The Conversation: Sudeep Sen

As part of our Indian Subcontinent feature, Gutter meets with Sudeep Sen, renowned poet, editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and author of the best-selling collection, Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation.

On a video-call from his home office in Delhi, surrounded by books, Sudeep tells our poetry reviews editor, Shehzar Doja, how poetry, like any art, is a living tradition and how the concept of space has the innate ability to shape his work.Join us as Sudeep and Shehzar share a conversation about Bengali literary influences, the role of poetry in Indian culture, and look towards the future generation of small press publishing.

GUTTER: OK, so it’s recording. Brilliant. I believe you have a lot of wonderful memories and connections to Scotland. Could you elaborate on that for us?

SUDEEP SEN: Well, when I lived in London, Scotland was almost like a second home. In fact, my first big UK project was in Scotland. I was the poet-in-residence of the Scottish Poetry Library. The SPL then used to be on the Royal Mile—well it still is—but it was the old Scottish Poetry Library opposite Netherbow Theatre, right next to World’s End pub. And World’s End pub signified that that it was the end of the city, and after that, it was countryside. It’s no longer the case... It was a beautiful old building with a courtyard, and the ground floor was the main library. And upstairs was the reading room with the bedroom and a kitchenette and the microfiche space. If you remember what microfiche is? Now everything is digitized, but that was the early days of digitization, where large amounts of data were filmed in tiny, tiny fonts and in the microfiche viewing machine you could scroll it and see that pages expanded. That was one way of storing. Anyway, so that was up there. After 5 or 6pm in the evening, the upstairs was basically shut. So yes, the upstairs living room was the stacks, the reading rooms and all the magazines were there and so on. And the bedroom was the poets’ room—that was the only private part of the library. So it was like living in the library. It was wonderful. And after the library was shut, the whole place was mine, surrounded by books. It was just an amazing space to live in. That was in the early 90s, I think. And then I’ve been back to Scotland many, many times. I’ve been to the Edinburgh Book Festival as a participant. St Andrews... I remember Douglas Dunn and Robert Crawford had invited me at the time and I was reading and there was this beautiful view of the sea with the broken kind of armature of the old ruin and the cliffs. I also wrote a volume, Distracted Geographies: An Archipelago of Intent (a book-length poem) that is based entirely in Scotland. It starts in a small village of Doune (near Stirling) and moves around Scottish landscape. And so yes, Scotland is embedded in one part of my life. There’s a lot of Scotland!

G: Hopefully we’ll get to have you up again! Moving away from the topography of Scotland back to something more rooted. What were some of the aspects or attributes of your childhood and upbringing that influenced your poetry?

SS: Many things. I would largely credit it to a Bengali upbringing. You know, I grew up in a Bengali family with a lot of poetry being read out from memory. Song, dance. A lot of conversation debate. Way too much food! A lot of collegiality. I lived in Bangladesh for five years and produced many books there. So, yeah, it’s a very, very Bengali upbringing. I was surrounded with poetry and the arts. So in an osmotic way, that definitely influenced my personality in terms of being a poet, I mean, I didn’t think of it that way because I was a science student, and I was training to be an architect or a scientist. But of course, my heart ruled over my head, as it always does in my life, and went for poetry and English literature eventually. And not the safer options of being in the bank or the corporate world.

G: That seems to be quite the thing with our Bengali background as well, with poetry not as revered as before perhaps—which is rather sad. Poetry and all arts were so much more fondly looked at before I feel. Do you agree that it was more fondly looked at in the past? Or would you say that there is a sort of a small revival happening now?

SS: No, it was very much part of the fabric of daily living and still is. There was a lot of fondness for it, but people were also equally practical. So, for instance, when I was opting to do English literature, everybody told me, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ And at the time, the professor salaries were very, very modest. So, I could see why they’re saying, ‘don’t take it’, because they were looking out for me. They were very practical when it came to the real world and you should be pursuing something that would make it easier to make a living. But if you were inclined towards the arts and were well-versed with it, it was something that people looked up to. See there was not much beyond maybe television... and television channels were then limited to two or three channels. There was not much entertainment, so a lot of it was just being with people. Live arts. We are talking about spoken-word or live art—that was performance art then, but it was within the confines of homes and friends. Now you have to create these spaces to make live art. But before it was a living thing. So it was a more egalitarian moment, more diverse, more inclusive space, certainly.

G: And I was just wondering from within that sort of space, what were the influences that seeped their way into you at an early age and that sort of moved you?

