(image from https://aditirao.net/)

Aditi Rao in Conversation with H Kalpana Rao

Aditi Rao is a writer, teacher, and potter. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Fingers Remember and A Kind of Freedom Song, and the winner of several awards and fellowships, including the Hedgebrook Residency, the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the TFA Creative Writing Award, the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, and the Muse India Young Writer Award, among others. Aditi has also been teaching creative and research writing for over a decade, as well as pursuing her passion for pottery in her small home studio. She holds a Master’s in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (New York) and a Bachelor's in Liberal Arts from Soka University of America. She currently lives between New Delhi and Himachal Pradesh.
 

Kalpana Rao (KR) Tell me a little about how you began to write. Were you influenced by any writers or works?
Aditi Rao (AR): Honestly, I don't remember a time when I was not writing. I've been writing at least since I was 6 or 7, just to make sense of my world. But I started taking writing more seriously when I was in college, during a time of severe illness, where my poems started to give me this incredible sense that I could take something really painful and difficult and create something powerful from it, something that enabled connection with others. I would read these poems in Open Mics and have someone else living with illness come up to me and tell me their story, and it would make the process feel much more meaningful. Even today, when I do a poetry reading anywhere, I most value the conversations that come after—the feeling that poetry has enabled something richer and deeper than the conversations strangers are allowed in polite society. That’s the only reason I publish. It’s not why I write—I write because I can't write if I am to make sense of my world—but sharing that writing with the public has to do with these bits of connection and conversation and possibility.

KR: How would you locate yourself as a woman poet? Is there anything specific that the term or label carries? Would you like to say that your poems have a feminist motif, or do you subscribe to feminism and if so, how would you like to position yourself?
AR: This question of whether you label someone a woman poet or a Dalit poet or a queer poet or what-have-you— it’s a really interesting one because the deeper question is as opposed to what? The bigger question is who gets to be just a “poet,” right? And obviously, the answer in the Indian context would be as opposed to the upper-caste-straight-male voice. In some places, there'll also be a language and a regional component to this. I have mixed feelings about this one because, on one hand, we do live in a world where these voices don't get centerstage quite as much as that straight, upper-caste male voice does, which means that we do need to sometimes assert identity as part of celebrating that voice, that story. This is why, even though I don’t actively think of myself as a “woman poet,” I also have absolutely no problem with that term, and some of my poems (are women-centric), and especially my second book of poetry is most definitely a woman’s book.

As to the question about feminism, I’m definitely a feminist, but feminism isn’t just a political posturing, it’s a lens through which to look at the world. Feminism is also about various identity intersections—for instance, I'm a woman who lives with chronic illness/ disability, and there are other women who are Dalit, or queer, or from minority communities, and those identities don’t always sit neatly side by side. So, I think that always complicates this question of “Are you a feminist poet” - of who gets to claim that term, define themselves by it?

For me, I think of it as being a feminist and being a poet, rather than being a feminist poet. Not every poem will pass the feminism test, if you will, and not every poem needs to. But perhaps the way in which I most think of feminism and my poetry is through the idea of the personal as political: I have found that I can only deeply access the political through the personal, I can only write about big abstract concepts through deeply felt personal experiences. And whether it's a poem written to this Kashmiri friend, whether it's poems written from the points of view of mythological women speaking back to the way they have been depicted, whether it is poems about surviving violence— all of those for me are feminist poems, they aren’t written with that as a conscious agenda. Feminism here is simply the lens through which I look at poetry and at the world in general.

KR: Several poets are writing in India who believe that their poems are good. In fact, it has become difficult to discern good and bad poems. Of course, good, and bad are relative terms but I still would like to know what distinguishes the two as some poets who are just writing randomly seem too abstract or too immature.

AR: I’ve been teaching writing workshops for more than a decade, and I find this really really interesting. Whenever I teach a workshop that crisscrosses genres, for example, I consistently find that people are often most reluctant to revise their poetry: With fiction or nonfiction, they're more open to the feedback that a story isn't working in a particular way, but with poetry, it's a lot of but this is how it came out naturally when I wrote it, and I don’t want to take away from the authenticity of that feeling by revising it. And so, there’s basically an assumption that there's somehow a compromise with the integrity or honesty of the piece if you revise it. And I think that there is a lot there that speaks to this larger idea of good poetry and bad poetry.

