‘No poem or story can exist without its spine of the truths of the world’: Poet Rochelle Potkar

Rochelle Potkar prefers to write poetry as soon as she wakes up because she’s then “closest to the subconscious in language and fragments of a dialect of dreams”. Her new collection of poems written over the past five years, Coins in Rivers, crackles with raw energy and oozes with stark images, some searing, some smouldering and some , sensuous. In what is generally a mundane world around us, she finds the notion that “strange people in strange cities is a very normal thing.”

Potkar has just completed writing two novels, The Terracotta Goddesses, and The D’Costa Family, and some screenplays. But poetry, with whom she was “in a slippery relationship not so long ago”, has never really left her. Jayanth Kodkani spoke to Potkar about he new book and her work. Excerpts from the conversation:

Your poems are “coins of wisdom” in rivers of reflection. The titles of sections are “First Mint”, “Private Wallet”, “Casino Tokens”, “Antique Currency” and so on – all to do with cash or currency. What’s with the motif of money?
Poems disturb and displace. I thought of them as being inglorious when I was initially compiling the collection and called it: “The Inglorious Coins of the Counting House”. All sections followed that imagery. Under this title, the manuscript was longlisted at the Eyewear Publishing, Beverly Prize Poetry Book Award UK 2019, and shortlisted at the 2nd Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize 2019, New York. Later my wise editor Sonali Jindal (of Hachette India) suggested a shorter yet vivid title Coins in Rivers – one of my section heads and we went for it. Coins are two-faced, ending up as narratives of either the hunter or the hunted or sometimes in-between. And rivers spark civilisations. I think of coins of epiphanies traded daily but also found at the bottom of our personal and collective unconscious eventually. Poets always have several such coins in their pockets for every occasion.

Many of your poems tell stories. How do you decide which stories are told in prose and which ones in poetry?
The idea decides its robes, that too in a flash of time as it comes to you. I just followed that instinctively and organically. Unlike stories and screenplays, you can’t outline a poem or write it piecemeal in several sittings. It’s written in one go – one exhalation. Its revisitation is in its editing for line breaks, punctuation, stanza-shuffling, or chiselling off extra words for rhythm. I also have included haibun (prose poetry) in the book. For instance, “Pav”, “Unreliable Narration”, or “Chaise Lounge”. Many of my poems tend to be longer because over the years I have a lot more to say and hence have veered toward novels and screenplays. I guess we just pick up more dust along the long walk even as we detach.

Some of your poems like “Applicasun to Eschool Principl” and “Bedding Day” speak in Inglish, drawing smiles while prompting reflections on day-to-day situations. They bring to mind some of Nissim Ezekiel’s works.
I would like to call these my badmaash poems. I have been amused by Ezekiel’s works as they relax away from propah English. While it’s fun to informalise a language in its after-hours after it has tamed us into its grammar and idioms, I made sure to only mock the haphazard dialect, not the protagonists who spoke it, unless it was an outright misogynist. Then I took some liberties like in “Bedding Day”, which was a difficult poem to write because I had to make deliberate mistakes in it.

There are some other poems that use jargon and standard terminology in such a skilful way, that these words turn into metaphors. Tell us about this magic.
Poetry captures a vast amount of abstract rhythmic thought in a span of a page. It is an independent language of its own, no matter which language it is written in. That’s why poets can translate poets. Telegrams from the Universe.

One gains a certain affinity with poetic English when you live long enough with it. It builds a reservoir of vocabulary and shapes linguistic diction. I only hoped I wasn’t getting too refined so as to not also turn opaque and garbled and lose a sense of reality with simple language.

That’s when screenplay-writing showed me how language can be simple yet visual, unlike haibun where it is lyrical and visual. Novels, I glean, demand an intermediate level of linguistic pitch between these two forms. Language is like fabric – sheer or embroidered and it all depends on the forms or body you are you are covering or revealing in different writing forms.

You portray love and conflict, anger and meditation with intensity and passion. How are these feelings central to the world we live in?
The world we live in seeps into me/us to a point of disequilibrium and hence the writing restores that equilibrium. Even genres like fantabulism and fantasy are rooted in a heightened reality. No poem or story can exist without its spine of the truths of the world we live in even if extrapolated into the future or distorted back into the past. I prefer to curate the contemporary zeitgeist, though I love mythology and history as much as futuristic projections.

How do you see poetry in the quotidian? And how does it carry universal appeal?
There is only a little magic in life. Most of existence is mundane. Art thus becomes that kaleidoscopic lens finder as we reimagine worlds, making us hover over small details and pixel wonders in deep contemplation and meditation. That gives us joy – to both creators and its audience.

Poetry is a highly revered form internationally, even if in India it constantly faces the question of ROI. Art has always stood at the crossroads, confession boxes, and witness boxes of a capitalistic world’s courtrooms. And yet poetry will give you what money can’t even buy: a sense and semblance of a world in constant flux. In the pandemic, surrounded by all uncertainties, the world turned to the solace of poetry. Only the abstract made sense then.

What are the lines of famous poets that haunt you often?
In my workshops, be it at the Himalayan Writing Retreat or at Iowa’s International Writing (IWP) summer programmes, I curate poems that have stood the test of my time and attention, that I share with the participants to provoke thought in them.

Take, for instance, this haiku by Geethanjali Rajan. It’s a classic and speaks of so much in the two images it juxtaposes colour and class, toil and labour. If you hover over a haiku its interpretation happens in two pages at least.

the colour of earth
on a farmer’s bare back –
multigrain bread

Or take this haiku by Sushma A Singh that speaks of ageing, loss, love, longing, and the slow release of mortality all through a daughter’s experience of hugging her mother.

summer visit
mother fits into
a smaller hug

Or take these lines from a haibun by Patricia Prime:

Nothing could have been more splendid than to see the coloured lights after the blackouts of war.

Or these vivid iconic lines from “Traffic Lights” by Arun Kolatkar.

but unobserved by traffic lights
that seem to have eyes only for each other
and who like ill-starred lovers
fated never to meet
but condemned to live forever and ever
in each other's sight
continue to send signals to each other
throughout the night
and burn with the cold passion of rubies
separated by an empty street.

Or Manohar Shetty’s lines from his poem “Closure”:

Closure will come when you
Recognize it’s only
A comforting word.

It will fall into place
When you accept its absence
Stays with you till the end.

Your thoughts on Paul Valery’s oft-quoted view that “A poem is never finished. It is abandoned.”
I rather feel the opposite – that the poem or story abandons the writer, so the reader can finish the rest of it in their minds. Like the Big Bang, the story or poem expands in the universe of the reader’s mind to form new interpretations based on their lived and imagined realities. That is its true end, from the personal unconscious to the collective unconscious and then like a water cycle back into the circularity of another similar but not the same story and poem.

Jayanth Kodkani is a Bengaluru-based writer.