Poetry is a truth serum taken voluntarily: Manohar Shetty

You recently brought out Creatures Great and Small, about the appearances of animals, birds, and insects into your daily life. What part did these creatures play in your creative life?
Over the years, birds and beasts have been pivotal metaphors in my poems. They have acted as my agents or proxies to comment on the world at large. More often than not, they come off as superior to human beings. Last year, I realised that there were enough 'animal' poems for a book and Creatures Great and Small was the result.

In one of your poems, you draw a parallel between glowing fireflies in glass bottles and humans trapped in mundane routines. If we were to make a dictionary of metaphors that each animal stands for in your collection, what would a few entries be like?
A poem like Domestic Creatures is a metaphor for the joint family: the lizard with its 'snapping tongue, long tongue', the well-fed, content pigeon like a grandfather, its 'head sinking/ In a fluffy/Embroidered pillow', the cockroach tumbling out 'like a family secret' from an 'old crevice'. There are also poems on the extinction or near extinction of animals like the cheetah and snow leopard. It 'took an age' for man to 'shed his fur' and 'stand on two legs'/ 'But just a day or two/To ambush forever/ The streaking arc/ In the blurred forest.' There are also metaphors for the writer in a poem like Claws: 'To sharpen its claws/My cat's lathe is any/ Old basket, doormat/Or carpet…' There's the hyena with its 'carrion call', the angry, marginalized pariah dogs in Fringes, and the dumb beauty of peacocks, our national bird, who are actually destructive but untouchable pests in farmlands in the south. Another poem, Survivor, is based on an incident when my daughter brought home a crocodile rescued from a fisherman's net at Comburjua canal here in Goa and set free in safer waters.

In another poem, you deal with the cobra you found in your house one day. Can you relate that incident? What was the childhood fear that you connected to that image of the cobra?
A baby cobra was also bought home, saved from the ire of some fearful villagers. The poem Visitants takes another angle, on the religious awe that cobras awaken in us, recalling childhood images of these hooded snakes hanging from the necks of Hindu deities.

Four Comic Strips deals with the surreal images such as a snake eating at a restaurant and a woodpecker's appearance deconstructed into other, non-matching images. Can you tell me a little about this poem?
I think of Four Comic Strips as an animation poem or feature or panels in a comic book. As I said, the animals are vehicles to comment on the human condition. I feel much more of an affinity with poets like Ted Hughes and DH Lawrence — vastly underrated as a poet — rather than to cerebral poets like Wallace Stevens or Charles Tomlinson. For me, poetry is something primeval and instinctive. The nervy edge scores over the meditative discourse.

Do you have any association with wildlife activism or similar causes?
No, I don't have any such association, but I fully back such groups.

What do you feel about the way we in India have treated wildlife and its habitats?
With the near extinction of the tiger, I don't think I need to add any comment.

To what extent does a poem come naturally to you, and to what extent is it crafted? How many drafts do you typically make before considering a poem complete?
Early on, in my twenties, poems would drop by fully formed or in need of a little brushing up. That doesn't happen anymore. After six books and the compilation of the animal poems, I now jot down any lines that come my way, even if it's 4am. Poems are elusive, sentient creatures, and if they are not 'trapped' in time, they simply fade away. They are caught in midair and made palpable on paper. Poetry demands honesty. It is a truth serum taken voluntarily and unconditionally. The fakes will always be found out.
Most of the poems have gone through several drafts. They are left in hibernation for a week or so before I return to them for fine tuning. It's been said poems are never finished, only abandoned. That sums it up.

Do you have a writing routine?
No, I don't have a routine, only antennae alive to any signs of life.
Having said all I have, following your line of questions, I must add I'm not an 'animal' specialist. They constitute a small but important part of my work. Other subject matter is also grist to the mill — love and loss, anxiety, the iniquitous world we live in, growing up, the city of Bombay, and Goa of course, where I have lived and worked these past thirty years. Goa may be a picnic for some, but to me, it's an office.

What are you writing about or editing now?
I've had a fruitful 2014 with three books out: besides Creatures Great and Small, a new book of poems, Living Room, published by HarperCollins, and my anthology, Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the 21st Century (Rupa). I'm now trying to put my short stories together and edit a new glossy 'lifestyle' monthly called Timeline Goa. To be a poet in India, you need to be born schizoid.