How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
From the early childhood i have always been together with the silent resonances of nature, its deep rooted utterances in numerous forms and shapes. there wasn't any language at that time. i wasn't familiar with any kind of poetry, textual or oral. after reading Bāsho i began recognising a form, -shorter, precise, and minimal - that can come closer to my being.
How does a poem begin?
where was the beginning of the life on earth? that of the waters? poetry lies in its vastness, beyond everything we have created. unending ebb and flow of the seas. endless dance of the spider. moving clouds. orbits on the snail shell. but we keep weaving a thread, tending the wounds, looking and looking into the bottom of the pond, the palms, footprints. a poem begins somewhere else, beyond our reach, and it ends somewhere. we see, touch, or we create a visible piece of fabric and call it a poem. while reading we may walk beyond those tightly bound words, to listen to the silence.
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
yes, i do. seeking a form is a lifelong process that every poet enduring. to me, writing poems has always been collecting fragments that can later be sewn together to form something, a mosaic, a quilt, a fable, a song.
How do you see your text and visual works in converstion, if at all?
words cannot create an object though they are born out of objects, both physical and imaginary. 'water' comes from the water. always. i cannot sort out words from things. they are water in the pot. they permeate each other. the words form a memory of things, places, times.
i touch my tiny poems as they evolve. i utter my tiny poems as they evolve. fingertips and the toungue.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
i spend a lot of time in tending the poems. i keep writing a journal. i work for hours on a tiny seed of poem, and of course let it grow on its own. i need much more solitude and silence around my desk.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
there are so many great journals. each of them in unique ways. naming a few is a difficult task.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
currently I'm through Alejandra Pizarnik, Ignacio Ruiz
Perez and Narayana Guru. they bleed, they heal, they flow in darkness. they are
hidden in the broad daylight. i love the night.
M.P. Pratheesh is a poet and artist from Kerala, India. He has published several collections of poetry in Malayalam language. His texts and images were part of ‘let me come to your wounds; heal myself’, a cross-disciplinary art event curated by C F John. His poems and object/visual poems have been appeared at various places including Singing in the dark (Penguin), Greening the earth (Penguin, 2023), Modern Poetry in Translation, Almost island, Portside Review, RlC journal, Indianapolis Review, kavyabharati, Nationalpoetrymonth.ca (Angelhouse press), The Bombay Review, Guftugu, Experiment-O, Indian Literature and elsewhere. His recent books are Transfiguring Places (Paperview books, Portugal) and The Burial (forthcoming from Osmosis press, UK). He is the recipient of Kedarnath Singh Memorial poetry prize, 2022.
A selection of his poems appeared in the ninth issue.