APRILIA ZANK TALKING WITH
POET OF THE MONTH
AMPAT
VARGHESE KOSHY
JUNE 2021
APRILIA ZANK: According to the American poet Robert Frost,
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found
words.” Can, in your opinion, all thoughts be 'translated' into words?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I was
a very logos centred or word-oriented person till my son came along who has autism.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God kind of artist, very
literature based. Reading and writing was the big thing. But after looking at
how he related to the world which is more in terms of sight, hearing, touch,
taste and smell rather than the three r’s and imagining his inscape and seeing
his kind of operative mode and creativity and artistry text has become for me
only a part of a larger picture to be honest and, though still my favourite
part of it, due to my background in the Word, no longer any more important than
other features like sound. To put it in a nutshell thought are to me predated
by experiences that are probably more holistically sensory and expressing them
through multimedia and hypermedia have become increasingly important for me and
the present world. The growth of the internet too has ensured this as we now
think more in terms of sound bytes, videos, memes, gifs, emojis, etc;, with
language being only a part of the whole. So, to sum up, Frost, no, things have
changed.
APRILIA ZANK: The English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
once wrote: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Can you explain how poetry
unveils the hidden beauty of the world?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: This
goes back to Coleridge wanting to make the strange familiar and Wordsworth
wanting to make the familiar strange, in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and
vice versa, with both wanting to do both to signal the shift to Romanticism,
but Shelley is also talking of something more, about not only beauty but truth,
according to me, that for most men these things are hidden and poets help us
to see them clearly, for the first time
or as if for the first time. When we describe the beauty of a woman we love we
reveal her beauty that is inner and hidden to the reader for example when we
are poets in our poems. Same with truth that brings about a development in the
awareness of people to increase their social conscience about causes by putting
before them truths they may not have been aware of before in an aesthetically
fitting way. Shelley’s own poems on Manchester and revolutionary ones and
anarchy, and his Ode to the Skylark and his Ozymandias are examples that reveal
to us both hidden beauties and truths and make the familiar strange and the
strange unfamiliar.
APRILIA ZANK: The American poet of English origin W. H. Auden
was convinced that, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is
passionately in love with language.” Do you think that poetic language should
always be refined and cultivated, or may it also be rough and raw if necessary?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: A poet is in love with language and for him
every word and nuance of it matters. Every poet knows instinctively and
intuitively that no word is bad in itself but it is thinking that makes it so,
to misquote Shakespeare. A poet can use refined, civilized and cultured
language where it fits and rough and raw or ready language where that fits. In
Sanskrit aesthetics there is a word that can be translated as appropriateness
which is auchithya, or as we say in Malayalam “uchitham” and this matters a lot
to me, this concept. Sometimes we get somewhere in art by breaking rules too
and it is the same in language as we are on a creative quest but if lucky or
sensitive our handling of language will be accepted and appropriate either in
the present or in the future and this is where we strike the balance.
APRILIA ZANK: Please consider the following statement of the
English scholar and poet A. E. Housman: “Even when poetry has a meaning, as it
usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will
sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.” Do you write or prefer explicit poetry
with an obvious meaning or message, or rather more cryptic, challenging poetry?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I am one of the widest poets I have known
with a breadth that is all encompassing so I write both explicit poetry and
cryptic challenging poetry. It comes down to what comes out as a first draft
often for me but there is one matter in which I completely agree with A E
Housman and that is that we have to leave half the work to the reader in terms
of form, meaning, content and everything else or the poem fails as we need to
draw in the reader as a co-creator. I would thus expand on what he says to
include other parameters and not just meaning.
APRILIA ZANK: “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”, is
a famous quote by the German romanticist and philosopher Novalis. To what
extent can poetry have a therapeutic effect?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: Poetry is a two-edged sword. It definitely
has therapeutic effects on those who write it and especially on women and
children and it has therapeutic effects on those who read it too but it can
also be used to cause wounds on those who sometimes deserve it and this part of
it interests me too. Poetry is an untamed beast and can sometimes heal but also
cause wounds even on those it should not as once written and released a half of
its reception is in its perception. Here poets have to take care to be more on
the side of the Force and not the Dark Side, to put it in Stars Wars terms. (laughs)
Poetry should be a light saber, in other words, and in the hands of Jedis who
have not sold out in today’s world, to expand on this pop culture reference.
APRILIA ZANK: According to Salvatore Quasimodo, an Italian poet
and literary critic, “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet
believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” Is,
in your opinion, the poet primarily a personal voice, or rather the echo of his
fellow beings?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: Both, I speak myself in poetry and not just
for myself, it is the flesh become word to invert scripture and unless it finds
an echo in my readers who say you speak me or for me it fails. Poetry has to be
an extension of oneself where the other melts into one too or it cannot be
poetry that will outlast time or find much spread in geographical terms to
other languages.
APRILIA ZANK: The American literary critic M. H. Abrams
asserted that, “If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you
have missed the body of the poem.” Do you also think readers need to be educated
as to how to go through a poem? If 'yes', in which way?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: For a
deeper understanding of a poem’s aesthetics readers have to be educated about
figures of speech, titling, musical devices, and imagery as well as forms,
genres, structures and analysis or comparison or contrast etc., as poems are
not just about themes or layers of meanings but “body” as MH Abrams puts it so
beautifully and to make love to that body one needs to get hold of it properly
first.
