Jeet Thayil: ‘Poetry will survive as a gift of prophecy and prayer’

Jeet Thayil. Pic Courtesy/Akanksha Sharma

Poets are dramatists, self-dramatists," Jeet Thayil tells us. "We draw into ourselves every possible bit of bombast. We make ourselves grander than we ought to be because we don't want to disappear. We don't want to die. We want to live forever. And so, we place ourselves inside a lineage that is very likely imaginary, and connects us not just to Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Eunice DeSouza but to Ovid, Emily Dickinson, and Rimbaud." After having declared in a volume of collected poems that his 2008 work, These Errors are Correct, will be "the last full-length collection of poems" he'd ever publish, Thayil returned to the artform - fortunately for followers of his work - with his new book, I'll Have it Here (HarperCollins India). Dedicated to three poets, he admits that he wrote the collection carrying "mostly gratitude" in his heart.

The book of poems is divided into three sections. As we read from the first to the last, the vision moves from the smaller details of the larger world to an eye that turns inward into the personal, the intimate. For instance, in the earlier section, in a poem titled Pet Sounds, Thayil glares at the champions of predominantly white music, who looked away from the artists singing from the peripheries: "You saw us only when you drove, /windows up, through certain neighbourhoods." In another poem titled Lateral Violence Among the Model Minorities, he digs further into the reprehensible behaviour of the "predative" kinds within the oppressed communities, the "good" immigrants, the comfortably ideal minorities. He calls them the "satisfied or competitively middle class/when ranged among the paralysed natives." This is the kind of poem one wouldn't find elsewhere because Thayil's politics does that. It takes a good hard look at the urban realities of the world.

The poems become more specific to the Indian context as we read further. Gandhi returns as a house gecko in one. Meanwhile, in a ghazal titled February 2020, Thayil writes about the current political climate of the country, the first shiver of which was felt with the decision of the citizenship amendment law. In another, titled December 2020, he comments on the macabre state of the nation during the pandemic.

The year 2020, undoubtedly, stood as the most terrifying year. Plenty of poems in the book carry the theme of impermanence and a sense of loss, so we asked Thayil if they were a result of the fear we've felt since then. "I didn't think of it that way, but now that you mention it... These poems were begun during the pandemic, and I'm sure some kind of existential terror must have seeped through," he shares. "Impermanence and loss, imminent or otherwise, is a constant theme of art. There's no way to be alive without being aware of mortality and the passing of time. I think it's a running thread through the moment we're living in, that sense of apocalypse or post-apocalypse. Future dread. Survivor's guilt. Rage against the dying of the light."

Thayil is a risk-taker. Not only does he write against the grain, he is also, daringly, one of the rare contemporary poets who continues to work with traditional poetic forms (the ghazal, sonnet, sestina), modernising them along the way. We wondered then, to a poet whose eyes and ears are so well trained, what comes first - the poem or the form? Thayil believes that it is best to stay away from delving too deeply into the process. "There is a chance, the chemistry, the mystery of the poem will disappear." He adds, "Let me just say the poem decides the form, not me." Additionally, his poems are sonically rich, and it is difficult to ignore the collaborative play between Thayil the musician and Thayil the poet. He tells us, "[The two] steal from each other all the time. No apologies. No explanations. Just wanton robbery. But nobody's complaining. Yet."

In his previous collection, These Errors…, the poet meditated on the power of poetry to make him return to "sanity". This one, as his last, has the power to salve our bruises, too. It stands as an antithesis to that infamous "brain-rot", the Oxford word of the year, said to have occurred as a consequence of excessive consumption of presumably "trivial or unchallenging" content. Thayil's work requires time, a few loud readings even. It is anything but unchallenging, and certainly a far cry from trivial. It speaks truthfully of the times we live in. He believes, "Even if ‘poetry makes nothing happen' it survives, and always will survive, as a gift of prophecy and prayer. It's exactly when the climate is fraught that we need the consolations of poetry."

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Thayil's current favourites

. Adil Jussawalla's Body of Evidence
. Sumana Roy's Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries
. Upamanyu Chatterjee's Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life
. Ranjit Hoskote's To Break and to Branch: Six Essays on Gieve Patel
. Ranbir Sidhu's Night in Delhi
. Shahnaz Habib's Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel