Interview with Jonaki Ray, a poet with a mellifluous voice

Jonaki Ray, an erstwhile software engineer is now a poet and an editor based out of Delhi. She is the recipient of the 2019 Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, the 2018 Pushcart Prize nomination, and the 2018 Forward Prize for Best Single Prize nomination. We interviewed her over email to speak with her about Poetry, her style, a cadence in her poetry, and writing advice.

Pc: Tinu Mani

Why Poetry, the most revered yet the most misunderstood form?

While I have always been a reader and started with writing short fiction, poetry came to me more naturally. It’s not a conscious decision. Now that I think of it though, it could partly be due to my background as a trained scientist that has taught me to observe moments, respond to them, and then distil those emotions into a concise, yet complete piece of writing. Whatever the reason, I’ve come to realize it’s a gift, and am grateful for it!

Your poetry has a lot of cadence and focus on rhythm (eg: In the violence raga, you say:

She learnt to moderate her voice to the rhythm,
synchronizing with the beginning
of the taal Dha dhin dhin dhaa—dhaa …)

Why do you add it and what effect does it have on you?

That’s an interesting question! While I write poetry mostly in the free verse form, to me, poetry is always about rhythm. This might not be obvious, in terms of the lack of metric or traditional forms being used in my writing. But music and the resulting cadence are all around us, even in something as obvious as someone walking past us on a road, and I’m always trying to capture those.

This particular poem was a challenge because I was trying to bring out the restrictions that traditions, in the form of the classical music beat here, can impose. It takes a while to go beyond the rules, and realize the beauty underlying it all.

How did the lockdown affect your poems? (especially when many are sensory and the lockdown has bottled us up in a room!)

I’ve used the lockdown time and being restricted at home as a learning phase. I’ve been trying new styles—I am working on prose poems as well as short pieces of fiction (I’m back to it after ages!). I’ve also picked up experiences such as my years of learning classical vocal music—that poem in the previous point being one such piece—and am writing about those. I’m writing about and inspired by the inner lives of the people I’ve met and my own life events, that is, going into an inner space, as well as the events in the world, but written from an observer’s (at home) perspective.

It has been rather challenging—due to not being able to focus, at least initially, due to the worry about what’s going to happen, but it has also taught me many things. I also learnt a lot through the workshops that I conducted last year—they taught me new ways of looking at things—and every time I teach, I am the one who comes away feeling like a student!

Lastly, how have you mastered interspersing social issues so delicately in your verses?

First of all, thank you for the compliment!

To answer your question, I’m influenced by Emily Dickinson’s words, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”. I also feel that the best poems, or writing, are the ones that don’t preach, and instead show the inequities of our world. The world is already full of too much agitation and aggression, and increasingly, subtlety is a lost art. In fact, often “what is essential is invisible to the eye” (to paraphrase The Little Prince), and my writing tries to follow that path.


Your favourite poets and a writing process that you would advise a poet to follow?

Too many amongst the current writers, actually! Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, among the “classical” poets.

I don’t have any advice, except to follow your intuition, and that gets honed with practice. I think everyone has to figure out the writing process that suits them. There is no template as such because creativity cannot be bound to one.

 

Thank you so much, Jonaki! She is virtually found here.