Manahil Bandukwala : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Music helps me figure out rhythms in poetry. Over the past month, I’ve been practicing reading poems while music plays in the background. I got this idea from a performance by Conyer Clayton and Nathanael Larochette and decided to see how it would work for me. Songs and poems are twins, so naturally the musical nature of a poem comes through with music.

Manahil Bandukwala : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I love reading chapbooks and books by people in my community, or people whom I’ve personally met. Readings and launches are a great place to find poetry books by people whose work you enjoy. Lately I’ve read Ayesha Chatterjee’s Bottles and Bones and Conyer Clayton’s For the Birds. For the Humans.

Manahil Bandukwala : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

The In/Words writer’s circle and the Emerging Writer’s Circle at Carleton have really helped shape my work as a writer. First drafts are usually bad, but I feel comfortable taking bad first drafts to these spaces. I’ve known some of these people for almost three years now and my writing has really grown thanks to them. My sister is also a great critic. If I’m writing a poem about growing up in Pakistan or being a person of colour, she’ll help me steer the poem away from clichés and such.

Manahil Bandukwala : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I used to consider myself primarily a prose writer, and wrote poems on the side. When I moved to Ottawa, I discovered a vibrant poetry community. Around the same time, in a first year university class, we studied Modernist poets. Reading Leonard Cohen alongside poetry on Bywords, in In/Words and in presses around Ottawa, I started to shape my own work. Reading or listening to other poets’ work has always been my biggest influence.

Manahil Bandukwala : part one

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and artist currently living in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in In/Words, Bywords, re:asian and ottawater, among other places, and she has work forthcoming in Room Magazine, The Puritan and Ricepaper. She is currently an editor for In/Words magazine & Press. Visit her website at manahils.com.

What are you working on?

My goal for 2018 is to put out a chapbook, or at least have a chapbook manuscript in the works. Earlier in 2017, I toyed with the idea of a themed chapbook and writing poems around that theme. I didn’t accomplish that, beyond producing a few regurgitated poems. I realize now that attempting to place those limits curbed my creative thought. Now I have enough good poems to go in a manuscript, and although I didn’t write any of those with the hopes of them fitting into a ‘theme,’ I find the poems do have a sense of connectivity (although not one I had previously planned).