How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I turned to creative writing and poetry, specifically Japanese short-forms and visual poetry, a decade ago. While I enjoy reading and appreciating long-form verse, my heart lies with haiku and erasures/cut-ups. The elements of disjunction and juxtaposition are what most draws me to both these genres. Their brevity and incisiveness are also something that I try to emulate in all forms of writing.
How does a poem begin?
For me, if it’s an erasure or blackout, it starts with chance/randomness. I pick any page or ask close friends to give me a handful of page numbers within a certain range and go from there. It’s not so much about meaning-making or having the full context as I go about erasing the page/s. I work with what is directly in front of me and spot words and phrases that emerge from the subconscious. Often, the final poem is what I’m meant to read/know at that moment.
If it’s a haiku, it always begins with an image or a word and I start thinking along the lines of how I can juxtapose one abstract feeling with the concreteness of another. My poems are usually at the intersection of abstract and concrete.
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
I envy writers who know exactly what defines their scope of writing. I don’t have any such fixed themes or motifs that singularly peg me down as a certain kind of poet. But I do, however, have a style that I hope and trust is distinctly mine. If I look hard enough, a narrative will weave itself, as it did in my first haiku collection. But largely, I just write and see where it takes me. The poem has a consciousness of its own, and I am merely the vessel.
How do you see your poetry and visual works in conversation, if at all?
The two forms that I absolutely adore are erasures and haiga. Haiga combine my love for abstract art and haiku. I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with several poets in the last few years who have responded to my abstracts with their poems. This serendipitous connection led to a whole collection of collaborative haiga that came out a few months ago titled living in the pause. While I enjoy creating solo haiga, there’s an indescribable excitement in seeing how a fellow poet makes that quintessential link and shift from my piece to create something that didn’t exist before. It’s a subtle yet profound conversation.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I work in bursts and take part in 2-3 writing challenges each year, including NaPoWriMo and The Poetry Marathon. When I’m not actively writing, I’m reading, editing, or teaching. So, all of these different things feed into my vials of inspiration and something eventually brews.
What are your favourite print or
online literary journals?
FERAL: Journal of Poetry and Art, Full House Literary Mag, Ghost City Press, Half Day Moon Journal, Heron Tree, NOON: journal of the short poem, password, petrichor – an archive of text image, Prune Juice, Right Hand Pointing, Rogue Agent, Unlost Journal, Utriculi, whiptail: journal of the single-line poem.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
It’s really hard to keep track of the boundless talent
out there but, off the top of my head, some poets include John Pappas, Jonathan
Humphrey, Buffy Shutt, Elizabeth Paul, Evgeniya Dineva, Robin Smith, Kat
Lehmann, and a few others.
Shloka Shankar is a poet, editor, and self-taught visual artist from Bangalore, India. A Best of the Net nominee and award-winning haiku poet, Shloka is the Founding Editor of Sonic Boom and its imprint Yavanika Press. She is the author of the microchap Points of Arrival (Origami Poems, 2021), a full-length haiku collection titled The Field of Why (Yavanika Press, 2024), and co-author of the haiga anthology living in the pause (Yavanika Press, 2024). Website: www.shlokashankar.com | Instagram: @shloks23
She has work in the twelfth and fourth issues.