Contributor Spotlight: Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Our poetry editor, Tanya Singh, loved Issue 2 contributor Sneha Subramanian Kanta's poem "Amritsar, A Coagulation of Tenses" and (electronically) sat down to ask her questions about her poetry, writing, and inspirations. You can read "Amritsar, A Coagulation of Tenses" in Issue 2.
Tanya: How did you come up with the title of the poem? An interesting title makes me fall in love with the piece before I’ve even read it. What are some of your favourite titles?
Sneha: You could say I have a certain patience with reference to titles. In “Amritsar, A Coagulation of Tenses” there is the timestamp of memory, sensory elements and tenses of recall as interludes in continuum. The title is a derivative that juxtaposes these factors and offers space for the narrative to shift. The change of tenses in the poem also allows way for memory to encompass pluralities as an era goes by upon the dawn of another.
A few favorite titles of poems, in no particular order would be :
“When roses cease to bloom, dear” — Emily Dickinson
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — Robert Frost
“Promenade in a City of Ghosts” — Muriel Leung
“Ode to Bombay” — Dilip Chitre
“The End and the Beginning” — Wisława Szymborska, trans. Joanna Trezeciak
“What Every Woman Should Carry” — Maura Dooley
“Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler” — Kaveh Akbar
“Compline” — Philip Metres
“Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” — Ocean Vuong
“Heart of Ruin” — Arun Kolatkar
“In the Light of One Lamp” — Sean Thomas Dougherty
“Babbage Explaining God And The Machine” — Neil Aitken
“Suburban Elegy” — Rebecca Dunham
“I Ask My Mother To Sing” — Li-Young Lee
“How I Became Sagacious” — Chen Chen
“I am dark, I am forest” — Jennifer Givhan
“I Dream Of Horses Eating Cops” — Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
“The Danger of Wisdom” — Jack Gilbert
“Corpse Flower”— Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
“Red Brocade” — Naomi Shihab Nye
“My Father Is the Sea, the Field, the Stone” — Ruth Awad
& & & -- multiple more.
Tanya: Do you have a favorite image, or a line in this poem that stands out above the others? In what ways do you think that line/image reflects the overall theme of your work?
Sneha: A line I closely reckon with is—
“We need barren tracts to lay soil
and till the land, claim ownership
to histories of a forgotten place.”
One of the many ways in which systemic oppression manifests is through acquiring land and claiming ownership—a multilayered nuance that differs in varied contexts. The Partition displaced several people and lines with barbed wires were drawn. This poem is for my grandmother, who traveled to erstwhile Bombay, India from Karachi, Pakistan during the Partition. I look at poetry as a form of resistance. The storytelling that takes place through contact with language redraws history in an alternate sense and offers newer ways to reimagine the world. I would say that the idea of erasure is central in this particular instance: “barren tracts” being symbolic for wiping out that which was—it is vital that there be a system to record those algorithms, lest they be lost. Audre Lorde said, “Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.” This includes several perspectives, including several ecosystems and the Anthropocene. The symbols, the remembering, they are all indispensable to the process.
Tanya: What was the idea, the intention behind this piece?
Sneha: I have had a fulfilling and intimate relationship with Amritsar since the first time I visited. The Jallianwalah Bagh, the village of Attari—the little patch of land where cellular network is unavailable. An internal cartography of the place has been etched in my mind. I also pay close attention to the little details in a place, in the lanes I frequent and the changing ether. A combination of these, and the history we carry on our backs as memory fragments by the passing of each day led to writing “Amritsar, A Coagulation of Tenses.”
Tanya: Every time I read my own work, I learn something new about myself. In what ways do you think reading your own work has allowed you to learn something new about yourself?
Sneha: The art of engaging with a poem is, to borrow from Mary Ruefle, “spiritual” and a journey you take on your own. I realize the fulfilling part of my work is that I do not go into a poem always knowing what it has set out to accomplish. You let the poem take you on that journey, than vice-versa.
The personal is, in many senses, political. I have explored the way in which a given landscape, for example, interacts with the body. This intersects with the actuality of transcendence and offers a foundation, an understory of history as it were.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee, and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. Her work is forthcoming in In/Words Magazine, The Ofi Press, Bombus Press and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal, an international literary journal. Her chapbook Synecdoche is forthcoming with The Poetry Annals (Oxford, England).
