How did you first engage with poetry?
For me poetry happened through song, dance, and then through the act of translation. I was a religious studies major as an undergraduate and was drawn to Bhojpuri folk music from the Caribbean. I recorded as much as I could, listened to as many songs as I could, and started to translate them in my journals and in my spare time. I then started to wonder what would these folksongs sound like if they were written today. That was my first effort: the up/re-cycling of folksongs with themes and poetics that are largely ignored by Caribbeanists, South Asianists, and ethnomusicologists who fetishize my community.
I am not deluded into thinking myself an American poet that is an inheritor of classical culture. My Aji had gold teeth. I am proud of this fact and of my ancestors teaching my parents the act of survival.
Then I started reading poetry by people from aural/oral cultures and was incredibly moved by Joy Harjo’s work. Her poems touched the deepest part of me, that of the ancestral knowing that I was absorbed in, and showed me how to take the original idea and blend it into the poetics that felt like home.
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