SS: Lots of things, I mean of course, you know Bengali poetry was being read out and recited around me, so Tagore was pouring out of every orifice, which as...

[Shehzar points to a picture amongst the framed portraits in Sudeep’s background of Rabindranath Tagore]

SS: Yeah, this is original. This is an original tear sheet from one of his diaries—this is his handwritten script. So now it’s behind me. When I was young, I would run far away from this because he was like the demi-god in a Bengali set up. I, in fact, love the modernists more like Jibanananda Das, and Kazi Nazrul Islam. But as I grew up, I realised Tagore’s stature. I mean, he was a real polymath. So that was the obvious one. But there was also the Urdu and Hindi poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ghalib, Rumi, and all that was very much part of the fabric I was growing up in. And then I remember my uncle had a wonderful library. On one of the shelves he had the entire series of the Penguin Modern European Poets. So, the wonder of the entire East European world of poetry, Russian poetry, opened up for me. And in fact, I didn’t have some of those books in that series. Even now when I’m traveling in the UK, in the second-hand bookshops I still hunt for them. And so all those books were around me, so it was just a very rich space to be in. Of course, I was born with the faulty DNA and my preferences were things like poetry and music. Things that other people were not interested in or, ostensibly as a boy or a man, my friends and colleagues, most of them were interested in other things. I was interested in the other things too, but I was also deeply interested in this space.

G: It’s lovely to hear! It all feels very old school... the links and connections that bound and propelled you towards writing. Is that fair to say?

SS: It is old school. It is old school in many ways, and I yearn for that. And I still maintain an old school thing. Right now, I’m in my study, and I am only surrounded by poetry books. This room only has poetry books. So even if you win the Nobel Prize as a fiction writer, your book is not going to make it here. But if someone writes an obscure pamphlet of poetry, he or she is totally welcome in this room! So, this room is my mosque, my temple, my church. The sanctum sanctorum of what makes me happy. It’s just got poetry books and poetry anthologies. There’s so many of them they spill over to the other parts of the house as well. But this is where I work.

G: So is it curated by...? What goes into its curation?

SS: The word ‘curation’ is a fancy word. It’s not quite like that, but I’m happy to use it since you’re using it. It is zoned by country now, and it’s alphabetical—just for my own sanity, otherwise I won’t be able to find the books and some of my editorial interns have come to help me out. Also, to alphabetise them properly and put them away. Often I have young poets and writers who I’m mentoring, and I give them this task, and they actually, instead of working on the poetry, they get lost in my library because this is such a wonderful space for reading. But I encourage them, because that’s part of it. You know, you get lost in books that you encounter. Most of the books, if a review for that particular poet comes out even 20 years later, all the cuttings are in each of the books. If I have letters from those books, they are within the folds of the book, so each one of those books is like a folder, literally analogue folder where things fall out of. So yes, they are curated in the sense that they are all zoned by countries. One of the things I pick up are poetry books and anthologies whenever I travel. So those shelves tend to be larger. Obviously, Bengali is huge! My Bangladesh library is almost half a room now. But then there are vertical piles. I don’t have any more horizontal space in my house. On the floors, it’s going up vertically. There are books that I’ve yet to read, packets I’ve yet to open, so they’re all over the place. This room, I don’t allow anyone to come and clean, because only I know the filing system. It’s a happy, chaotic, organized space where I kind of jump over these little islands of books and plant myself depending on my mood and where I want to be, whether it’s a tropical island or the icebergs and the Northern climes.

G: Sounds amazing! And then more recently, you published two major new works, Anthropocene and The Best Asian Poetry Anthology. How did each of those things come about individually?

SS: I think The Best Asian Poetry first. Kitaab, which is a very good Singapore publisher. They already have a very well-established series. The best Asian short stories, the best Asian crime fiction, best Asian science fiction... So they have prose—quite a long-standing series, but they’ve never done poetry before. So, this is the first time. You know, I think partly it’s this misnomer about poetry sales and so on. And partly they didn’t know who to ask to curate something because Asia is incredibly vast. I mean, going from parts of Turkey all the way to Korea and parts of Russia. I’ve included Australasia in it because, to me, that’s also part of a larger fabric of Asia. Also, there’s such a huge Asian diaspora in it. So, it was a real treat to put it together in one place. You know, some of the top poets from Asia, they’ve never been put together. So that was a good opportunity. So the Asian poetry one was a commission, and it’s just out. The e-book is out. The paperback is going to be out very soon. And hopefully it’ll be an ongoing series. So, it’s just like the best American and British poetry series. The Best Asian Poetry is a much larger project—it is several continents put together!

