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Usha Akella talks to Nandini Dhar about her chapbook,
Ordinary, and the experience of working on FIVE. Read a poem from the chapbook |
NANDINI DHAR
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The first poem "Ordinary" in your collection is a list poem of sorts. Why did you choose this
particular form? Especially since the collection has also been titled Ordinary, does the idea of a list play any special role in your conceptualization of this collection? |
USHA AKELLA
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I’d first like to thank you and Mihir — and Arjun for bringing me to the fold — for the amazing
opportunity you offered me. I think we’ve pulled off something extraordinary (pun intended) with FIVE. Kudos to you two for the vision. I think my intention — it's upto the reader to speculate how successful it was — was to take the list, the most ordinary and unconscious of everyday written formats we use to navigate through life. And use the form as a metaphor for the mechanical, quotidian and ordinary. The content is self-explanatory, the frightening extremities we juggle, the consumerist drive we bring to everything, reverence lost. And how do we reclaim the sacred in our time? This was the question driving the poem though not answered. |
NANDINI DHAR
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Three of your poems "This is Just to Say William Carlos Williams", "Reading the South American Poets" and "I Can't/Won't Write Like A White Male Poet" create a kind of trinity, I felt. Here, you define a poetic trajectory for yourself. And, that trajectory has been formed through a certain kind of questioning of Anglo-American poetics of whiteness as well as a form of homage to Latin American poets. Can you speak a little bit about this? How do you envisage yourself as a poet in relation to the dominant Anglo-American poetics of whiteness, especially since you live in US, and more specifically the southwest, with its own histories of complex whiteness? Are you interested in creating a trajectory of different kind of exchange between poets from the global south?
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USHA AKELLA
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To be honest, I would rewrite some of that poem and work out some logical inconsistencies in ‘I
can’t…’ The poems were not intended as a trinity. I began to feel that some of my poetry was evolving organically from within, like a corolla from a nucleus of sound. Some of my poetry seems incantory sound driving the form and how it is received. It is in this sense I felt I was reaching for something like the South American poetic aesthetic, though not imitated consciously. I can’t rid myself of the place of sound in poems. I love it. I am also engaged with the question of cultural sensibility and form, so as trite as it sounds- are we equipped to write a damn good sonnet? Whiteness, blackness, what are we going to do with this otherness so in focus in Trump’s America? It’s on the surface again staring us in the eye. I don’t know, Nandini. I write the way I write, and every poem must invite dialogue as a poem and not as a political agenda. When I write, I don’t think this brown skin is writing, but when work meets politics of exclusion that can’t be proven, then I am reminded of my brownness. I would want to engage with poets here in the South as poets first — that’s the first way to meet this horror — writing as passionately and triumphantly as I want and give the world my poem, whatever kind of poem it is. I think I would retitle that poem as ‘I’m saying, Mr. Trump’. |
NANDINI DHAR
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I love your poem "Turmeric Hue", probably because it speaks to one of my current obsessions-- how to represent the domestic space in poems. Can you speak a little bit more about this poem? What was your process for writing this one? Also, it seems like you are creating an opposition here between cooking and writing. Was this conscious?
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USHA AKELLA
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You’re absolutely right. As a mother of a then young child, I felt I had to sneak in my poems into
this time-space capsule we call Life; as if everything else I did had quantifiable social value and as if the poet had to insert herself into existence like the way a passenger apologetically inserts herself in a wedge between two people in a public bus in Delhi. I was and am a suburban mom leading a schizophrenic existence of inward absolute freedom and outward social cliché, it used to feel a bit unhinged but it no longer does. I rather enjoy it like a game of charades now. I live in a neighborhood of moms and dads working in IBS, Freescale and such; Navratri gollus and 2/3 car garages… In the midst of this all there is a poet writing her reality… I feel like a pirate of some sort, it is surreal. I enjoy these tensions no longer in their grip or apologetic. Yes, the cooking and writing was a conscious cocktail though not an opposition in absolute terms but only by relation within the context and poem. I am sure we could tally the two and find similarities. |
NANDINI DHAR
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What rationale were you following to put together the poems in the manuscript that has
eventually become Ordinary? |
USHA AKELLA
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I think the assemblage was loose and not a pointed effort. In some sense it was collating poems
that seem to come out of ordinary routines- a dream one might have, looking in the mirror, in love with the light in the hall of one’s home, a news cast… just bits of glass falling from a kaleidoscope. |
NANDINI DHAR
USHA AKELLA
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How was this process of collective work of putting together five chapbooks different from the other publication processes you have experienced?
Absolutely unique. We were all juggling and straightened in timelines and mismatched schedules
across oceans and rivers, yet we made it work. It was fantastic. I remember midnight missives flying back and forth. What I really appreciated was the hard effort we all made to extend respect, working at communication and understanding while keeping critiques honest. Both of us went through a round of that inter personal work and have come out as friends. I was floored by the concept and felt very united with it. I know there is an age gap — I felt like a grandmother at times — but thankfully seniority had no place in the dynamic from the start. I felt we all faced the same struggles and issues and were on the same path trying to redefine peer-relationships as poets, and trying to activate new platforms. Pramila and I were doing it with Matwaala — trying to create a festival, a new wheel based on talent, community and respect and not on elitism and bullshit. FIVE was doing the same. I really began to enjoy the critiques because they were making my poems better, the chiseling was very enjoyable. My regret is this. I had put in a lot of time and took the critiquing seriously but unfortunately three of the initial poets I had worked on dropped out of the group. My Cambridge studies took over and I was unable to do as much as I would have liked with two poets in the present collective. I think we can all proudly say that this was truly a collective —we all had out two-cents worth on everything from poems to design to font choices to title… and it bewilders me that the first title choice I dashed off ended up baptizing the project and now FIVE seems to have such a triumphant ring, which is how we should be feeling. |
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