Sujata Bhatt interview

The way a poem begins for me always varies. Sometimes it can be an image, something I dream of or something I witness. It can also begin with a line: frequently I have the first line of a poem and I don't know where it will lead to but usually if I write it down and concentrate on it, I do get more lines that I can work with. Sometimes a poem can also be inspired by a piece of music for me or an experience - travelling for example has sometimes led to unexpected poems. So there's no one thing - almost anything can inspire a poem, even reading the newspaper, I might read about something to which I respond to with a poem.

Yes, I do - I do read my poems aloud when I am working on them, and in fact I need to do that in order to know how the poem is working or developing. Once I have a first draft, I have to listen to myself reading it to see how it sounds and to see whether I stumble over anything, and then I also like to read it to a friend, so they can also hear the sounds and they might be able to hear something that I don't catch. And I think that for me the sound and the meaning and the tone of the poem and also the subject, all that comes together organically. If the poem is working and if I'm at that level of concentration which results in the writing of a poem, everything just comes out more or less the way I want it, if it's really working, and I do get unexpected rhythms and sounds that I hadn't thought about before, and sometimes of course I have to polish it up, but the raw material is there for me already.

My work reflects my life so what I have experienced and seen does enter into my poems, and, for example, if I had lived all my life in India and had never really gone abroad, then my poems would be very different. I would not have written about Germany, I wouldn't have written about Italy or England or the United States, nor would I have written about experience which occurred in those places, sometimes in the natural landscapes of those countries. I feel that I'm an outsider wherever I am, and I think that being an outsider gives me a different perspective on life and on any culture including my own. And, so yes - my travels and the fact that I've lived in so many different places have really determined and influenced my writing.