Kanwar Dinesh Singh talks about his book, Epistles: Poems of Love and Longing
“I’ve been penning love poems since the beginning of my literary career. In my recently published book Epistles: Poems of Love and Longing, I constructed a sequence of interconnected poems to preserve the personal experience of past love, or my observations about love, and the mnemonic experience of love. These sequenced poems reflect the emotional ups and downs of love’s union and separation. In these poems, there is a manifestation of two lovers’ overwhelming longing to meet one another as well as discomfort coming from their mutual distance. Looking beyond the physical level, it is clear that love is a supernatural experience that elevates the person in love to spiritual heights.” ―Kanwar Dinesh Singh
Shiv Sethi in conversation with poet Kanwar Dinesh Singh
Kanwar Dinesh Singh is a prominent voice in contemporary Indian English poetry. He lives in Shimla and works as an English professor at a college. He has authored twelve volumes of poetry in addition to fifteen books of literary criticism, microfiction, haiku, and translation. The Frosted Glass: Poems and Ghazals, Epistles: Poems of Love and Longing, and Thoroughfare: A Book of Ghazals are his most recent poetry books. Among other themes, love has emerged as a constant motif in his poems.
Here are some extracts from our interview with Professor Kanwar Dinesh Singh about his recently published poetry book, Epistles: Poems of Love and Longing, which focuses on the leitmotif of love and has garnered favourable critical acclaim.
SS: Your book Epistles: Poems of Love and Longing has received much acclaim from literary critics. How did this book come into existence? Tell us about its content.
KDS: I’ve been penning love poems since the beginning of my literary career. In my recently published book Epistles: Poems of Love and Longing, I constructed a sequence of interconnected poems to preserve the personal experience of past love, or my observations about love, and the mnemonic experience of love. These sequenced poems reflect the emotional ups and downs of love’s union and separation. In these poems, there is a manifestation of two lovers’ overwhelming longing to meet one another as well as discomfort coming from their mutual distance. Looking beyond the physical level, it is clear that love is a supernatural experience that elevates the person in love to spiritual heights.
SS: Why did you decide on the epistle form to write these poems?
KDS: In reality, the poems in this collection describe the lover’s soliloquies when he is not with his beloved. I found epistolary form to be the most appropriate medium for portraying moments of separation. These letter poems have passion, emotional substance, and depth or intensity of feeling, yet they also lack metre and internal structure. Overall, this form accurately portrays my emotions.
SS: You started writing poetry at a very young age. Has love been a major theme since your early poems?
KDS: Yes, I started writing poems in my school days. At that time, I was a student in Class IX at DAV High School of Shimla when my first poem “My Mother” was published in the prominent newspaper Indian Express. This poem was written about motherly love. Along with this, a key theme in many early poems was love for nature. And the expression of the spontaneous and innocent yearning of first love may also be noticed in poems written during college days.
I was a Bachelor of Science student at college, and I was in the final year of my degree programme when my first collection of poems, Reveries Incessant, was published. The theme of adolescent love predominated in many of the poems in this book, combined with spiritual and philosophical reflections on various aspects of life and existence.
There was undoubtedly a spontaneous vibration, an invincible energy, and an uncontrollable wild excitement in that love. This autonomous inner sensation has been expressed rather naturally in my writings.
SS: It is true that many poets start writing poems out of teenage love. How has the theme of love evolved or developed in your early poems?
KDS: In my early love poems, one can observe the teenage mind’s open, forthright, and guileless feelings, dreamlike flights, natural wishes, and rational ambitions. There is straightforward and explicit phraseology in these poems with romantic flair or style, ideal for a direct approach to the object of love. These poems include the use of elements such as rhyme, rhythm, simile, and metaphor.
