What Sparks Poetry

The creative process is usually invisible and mysterious. Maybe this is why we love makeover shows: we get to see the nitty gritty of the transformation, not only the reveal. Thankfully, my two books are public artifacts of that transformation, snapshots of how the 2019 translations morphed into the 2025 ones. Between those two published markers sit hundreds of drafts—an archaeological record of creative decision-making.

Poetry can dive beneath narratives and their erasures. In this poem “For love,” I wanted to look at the complexities and contradictions of the humans who devote their lives to weapons of mass destruction. What drives them? One aspect, the poem suggests, is fear, a fear-tinged love, an anticipatory or active grief about what could be lost, which comes out of their strong love. Maybe a poem can bring these motivations into the light so that they can be examined. What if fear could be felt and known as the vulnerable emotion that it is, what kinds of knowledge and action might that produce? Maybe the existence of fear would not have to lead to weapons.  

“The Field” was a new way of being with a poem. To focus on one thing, to stick with it, to follow a seemingly organic line of inquiry—this was radically different from what I had been writing. Still, on the evidence of so many poems in my personal anthology that modelled this kind of concentrated attention, like “Opulence” and “Dead Doe,” it was clear I’d been yearning to write this kind of poem for a very long time. 

The first line of my poem, “Beauty is made my fear” is: “What slips from me is what / slips from me.” It occurred to me as I was thinking about those fiddly little typos in my book: first resenting them, then accepting their inevitability, and then embracing them –– “kissing” them, as the poem reads. 

I look to this past for models to meet the current moment: in stories of resistance covered over like bomb shelters, redacted from dominant histories like proper names from a CIA memo. Over the years of my continuing re-education, the Newark uprising has become a flash point from which to begin my studies on a variety of struggles for liberation.

What kind of poetry can we write in the world we live in today? This poem suggests: a jagged poetry that features horror but also humor, that knows tragedy but also comedy, that we don’t know how to trust. An all-too-human poetry, unpredictable, which we must keep going back to, to see what it will tell us today.

In my poem ‘New words, new clothes’ I revisit the time when I abandoned the Tamil language, choosing first silence and then English as replacements. This is a poem about the transformative capacity of words; the power they contain to both illuminate and camouflage in equal measure. There is a sense of defiance in this poem, the short-sighted defiance of youth maybe, which nevertheless ensured that I survived in order to write this poem decades later. I

I’ve been interested lately in being wrong. And in changing my mind—and in catching my mind as it’s in the very act of erring, or shifting, or turning, and in following that act. Which, in a poem, amounts to asking the reader to think something, then to un-think it, and then to replace the first thought with another. Except that you can’t unthink something.

If you think about each poem as a painting or a shadow box or a tiny black box theater with movable parts, each of those stages have their own set of forces, those forces must resolve upon the body, and then the body will then act accordingly. The body has its own force which gets resolved within that matrix. Poetry is thus the art of making things happen. It's the art of producing events, at least on the page. And if poetry produces happenings, it's a continuous presence that isn't fixed to one temporal unit.

The poetics of disruption is a lens to develop a different sort of relationship with disruption, where it can be a giving force. My goal in the “poetics of disruption” was not to find answers necessarily, but to metabolize the inextricable link between intimacy and violence, and falling in love in a time of queer people getting hate-killed, loving in a time of genocidal violence. Not only was my sleep disrupted for so many reasons beyond my control, but then I practiced disruption, where the speaker becomes an agent of disruption.

What I privilege is questioning the notion of things. Questioning myself, the world. Faith. Light, and even darkness. These are all places I am always eager to enter. The pursuit of understanding knows no bounds. And so, the poem Bakandamiya began as a seed to sow into the soil of my mind. 

The multi-genre approach just felt intrinsic to the subject matter, because in a lot of ways, the book is about how history gets recast in genre and how genre acts on story, right? The movie version versus the novel version versus the history book version. I’m really interested, having grown up seeing real life turned into a tourist attraction, how that move inherently emphasizes or obscures different elements of the story.

Gregory Orr, a mentor of mine, immediately comes to mind. He always pushed me to write about what I was most afraid of on the page—and he also encouraged me to embrace my obsessions. I carried both of those things into the writing of the book in almost daily ways. They helped me see the book through.

 In college, I was part of Stanford’s Spoken Word Collective, which was such a loving community, because so often being an artist is about rejection, and about toiling by yourself in your Google Doc alone, and so slam gave me a community, gave me a sense of possibility and of love, of writing in community around writing, which mattered so much to me as a young writer. Even now, as I become more of a “page poet” or whatever, I still have that attention to rhythm and music that's so central in slam.