Anthropocene was a gift of the pandemic, and it’s odd to say that because the pandemic was so horrific, and particularly in Delhi, they were burning bodies on the side of the streets. And I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this, I was cooped up, locked in lockdown, like I am even now. For me, lockdown was nothing particularly special, because I’m in lockdown most of the time, either traveling or I’m in my room. So the travel part got completely erased. So I was in my room, happily, and I was responding to the things that were happening around me. But climate change is something that I’ve been engaged in for a long time. So, Anthropocene I see as part of a larger climate change issue. Because everything got concentrated around these topics, I was writing a lot and I realised the whole book was emerging out of it. It wasn’t planned at all. And it’s a multi-genre book: it’s got poetry, prose poems, reportage, meditations, and photography. And again, it’s not the sort of thing a publisher would easily pick up because it’s not commercial. But a publisher did pick it up, and it’s just rolled. I mean, the book came out, it’s distributed by Penguin Random House in India, in sixteen Asian countries, so that’s lots. The UK edition came out the end of last year. And that’s doing really well. The American edition is supposed to come out this summer. So amazing response! I mean, it is completely unexpected as far as I’m concerned.

G: I was at the London launch and there are just so many wonderful things being said about it. It is a wonderful collection altogether. I just finished reading it a few days ago. Like you, I think it takes time for understanding the poetry to sort of seep in and to appreciate every single word or every single sort of line and passage. It’s very exciting to hear that. Is there anything new that’s coming for you?

SS: No, I mean, with Anthropocene, I must say that it went beyond the English literature circuit, which was great. So, one of the first reports that came out on it was in Norway via the Norwegian Writers Association and the Norwegian Climate Council. They contacted me for an interview before any of the English-language people. There was a seminar on the book at Oxford, where three people were discussing the book, and I was not even part of the discussion. And that book was the symposium topic. There was a climatologist, there was the economist and there was an English professor who discussed the book. So that’s really how it should happen. You know, it’s much more cross-genre, cross-discipline and it’s reached spaces, which I would have never thought it would because it’s gone beyond just the usual literary space.

G: Yeah, and speaking of spaces. I’m so glad you brought that up because literally ‘spaces in your togetherness’, the line from Khalil Gibran is a line I always return to as a poet. In your work, there is always such wondrous uses of spaces including rendering of space and negative space, or even the presence of space as an occupying identity. I would love to hear more about what forces external or internal led you to this. Or would you say you let the poem do that instead?

SS: It’s a bit of both. I mean, and it’s always a give and take. You know, any relationship is giving and taking—hopefully more giving! So in this case, nature any day is more giving to me than I can give back. My attempt to give back to nature is fractional than what I get from it. But it is a two-way relationship, and when it comes to space, it’s very important, partly because I was studying physics. You know, one of my books is called Fractals, the whole architecture of light and space, and the way light moves. Light is the most important element to the side B of my life as a photographer. And space, how do you define space? It’s at one level very artificial, and at one level it’s infinite. The artificial part of it is right now we are looking at each other bound by a rectangular aspect ratio. And depending on the screen size and your settings, it could be four by three or it could be sixteen by nine or... however, the screen setting is predetermined for particular things. With poetry or with the written word, the printed page becomes the frame. It’s vertical, mostly, unless it’s in landscape format, for a photography book or an unusual book. And then you set the margins. Why do you leave spaces around the printed text? The poetry? It’s even more incumbent upon you, how you use white space and inked space. So, for me, the white spaces in the book are equally, if not more important than the inked part of the page, which is the text itself. So how you break lines, how you justify the poems, where you put the margin, the placement of the text itself on the white space is crucially, crucially important. Even the kind of graphics you use, the point size, the font itself is of critical importance to me, I mean, I’m anal about this. So either the either the publishers love it because I pretty much give them not only the poems, also the edited version, but also a designed book because it has to be transformed into a proper printed form. These aspects are very important to me, so both the negative and positive spaces interact together. You know, you think of the eclipse, you have the umbra, the penumbra. And it’s in the space of these zones that the most exciting things happen. Otherwise, it’s obvious, it’s black or white or it’s saturated or unsaturated, but it’s where the calibration of the two, and the subtlety that goes behind it. It’s the unsaid, which is always more interesting.

[the connection temporarily cuts out]

G: I swear it feels like that right now with the internet just suddenly disappearing then. But sorry, you were saying about the penumbra and umbra...