These poems feature a passionate conversation between two adolescent lovers as well as the exquisite fragrance of life’s springtime. The sensation of love appears to begin with the playful sigh of a young mind, but with consistency and depth of feeling, it reaches the spiritual level, and this is the strength of my early love poetry. As a result, the progression of the love theme is analogous to the flow of water in a river that, after slowly and gently emerging from a glacier or estuary, seeks to calm down by going or merging into a great ocean.
SS: Does it mean that the spiritual side of love is more dominant in your poems? Throw some light on this subject.
KDS: My love poems contain physical or sexual imagery, yet they appear erotic on the surface, with an undertone of two lovers’ yearning for togetherness. These visuals appear to depict materiality, yet with semantic extensions, they convey a sense of spirituality. My early poetry collections Implosions and Asides have short but nuanced poems with strong sexual images that have double significance; the synchronisation of the physical and spiritual may be noticed in them.
SS: Love poetry has always held a special place in literary history. How do you see your love poetry fitting into this tradition?
KDS: Without a doubt, love poetry has a long history and a rich tradition. Love poets have described love in their own unique way throughout history, and their statements are distinctive in their own right. I have communicated my feelings of love in a straightforward manner without adding any layer of embellishment to it. I have conveyed in words what I have felt in my heart. Now only the readers will be able to tell how effective my poems are. But I would like to say one thing: I have definitely gained self-satisfaction from these creations of mine. I myself experience inner joy by reading them again and again.
SS: How have reviewers reacted to your love poems? Please tell us what they think.
KDS: Critics have given me excellent feedback on my love poetry. Some see these poems as the verbalization of natural inner energy, while others see them as divine inspiration for great emotion. The feedback from the reviewers has been really encouraging.
Manohar Bandopadhyay, poetry editor of Sun, said of my early poems, “Afflatus of passion is the overriding sweep of his numbers.” Professor Graham Chapman of Lancaster University in England, speaking about my poetry, observed, “Many loves claim him, not just of people, but also of the natural world around, and so the range of poems is equally wide.”
SS: How do you see love in relation to such dichotomies as body and soul and mind and heart?
KDS: I believe that love is an integrated experience of body, mind, heart, and soul that provides two lovers with a sense of oneness. All conflicts between body and mind, heart and spirit, vanish when love is sincere. Lovers only perceive love. Pure love transcends all forms of duality.
SS: A broad question: How do you evaluate modern love poetry in relation to classic love poetry?
KDS: Classical and contemporary love poetry differ significantly in that classic love poetry is more romanticised and idealistic in its portrayal of feelings, while current love poetry is more realistic in its depiction of realities and realistic opinions. Second, traditional love poetry employs prosodics and metre, but contemporary poetry employs free verse. Third, each epoch has its own unique set of social constraints, which is evidenced by literary expression. The nature of experience and expression of love in today’s environment has changed as a result of sexual freedom and socio-cultural transformation.
I can’t deny that there are romantic aspects or an excess of emotions in some of my poetry as well. Personal experience and sensibility, I believe, are also important considerations. Furthermore, time, event, circumstance, situation, and location all have an impact on a writer.
SS: Please share any of your short love poems with us.
KDS: Here’s a short poem captioned “When You’re Not With Me” from this collection: “A world denied / its magnetic north, / every compass / useless without you. / The sun has lost its shine / and the moon its sheen. / Flowers withdraw their fragrance. / Birds wage a strike / against song. No cicada makes / an evening prayer. Stars haunt / and prick. The air is a monologue, / not a dialogue. Rivers and brooks / no longer speak to me / in this country without you.”
SS: Are you still in the mood to create more love poetry with full intensity? Or do you believe that it is hard to write love poems unless you’re inspired?
KDS: Love’s form and sensation change with time, situation, circumstances, and the person’s age. But the key point is that if there is a feeling of love in a person’s heart, it flows consistently, unreservedly, and selflessly. Of course, I want to continue composing poetry with a feeling of love, and I am doing so. Love is not limited to a man-woman connection; it evolves through time into a universal and auspicious feeling.¡
