Jeet Thayil (born 1959 in Kerala) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is best known as a poet and is the author of four collections: These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar, 2008), English (2004, Penguin India, Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004), Apocalypso (Ark, 1997) and Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992). His first novel, Narcopolis, (Faber & Faber, 2012), is shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. You can follow him in his twitter handle: @jeetthayil

1) Can you tell us briefly about your poetic journey and the experience in publishing four poetry books: These Errors Are Correct, English, Apocalypso, and Gemini?

Gemini was introduced by the pioneering Indian poet Dom Moraes; it was edited by David Davidar; and my Gemini twin was the gifted, mercurial Vijay Nambisan, who did not publish a full-length book of poems. I didn’t know it at the time, but Gemini was a watershed moment, never to be repeated. Apocalypso is uneven, erratic, opiated. I’m glad it’s out of print. I consider English my first full-length collection. They are New York poems, post-September 11, poems of winter and displacement. These Errors Are Correct was my last book. It was a book of tribute for my wife, Shakti Bhatt, who died. I think it’s my best book and I don’t think I’ll be able to equal it, so why try?

2) What was the first poem you wrote? How were you inspired to write poetry?

The first poem I wrote was in imitation of Baudelaire, a short poem of four stanzas in rhymed quatrains. I was inspired in the same way many young poets are inspired: I wanted to equal the poems of my literary heroes. I was twelve or thirteen. I don’t think the poems were very good and I’m glad I destroyed them.

3) You lived in many countries during childhood. How did this influence your writings?

I don’t know if there is a direct influence, but then again influence works in mysterious ways. For one thing, I don’t restrict myself to writing about India. In Narcopolis there is a long and vital section set in China. Many of the poems in English and These Errors Are Correct are American Poems.

I am an Indian writer, obviously, but not in terms of the imagination.

4) As being the editor for Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, 60 Indian Poets, and a collection of essays, Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora; what do you think about Indian Poetry in English? How far has it gone?

I am sorry to say that I don’t think it’s gone far enough. The first generation of Indian poets who wrote in English was more experimental and adventurous than subsequent generations.

The younger poets seem more conservative than their forebears, and that is a puzzling condition peculiar to the Indian milieu.

5) What’s poetry to you? What does it mean to be a poet?

Poetry is a life sentence. It is a hardship to be a poet.

6) Poets who influenced you. Your 5 favorite poets?

Baudelaire, Dante, Trakl, Pavese, Auden, Walcott, Glyn Maxwell, Bishop, Lowell, Berryman, Crane, Moraes, Agha Shahid Ali, Philip Nikolayev. That’s an incomplete list, but it’s already more than five, so I’ll stop.

7) You are also an author of the libretto for the opera Babur in London, a performance poet, and musician, songwriter/guitarist and involved in the music project Sridhar/Thayil? How do you manage poetry and music? Is music a part of your poetry?

I hope there is music in the poetry, otherwise, it would be pretty awful. Verlaine was right when he put it above everything else: “De la musique avant tous les choses.” Sridhar/Thayil is a complete music project; the poetry in it is incidental or accidental. At the moment we are a five-piece band and we released our first album STD a few months ago. You can hear the music here: www.stincmusic.com

8) Your latest novel Narcopolis has been shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2012. What is Narcopolis about?

Narcopolis is the city of intoxication, Bombay, and Narcopolis is the secret history of the city over three decades, told by the marginalized, the crushed, the disenfranchised, the deranged, the addicted, the maimed, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low. Bombay’s conventional history is concerned with glamor, money, and fame; Narcopolis is concerned with sex, God, violence, madness, transformation, and death. Every character in the novel is an addict of some kind. Most are drug addicts, but there are also violence addicts, god addicts, sex and alcohol addicts, beauty addicts.

For the people in the world of the book, addiction is the only means of exaltation and of escape.

9) Do you consider yourself as a Bombay Poet? Can you reveal us about the Bombay poets and the movement?

For better or worse, I do consider myself a Bombay poet; and though I live in Delhi I don’t consider myself a Delhi poet. At the time in Bombay, we didn’t know we were part of a movement or a group, but in hindsight, it certainly seems that way. It was a fragmented group, full of suspicion and grievance towards each other, but the work stands and the work—and by that I mean the books produced over a period of a few decades by a dozen or so poets—is substantial.

10) How do you wish to be remembered? What suggestions do you wish to give for budding poets?

I would tell young poets to harden their skins and their resolve. I would tell them to move to other kinds of writing.

Poetry, especially in India, is a long hard road. There is no milieu, no readership, no publishers, no money.

You have to teach yourself. It takes decades before you figure out what you’re doing. If and when it comes, the fame and the money hardly seem worth the effort. That’s what I would say, but only rhetorically, young poets do not listen to good advice.

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