the tongue, no matter how forked it threatens to get.
Q In the birth of a poem, what comes first - words, meanings, concept or emotions?
I never wished to be a poet. Who wants financial poverty? But a poem snatches you from the dark behind, it attacks, abducts. Once radicalized, you don’t care for money.
The word becomes a coin, the currency to a new country. And you write and write until the poem leaves you alone. Writing poetry is the banal act of disrobing in an infinite walk-in wardrobe.
Practically speaking, poems come to me with their first lines, like drawstrings.
Q Do poets take it granted that everybody would understand what has been written?
Poets are meant to architect labyrinths; to provide a solution infused with metaphors that only aggravates the problem.
A good poem is an exciting problem to have like a complicated romantic relationship.
Also, art is its interpretations, and hence always on a psychedelic spectrum.
Different readers have reacted differently to my poems – always refreshingly dissimilar from each other.
Q Literature mirrors our life and the world around us. Do you prefer to pen it as you see it with naked eye or do you add your imagination to give it an aura?
Every naked eye has a coloured lens and a vantage point, a perceptive based on where the gaze places itself on the 360 degrees of a circle, assuming the subject is at the center and not on a tangent – or even then. After that comes a backing of bias and beliefs, even if self-sponsored.
No wonder each account is as unique. We never share the same geopolitics of a standpoint even on the same side of the rink. My writings too are a sum total of my blasphemous assumptions, optimism, and idealism.
I also love the skirmishes associated in choosing language, while at this. If writing shows evolution I like tracking down the poems I still haven’t outgrown. I don’t consciously add ingredients; I write subconsciously as though in a trance but editing-rounds have enriched my pieces.
I am an accidental publisher!