APRILIA ZANK: Let us now consider the words of the American
songwriter and poet Jim Morisson: “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's
to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” Can you
please tell us how poetry can be/become educational?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: It is strange
that you should club the word educational with Jim Morrison as his point, I
think, was to set people from the limits of education as it was practiced in
his time, through the art of music, lyrics, poetry and performance. Morrison
knew what Gardner speaks of, that there are many intelligences and not just
literary or linguistic ones or mathematical ones, left overs of Greek
philosophical subjects in schooling that were reduced to these three as
primary, and his aim is to make poetry also reflect that times have changed and
should take in technology and the past not limited just to Graeco Roman or
Judaeo Christian frameworks but including others ones too like American Indian
ones. He does this in his own lyrics to try to expand the frame.
APRILIA ZANK: The British-American poet T. S. Eliot claimed
that, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Do you
sometimes/often experience 'love at first sight' for poems that you have not
understood immediately/completely?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: Oh,
yes! Poems have a lot of depth and to get the meanings one has to read them
several times, but to love them one has to read them only once. They
communicate to the neural synapses before anything else being a very sensory medium.
I remember this reaction on reading Rilke and Rimbaud for instance and more
recently RS Thomas, WS Merwin, and some others. As I get older some names
escape me but the poems don’t.
APRILIA ZANK: Paul Valéry, a French poet, essayist, and
philosopher, said: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Do you also
think that the final 'embodiment' of a poem happens in the mind of the reader?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I agree fully with Paul Valéry as in my own
experience being a poet whenever I return to a poem after weeks or months or
sometimes years I see I could have written it better and make changes to it.
There seems to be no final satisfactory version, even if sometimes the change
is just a word. However, as they reader does not know of this and the care
poets take over their works, at least ones like me influenced by fastidious
poets like Valéry feel some of my poems are perfect and need no change. I
rarely feel that way about any of my poems. Maybe one can a about a couplet or
a four liner or five liner, at most.
APRILIA ZANK: The famous British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie
believes that, “A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to
take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” Should,
in your opinion, poetry have a strong social and/or militant component?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I need to point back to my earlier answer
of calling poetry a light saber here. In today’s world no poet can be
apolitical or not take stances or fight for things he believes in, or call out
bogus stuff and keep to wanting to be secure and safe. This is my unabashed
position. I fully agree with him. I am, for instance, against fascism, against
minorities being persecuted, for autism, against caste discrimination, for
preserving what is good about Christ’s influence in the world etc. And all
these things if opposed I have to point out that I cannot just stand and watch
but have to take sides.
APRILIA ZANK: The poetic credo of the highly influential
American poet Maya Angelou was the following: “The poetry you read has been
written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay,
straight.” Do you also think that your poetry addresses a large and varied
audience?
AMPAT VARGHESE KOSHY: I have written thousands of poems and my
poetry definitely addresses a large and varied audience, including all who know
English, all who are Indians or Asians, all who are human beings and all who
are against the idea that they are human beings to as there are post human and anti-human
strands too in my poetry so I really don’t know anyone my poetry leaves out. It
may address people in different ways but all may find themselves and their consciences
questioned in it as well as find me appreciative of their arts, cultures, and
other such valuable things. I feel this is how we can approximate to
universality in our times and in all my poetry books like FIGS, or Allusions to
Simplicity or Birds of Different Feathers or Wine-Kissed Poems which is a
collaboration with Jagari Mukherjee or Vodka by the Volga which is another
collaboration with Santosh Bakaya I have tried to go beyond parochialism to
being universal and mostly succeeded, or so I feel.
AMPAT
VARGHESE KOSHY: Dr. Koshy
A.V. is presently working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department
of Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. He has many books, degrees, diplomas,
certificates, prizes, and awards to his credit and also, besides teaching, is
an editor, anthology maker, poet, critic and writer of fiction. He runs an
autism NPO with his wife, Anna Gabriel. Two of his co-authored books published
in 2020 were Amazon best-sellers in India and USA, namely, Wine-kissed Poems
with Jagari Mukherjee and Vodka by the Volga with Santosh Bakaya.
Dr. APRILIA ZANK is an educationist, freelance lecturer for Creative Writing and Translation Theory, as well as a multilingual poet, translator, editor from Munich, Germany and an Author of the Poetry book BAREFOOT TO ARCADIA. Born in Romania, she studied English and French Literature and Linguistics at the University of Bucharest, and then moved to Munich, Germany where she received her PhD degree in Literature and Psycholinguistics for her thesis, THE WORD IN THE WORD Literary Text Reception and Linguistic Relativity, from the Ludwig Maximilian University, where she started her teaching career. The research for her PhD thesis was done in collaboration with six universities from Europe, and as a visiting lecturer at Alberta University of Edmonton, Canada. Dr Aprilia writes verses in English and German, French and Romanian and was awarded a distinction at the “Vera Piller” Poetry Contest in Zurich. Her poetry collection, TERMINUS ARCADIA, was 2nd Place Winner at the Twowolvz Press Poetry Chapbook Contest 2013. In 2018, she was awarded the title “Dr. Aprilia Zank – Germany Beat Poet Laureate”, by the National Beat Poetry Foundation (USA). She has been an acclaimed guest at cultural events in Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Turkey, Singapore and Romania, where she read her poems, delivered lectures on various topics. Her poems and articles are published in many ezines and Anthologies of different countries.
A most scintillating conversation! Enjoyed it so much. Congratulations to Dr Aprilia Zank and Dr Ampat Koshy!
ReplyDeleteSuch a wonderful, stimulating interview. Riveting!
ReplyDeleteSuch a wonderful, stimulating interview. Riveting
ReplyDelete