Like any other art form, there is a craft to poetry just as much as there is an art to it: In addition to meaning and language, poets are also thinking about image, music, white space on the page, and so much else. Whether you're doing rhyme, whether you're doing metre, whether you're doing it through alliteration, consonants, whatever you're doing — you’re thinking very intensely about how music can enhance the meaning of a poem. You're also thinking about it in a visual way, about how it's laid out on the page, where you break lines, where you break stanzas, How does white space interact with your poem? And this is all still just in the realm of free verse. If you go into writing in form, if you want to write a sonnet or so you're working with really tight forms as well.

I don’t devalue that first draft, that unfiltered emotion on the page that many poets begin with, but I also really emphasise craft from there forward. You need that original impulse that drove you to the page, that heartfelt, honest thing you want to say. But also, I can say something true and heartfelt, like “I’m really sad today,” and not expect anyone except folks close to me to care. But if I can create a world where I show you that sadness, where I invite you into it, where I create for you the possibility of looking at it and saying, oh gosh, I have felt that feeling, I've just never found language for it before or the opposite, the sense that wow, I’ve never had an experience like that, but I feel like I glimpse it in this poem — Both of those are great reasons for me to keep reading, right? Without that, the world doesn’t care, but with that, the poem is a poem. And that's where craft comes in.

I think the important thing is that in all of the writing and revising and craft conversations, I'm guided by the effort to become more honest rather than less honest. When somebody says, oh, but this is how it came out the first time, therefore, I don't think I should revise, I often ask them if everything they have ever said is their deepest, most honest truth. Of course, it isn’t—we have all had moments of saying something and then thinking later how we wish we had expressed it differently, more authentically or accurately. I think of revision as a process of embracing that and then working with the craft to get closer to the heart of what we want to say.

So for me, I don't think of good poetry and bad poetry as much as I think of well-crafted poetry and poetry that went out into the world perhaps too early or too raw. And craft is learned, with practice, and over time.

Folks often ask me can you really teach writing? And I say, well, no more than you can teach painting or music or any other art form. Which is to say, yes, there is something that will be inherent, that will be uniquely yours, that only you can bring to the table. That's necessary. But also, I can have all of the unique things that I want to bring to the table in my painting or my music, but if I don't know how to use a brush or understand notes, I can't do much with it. The emotion by itself is not enough. I need the craft and I feel the same way with the writing. I think because we all work with language on an everyday basis, we forget that there is an art as well as a craft to writing. And the more you practice and learn the craft, the more you can do with the poems you want to write.

I suppose all of this is a long-winded way of saying that for me “good poetry” is essentially just poetry that has done its homework.

KR: Aditi did your foray into teaching and pottery help you while writing poetry? How do these different identities shape your writing?
AR: I think teaching definitely helps with not just poetry, but all writing I do because there's no better way to become a good editor of your work than to teach other people to edit their work. That's something that I also tell my students. And I think the decades of teaching writing workshops and offering feedback on hundreds or thousands of pieces by now have made me a much better editor of my work. I am much more quickly able to see what's not working, and what I'd like to experiment with doing differently all those kinds. Of things. So, I think that's the biggest way in which I would say teaching has influenced my work.

With pottery, it's more ambiguous. I'm not sure if my pottery influences my poetry, and I'm also not super concerned about whether it influences it. I do it because it's another art for my love. But what I will say is that because clay is a very fickle medium—if you don't get to trimming it in time, you will lose the piece; if there's too much moisture left in it, it'll explode in the kiln; and so on— it teaches you something about working with and against constraint that has an interesting parallel in poetry. I’m not sure which influences me one way, whether the poetry influences the clay or the other way around, but I think clay teaches me to create with constraints. Sometimes the constraint is from the medium, sometimes it’s your own body, but this idea that you cannot just make whatever you want to make, that your art is a conversation with what is possible — I find that very interesting. It is in the process of working against that constraint that you will create something that you might not have been able to without that constraint existing, which is very much the idea behind writing formal poetry as well. So for instance in formal poetry, sometimes it is because you're looking for a word that has to rhyme with this, or a refrain that has to come here, or this word that has to come back at so many places— it's precisely because of that that you discover images and words and ideas you might not otherwise have found. In clay, you might end up with a particular design when you hit a wall with what is possible in the medium and have to improvise. I think they are similar processes.

