URVASHI BAHUGUNA
in conversation with
Michelle D'Costa

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Urvashi Bahuguna's debut poetry collection, Terrarium (originally titled Mudscope), was selected for the 2017 Emerging Poets Prize by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and published in 2019 by
The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. Her book of essays on mental health is forthcoming from Penguin India. Her work has been recognised by a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship, a Sangam House fellowship, an Eclectica Spotlight Author Prize, a TOTO Award for Creative Writing,
a Wingword Poetry Prize, and nominations for
​Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Orion, SOFTBLOW, The Nervous Breakdown, Eclectica Magazine, The Fourth River, Barely South Review, Kitaab, Jaggery, The Four Quarters Magazine and elsewhere. She grew up in Goa, and currently lives and works in Delhi.

This interview was conducted on mail.

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Michelle D'Costa: The collection gets its title from a stunning poem in it. I think ‘Terrarium’ is apt for a debut collection. The poems that had been kernels are now finally on display for the world’s scrutiny. Buds that are now petals with lots of edits and rewrites...

​           How does it make you feel to know your book is now out there?

Urvashi Bahuguna: It’s unnerving at times to know I’ve put a part of myself out there. But, most of the time, I am relieved – relieved it was published, relieved my editors worked hard to help me put a stronger manuscript into the world. And I am grateful to be read – both by my friends and family, and by writers I respect. The attention of those two groups means vastly different things, and I am taking in both. There’s nothing quite like having someone tell me they’ve read the book – I am so astonished people (no matter how small a number) are spending time with it. Another person’s attention for the length of an entire collection feels like an incredible gift.

​I am also trying to maintain a healthy distance from the reception, keeping in mind everything I’ve learned over time about criticism and rejection, prioritising my mental well-being.

MD: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, an accomplished poet, judged the contest. She read and praised your book.
              
                  (i) How important do you think such validation is for a debut poet’s self-worth? 
​                      What in your view is ‘validation’?

UB: On the Commonplace podcast hosted by Rachel Zucker, Sarah Gambito recently talked about the poetry economy in which there is little money but there are a few prizes. She stressed the “toxic and horrendous” problem we’re left with
​“when poets believe the marketplace.” And that stayed with me – writing is for more than the market. That’s really easy to lose sight of – whether you happen to be winning or losing (in the narrowest, limiting sense of those words) at a particular moment. Aimee is the poet whose poetry has most informed my own in recent years. She’s a poet who’d shown me a meaningful way of looking at the world – her choosing the manuscript meant more to me than any other judge would have. In my wildest dreams, I didn’t expect to be read by her. It was a privilege to be read by her. I don’t want to use the term 
​“self-worth” with respect to anyone’s writing. Sometimes, my writing and my self-worth do become entwined, and that occurrence always causes me unhappiness – sooner or later. Writing is a stimulating part of my life, but it decides my worth in one sphere at one particular moment – if at all. If I hadn’t won (and I haven’t won or been accepted for many, many things), I would still have had to keep going, keep charting a life. There are always other aspects of our life to tend to. If we’re lucky, some of those are aspects we want to tend to. Of course, it would have been hard to lose the GIPC prize, but I would have wanted to move past it, to keep tinkering with the manuscript, to keep simply living my life. Even after the win, it wasn’t like the manuscript went straight to press, I still spent over a year editing the manuscript with my editors.

             (ii) Do you think prizes/blurbs from established writers increase a book’s outreach or is it the content that                                           mainly decides a book’s destiny?

UB: This is only a guess, but I suspect that it’s both. The blurb can sometimes be a clue about the writer’s influences, whose writing they respect. It’s one way for a book to reach the readers of the blurbers’ work – a little bit like saying, “hey, if you liked their work, perhaps you might like mine.”

MD: You’ve written about your time a Sangam and what happened to your manuscript while you were there. To quote from your essay,

I removed fifteen of my technically strongest poems because I wasn’t satisfied with the answers to these questions. Some didn’t adequately address my privilege, some told a story that wasn’t mine to tell, some simply did not belong thematically in this collection. I sat on that green table, swatted away mosquitoes, and toiled. At the close of my time, I had a new draft
​of my book to send to my editor.

            (i) What do you mean ‘technically’ strong?

