What are the elements of writing gripping, impactful, interactive poetry?
Different people have their own way of dealing with this situation. You can say that you write for yourself but that's not really true. We all presuppose an ideal listener or reader when we write. Some people engage in performance poetry, some people feel the need to actually read simplified poetry. I've always been inspired by these lines from an American poet and critic who said, “It's not that people have stopped reading modern poetry because it's difficult; it's because that we've stopped reading modern poetry that we find it difficult.
When I was 13 and in my grandfather's library in Madras, I read a book by someone called T.S. Eliot; I had no idea who T.S. Eliot was, I knew nothing. But as I read it, I knew I was in the presence of poetry. So I realized even when you cannot quite realize what's happening, there is in each one of us the ability to recognize when they are in the presence of something real and significant.
My own way, as far as writing poetry is concerned, is very simple. When you present your poetry to a group of people, you only try to be intensely present. Rather than try to perform it or dramatize it, trust the poem to do its work. At some point, the poet had said that this is a poem and it's done; this could be after eons of self-doubt and after crafting it endlessly but the poet does admit at some point that the poem's completed. The poet needs to go back to that point of faith and the poem and be intensely present when you present it to their audience. I find that people respond to presence. If it's possible to respond to life without understanding it, it's also possible to respond to art without understanding it.

Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?
I think earlier I saw it more as self expression, wanting to express the rages and fears and loves of my life. It was also a way of making sense of this world. At the earlier stage of writing poetry, I wanted to write poetry that could embrace all kinds of contradictions. I wanted to be able to talk about my dislike of dead white men, (laughs), but also my love of Keats. I wanted to be able to talk about my visceral dislike of hierarchy but at the same time I wanted to be able to talk about the rich tradition to which I'm heir.
My first book 'Cleaning Bookshelves' was actually about rewriting the literary canon, allowing conversations, in a small way, to be set up between writers I think ought to have met. It was for me a very varied, exuberant first book. Then came the second book, 'Where I live', which was much more preoccupied with context; it spoke about what it meant to live in a body, what it meant to live in a third world city, what it meant to be a woman. It was a way of exploring the gaps between where I lived and where I belonged. I didn't know where I belonged but I knew where I didn't belong.
Now, I don't know where I live anymore because I'm between places. I spend a lot of time in an ashram in South India and I go to the city and I live in Bombay as well. My sense of where I live is a little more shadowy than it was earlier. I knew earlier where I lived and it was very fraught. Now I'm not so sure where I live but I have a deeper sense of belonging.

Arundhathi Subramaniam. Photo: Prabir Das

That is a good segue to my next question. Some of your poems have a theme of belonging. In your poem 'Heirloom', there is a sense of belonging and yet there is a feeling of alienation. Did that come naturally in your writing or was it a conscious decision?
There was a yearning to be part of this whole lineage of 'nayikaas' who seem to know how to inhabit their bodies and their minds. I remember being terribly drawn to this but knowing that this is not me and that I don't belong here. Now that I see it in the light of what you've just said, it was probably part of a certain existential yearning. The feeling always that one is never where one is meant to be, one is never who one is meant to be and that life is elsewhere. That can be a source of pain. So you spend your life in various sense of yearning or longing, unconsciously, maybe, but it was there. And then it became very conscious at one point. Now I realise that you couldn't be anyone else and I couldn't be anyone else and we are wonderfully lucky to be in a situation where we are sharing each other's presence, where we can be with each other without trying to get anything from the other. I think there's a greater sense of being me now. In my new poems, there's less of tension between where I live and belong instead there's a sense of fragile joy.
Does art need to have a meaning or should it have a more self-serving purpose?
The reason I hang around words is because words are capable of coming around patterns that make me want to look at them again and be with them again. When I was first exposed to nursery rhymes, I didn't understand most of language but I got a fragmentary glimpse of meaning and that was enough. The rest of me was excited about the fact that language could dance; it has a texture, taste and sound. Personally, I am not anti-meaning nor am I anti-beauty. What's important is to try to arrive at a moment when truth and beauty can co-exist.
There are many effective ways in which we can communicate messages; there are particular kinds of filmmaking, particular kinds of propaganda, advertising, public messages broadcast. But if you as an artist are discontented between who you are and what you want to be, then you are part of an intense process of becoming yourself. If you are truly able to transfer that on page, people will response and they do. I think poetry is capable of creating all kinds of shifts along your inner fault lines which you may not be aware of when you read it. So you may go away saying, 'read a poem, didn't understand it and moved on.' But actually you've been deeply touched. I think we are too hung up today on content, whether it's in faith or whether it's in art. We need to trust our forms to communicate on many levels, not just on one level.

How did your interest in spirituality develop over the years?
I was always an unconscious seeker as most of us are. But I read philosophy and poetry and I thought that was enough. Art, dance, music, theatre, love, travel, books and cats (laughs), I thought that was going to be my recipe for happiness. One day I had an experience that took me off-guard. It was a kind of near-death experience for me but I was not physically sick or depressed. It was a very alive experience but it made me realise that there was something much more real than language happening. And I may not like it or be comfortable with it but if I don't try to make my peace with it, it will come in a big way at one point and I'll be totally unprepared. I started reading mystics now. And I realized that mystics seemed to know some things about death and I wanted to know more. But reading mystics was still not enough and I was searching in a blundering way for something. Eventually, I did meet Sadhguru [Arundhathi's spiritual guru]. I used to think of gurus as people who wanted to sell water by the river and I would think how can one do that? But some of us desperate seekers end up searching madly but going off in a separate direction. All the guru does is direct you to the river, he is not trying to sell you water. The journey is your own. It's not a pundit or a priest but someone who's guiding you to your own birthright.

Shouldn't doubt be a part of faith or a belief system? If that weren't there, you'd be very robotic in the way you think.
I don't think there can be a faith without doubt, just as I think there cannot be a faith without reason. By reason, I don't mean a kind of barren rationality but I mean the kind of reason that's constantly guarding you against hallucination and self-deception. You just slowly find yourself second by second, blundering and groping along the way. I think it's important to be anchored in all these things, doubt as well as reason. But if you want to inhabit yourself more deeply, there comes a time when you have to take just a little leap, then it helps you to have a spiritual guide.

In your poem 'To The Welsh Critic Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian', you explained beautifully how some Western critics are contradictory in their expectations of sub-continental writings. Could you dwell a bit more on that?
It's a double-bind (laughs). There's another kind of double-bind women experience. A British poet had once told me that when she wrote a poem about menstruation, a critic reportedly said, 'Not another poem on menstruation. But when you write a poem on war, you'll be wrapped on the knuckles for writing something that's not in your experience. There are many ways of dealing with annoyances of this kind. One way is to just assertively say, 'I reject you as gatekeeper of my culture. I will be Indian the way I choose to be Indian.' I have a sense of cultural identity that I am conscious about but I'm not inclined to define it for anyone. What any critic needs to be interested, and I say it as a critic myself, is to try to listen deeply, receive as deeply as possible a work of art and then you make observations based on that. You are not trying to prescribe categories of belonging, that's not your role. There's a saying that sometimes you don't feel the need to bite but you have to hiss. And this was my hiss! (laughs).