Other than that, for me, clay is valuable precisely because it's the opposite of words. After all, after you've spent so much time in your head, you now have to be very literally grounded. I appreciate the way it takes my brain in a totally different direction. It brings alive a different part of my brain.

KR: Would you like to say that your poems have an Indian oeuvre, or would they be termed as more global? Does your traversing different geographical spaces influence your writing? How does the knowledge of different languages help in your writing?
AR: I feel like that's actually an interesting journey within personal life and therefore within poetic life. Because my first book, an early draft of it, was my MFA thesis. When I was in New York doing my Masters and in my 20s, I had the opportunity to travel a lot. I had a scholarship first to study in the US, then to go from there to Argentina for a semester, and then to Mexico for a summer. And all of that constant moving, being amongst newness, new places, new language, new people, new assumptions about everyday life was really, really enriching. And at the same time, I would say in my 20s, I wasn't really grounded in a particular place or a particular sense of history. I was exploring.

And I think the last 10 years, I think in my 30s have been about grounding and becoming more of this place than anywhere else. I still move between Delhi and Himachal. I spent my early childhood in Himachal, and I help run a campsite there with my partner now, So, I'm still back and forth between these two places, but I feel grounded in both of them, and I feel grounded in language, and I think you can see that even between the first book and the second book— the way the first is written with influences from everywhere, and the second book is much more grounded in one place and time.

That said, I still travel a lot within India: some for leisure, a lot of it for work, and so I would say I find myself in some kind of new space at least once every couple of months. And I think there's something about constant exposure to newness that really keeps your imagination and your mind alive. I find that in a new place, for example, I will notice words on street signs, or something funny written behind a truck, in a way that I don't notice in the course of my every day getting from home to work in the same routine. Being in a new space primes you to notice things, and I think noticing the small, peculiar details of the world is a really big part of writing.

As for language, even though I write primarily in English, I think in both English and Hindi, and for the longest time also in Spanish. I'm right now in the process of trying to reclaim my Spanish before I'm afraid of losing it. And I think one of the things that having access to multiple languages enables is access to different types of music in your ear. As a poet, the sounds of Spanish tend to be very soft. Hindi has a wide range of soft and hard sounds, English has a very different sound palette, and just having those different sounds in your ear enables you to play with music in a way that you can't do quite as much if you're monolingual. The other thing I think about having access to multiple languages is having access to this idea that certain thoughts cannot be thought in a certain language. I think there’s something very valuable about the knowledge that not every thought and feeling is available to you in every one of your languages—I think it’s wonderful, when you work with words, to be aware that very often words are just out of reach, that language is its own constraint. Because, when I don’t find that exact word, then I look for other ways to reach the idea: I sometimes might try to reach it through images, and sometimes I might try to reach it through music. But I think that is the real gift of multi-linguality: the knowledge that it's possible for there to be thoughts that are outside language and that I might have to be playful in how to reach them.

KR: Can you tell us about your forthcoming works
AR: Right now, I'm deep in the process of writing a nonfiction book, which is an oral history of eight women across India who were raised by single women. I am also very, very sporadically working on a third collection of poetry, which I imagine will take at least another couple of years because my focus is right now on the nonfiction book. It’s a book about lineage and where we come from, not just in a biological family kind of way, but also just that question of what are all the things that make a person up, and what are all the legacies that a person can leave behind. So that's sort of the broad thematic of that book, although it could go in any number of directions. But my main project right now is the nonfiction one, tentatively called the ‘Daughters Project’, which is the stories of these eight women, across all types of demographic groups across the country, and what it meant for them to all have been raised by single women.