UB: I mean that the poems I removed weren’t, in my opinion, bad poems. They weren’t clunky, confused, inconsistent in quality. They were relatively decent poems that had been edited a great deal. But those strengths alone weren’t enough to justify their inclusion – there were other questions (that you’ve quoted above) to consider.

             (ii) Do you think you were able to kill your darlings at Sangam because you were uprooted from your routine?

UB: At Sangam House, the goal was clear and singular: write and edit. At home, I’m simultaneously managing work, household, family, friends, writing – I have to fit all of those into my days. At Sangam, those other parts were on hold –
the manuscript had my undivided attention (outside of meals, chats with fellow residents, walks etc). I was aware that
that time was fleeting – I needed to make the tough decisions. I can’t fully explain it, but Sangam was the right combination of stimulation and solitude that facilitated productivity. It was actually quite easy to let go at Sangam House of those
​poems I’d maybe have clung to before, that I was maybe procrastinating letting go of.

MD: One of my favourites from the book is ‘The Heart of a Mango’ which also won you a TFA Award in 2018. Can you share with us the journey of this poem: from guthli to the full fruit. Also, what did the award mean to you?

UB: That’s a poem I wrote because I wanted to tell my father’s story. There are a few strands I could distill his life, his personality into – and the love for mangoes was near the top of the list. People’s interests, their likes are such a fulfilling space to observe them within – because they’re engaged, happy, tapping into the lighter parts of themselves. I asked myself what I
remembered from summers after summers of mundane memories around the fruit – and the guthli, the transporting of fruit on trains, his trips to orchards, the way our fridge looks in summer came back to me. As I am writing this, I notice that the poem is also about how I see him. I also wrote it, at least in part, to remind myself that I had these memories within me,
that a poem can also crystallise light.

I’d applied to Toto Funds The Arts a few times. I liked the more or less annual ritual of submitting a writing portfolio to the prize. It was a place I knew was interested in young writers, it meant a lot to me to try, to even be able to try. I have followed the writing of TFA winners for years and interviewed some of them. It was a win with a lot of personal history attached. I am incredibly grateful to the Vellanis for making that space for young writers.

MD: Your poem ’Migrating to Goa’ is really interesting. These words stayed with me: "a good place for a holiday, but
not to live". Anecdotes from Goa are often an outsider’s view having experienced Goa only in flings. You moved from
Gujarat to Goa for the long haul and here’s a poem that looks back on the awkward first meeting. Somewhat like
​an arranged marriage. Any thoughts?

UB: It wasn’t awkward so much as tentative, untested, unknown. Migration is weird – we moved where my parents were transferred. Where we live is often determined by those sorts of forces, right? In that first week, it didn’t feel like it would become our home. But, it did gradually. It was a place I didn’t write about for years after I’d moved away – I didn’t want to collapse into clichés, I hadn’t yet made my peace with the fact that I had no ancestral ties to Goa even though it was one of the places I considered home. In some ways, I needed some years of adulthood to accept my relationship with Goa as
complex – sometimes it is a good place to live, sometimes it isn’t: the same as most places.

MD: In your poem ‘Alone’, I especially liked this line- "Two girls ask if I will photograph them & I ask back: in the photo, I look small & full of wonder."- The poem is about travelling solo. How did the poem come to you?

UB: I’d read accounts of travelling alone where people savoured the solitude. In some way, I expected to feel the same way. But I didn’t. I wanted to articulate what it was like to be confronted by breath-taking beauty but still feel profound absence.
I was trying to make peace with feeling anything more complicated than pure joy, to make room for this kind of solo travel
experience too.

MD: Who are your biggest non-literary influences?

UB: Currently: Krista Tippett for her On Being podcast, Jessica Dore for her unique blend of mental health and tarot, Neha Sinha for her posts on local ecology, Paul Salopek for his Out of Eden Walk which is currently touring India, Alisha Dutt Islam for her botanical illustrations. I’m learning from each of them at the moment.

MD: You have interviewed many writers. Do you think curiosity is an essential trait for a poet?

UB: On the TV show, Succession, a minor character describes themselves as “pathologically incurious,” and that’s a phrase that’s stayed with me because it really brought home how curiosity is an almost unfathomably wide spectrum. Recently, I’ve asked myself: how curious or incurious am I, and about what? I can’t say if curiosity is an essential trait for every writer, but I think it is a helpful one to have both as a person and as a writer. In my case it heightens the quality of my life and my observations, and hence, my writing. I’ve lived with different degrees of curiosity – absent, limited, unbridled – and it’s when I’ve been most receptive and questioning that I’ve found myself most stable, most capable of writing. For example, I have been walking around my neighbourhood with more attention these days and I’ve noticed, for the first time in some ten years of living around here, that there are sunbirds and bulbuls during the day, bats and dark-brown snails at night. Curiosity allows for a fuller life.

MD: How has community played a role in your poetry?

UB: There’s been many different kinds of communities that have shaped and/or supported my writing. The most important one is the community of writers I’ve had the privilege to be a part of. Some of them I’ve gotten to know because I’ve interviewed them, and they’ve become guides in how to navigate a writing life, how to make space and time for one’s writing, how to not feel guilt or panic over fallow writing periods. They’ve modelled how to support one another. I met two of my most constant writing companions and first readers of my poems at university. I probably wouldn’t have been able to write without both their insights and their encouragement. There are other communities too that shape my writing – my female friendships for instance.

MD: I loved your poem ‘Blue slipper’. It’s a quite simple but powerful poem and leaves an imprint of a slipper landing on one’s skin. I’m sure it has been through many drafts to deliver the sting that it does now. Do you think a poet constantly
dissects life to find pivotal moments such as these only to turn them into poems?

UB: That’s a really good question. 'Blue Slipper' is actually the culmination of two moments – one long-ago and one recent. When I heard someone tell me that if women had the power of men, they’d be as terrible, I was reminded of the incident with the blue slipper. I am interested in the connections the mind instinctively makes – more than single moments, I am drawn to the ones I find myself placing beside one another. Dissection sounds more deliberate than what I am often doing – idly thinking, drawing parallels: whether they’re false, misplaced, true (but always revealing). I do hold on to those – sometimes just for myself, other times as a journal entry, and sometimes as poems. For me, poetry, particularly within Terrarium, has been the result of thinking I’m already doing – when I chance upon a memory or a realisation that ignites,
I take it to the page and see what comes of it.

MD: Your work has appeared in different literary magazines? How does publishing in lit zines help poets find the confidence they need to publish a collection?

UB: One of the first places that published my poetry was Vayavya. Two of those poems are in Terrarium. I respect the poetry and editorial insight of Mihir Vatsa (the poetry editor of Vayavya) – I was really pleased to have poems selected by him. I’m referencing Vayavya as an example of the fact I’ve mostly submitted to literary magazines whose work and aesthetic I’ve resonated with. It hasn’t been random. I saw the places where poets I admired were submitting, read those magazines (usually if they were available online), and sent submissions their way if I thought there was a possible fit between their
work and mine. I get turned down constantly which is a really valuable experience to have because I keep editing, keep sending poems out. The few poems that do get accepted (ordinarily after multiple attempts) show me that there is an audience for these poems – audiences don’t have to be universal. The other contributors in that issue and I get to read each other’s work, we become accustomed with poets who don’t have collections out, who are between collections out. It’s a place where a single poem or a trio or quintet of poems get to stand on their own strength – and that’s how collections are built,
right? Unit by unit. Literary magazines can be a part of that process of learning and building.

MD: Your poem 'In sickness and in health' speaks about mental health and female friendships. It reminded me of your essay in Skin Stories. Was this poem especially difficult to write? I imagine the essay was not easy to write.

UB: On the contrary, I loved writing this poem. It came fairly naturally. Writing a celebratory poem is always a little bit healing, a little bit humbling: I had the support of these incredible women when I needed it desperately. The essay was harder - it was the first essay on mental illness I ever wrote, it was terrifying. I'd already explored these themes in poetry,
​I was comfortable talking about these experiences within poems. Essays stand in harsher light, I think.

MD: Tips for poets who are looking to write better?

UB: Read widely and across genres. Revise a lot. Make use of free resources. Listen to poetry podcasts. Read a lot of interviews with poets. Take care of your health. Try not to compare yourself to others. Have multiple lives outside of writing.