SS: Spaces become shapes depending on how you calibrate and control space. And in poetry that is of utmost importance. You can’t have an extra comma. Or an extra phrase... Just as people go to the gym to make their bodies more beautiful and fitter, I think the same rules apply to poetry. I go to a mental gym so much that I don’t have time for physical gym. But I do a lot of gym work with poetry, you know, kill anything that’s not required. Throw things away, make it lean, fit and spunky.

G: As you know, this issue is celebrating the subcontinent. I have a question on some of your musings on the contemporary poetry scene around the subcontinent. You’ve lived in India, you’ve lived in Bangladesh, you’ve visited elsewhere... What are your thoughts on the contemporary poetry scene?

SS: I think it’s buzzing like anywhere else in the world. I think what has happened with, I mean, let’s just stick to English language poetry because we have so many languages across our part of the world, certainly in India, you know, we have over twenty-five official languages and over thirty-thousand dialects. So where do you even start? Let’s just say for the sake of argument, stick to English language writing—it’s exploded. Certainly, my generation, I consider English as an Indian language. So, it’s not a colonizers language, it’s not a foreign language, which it might have been for the generations before mine. The poetry they wrote was of a certain kind. The early English language writings were quite imitative, almost Victorian in style. Then in India, there was a conscious effort to make poetry, which has Indian English, Indian types of vernacular/terminologies that got into the English poetry, which was interesting. To me, now, the youngsters are using English as if it’s like anything else, it’s a global language, so, obviously, the writing style has changed a lot. Like with anything else, the American media, the American influence is such that I think a lot of younger people are writing more like American than, say, European and English. So there’s an explosion, not only in the kinds of writing, but the types of writing, but also the platforms are so varied, you know, whether it’s a podcast or a video cast or performance poetry or mixed genre work. So, it’s not like before where people wrote a poem and it was largely or entirely for the printed page, but for an occasional poetry reading. Now, a lot of people only write for spoken word spaces and are not writing book print. So the diversity is huge, you know? Something is there for everyone. But again, I’ll come back to the same thing. The only way any of these subgenres will work is good writing. You can’t escape it. You can be a great performer. But if your content, all the phraseology is not tight, it ain’t gonna work.

G: You said earlier that you had a lot of young mentees who had come in and worked with you on the library and other aspects. So what role, direct or indirect, did literary mentors play in your growth as a poet? And what are your thoughts in regards to mentoring the next generation of writers?

SS: I think it’s a huge, huge influence. In my life, it’s been a huge influence and sometimes mentoring can be direct or indirect. So when you were talking about my influences as I was growing up, that was a certain kind of mentoring because I was already in a kind of curated space where the arts flourished, the poetry flourished. So without them mentoring me officially, I got mentored. I have had the privilege of having senior poets who have been mentors, again officially and unofficially, and sustained over a decades long friendship. So you learn a lot. I’ve done that with younger poets all the time because I think poetry, like any art, is a living tradition. I am what I am because of my parents and grandparents and the poets and other people that I’ve read, and it is our duty to just pass it on as best as we can, without any ego, without any want of any kind of return, just for the pleasure of sharing and making things, keeping the conduit alive. So mentorship is of utmost importance. Not a lot of people believe in it because writers’ egos can be really, really huge and sometimes misplaced. So it won’t benefit that lot of people. But if you’re open? And willing to give and learn. Oh, it is the first thing I would recommend that you have... People who you admire are actually people you would go to for mentorship. And I have young friends who are my colleagues, I don’t think of them as my students. They’re just my friends. So there’s that continuum both ways and absolutely, absolutely essential. It’s good. It’s worth its weight in gold.

G: I would love to hear more about AARK ARTS and Atlas. How did it start, and moving forward are there any aspirations for those? Any development plans?

SS: So as with any writer, you know, you first want your own writings to be published. Once you start publishing your work for a good while; you may want to edit a literary magazine and that becomes the quest. So I started with the magazine, called Atlas, but I also started up a poetry publishing house called AARK ARTS in 1995. But the last decade or so it’s been on the back burner because I just don’t have the time for it. When I started, it was just me and then I got a few friends of mine to put some money in, and we were all young and not attached. And as they got married, their partners would say why are you wasting your money, putting money into this, so they eased off. For anything, you need money. And I put in, you know, my motto was, I will put in a certain percentage of my poetry earnings. And with that, you can do a few books and it’s easily possible. So now it’s just a question of time. But we at AARK ARTS have all the hundreds of books on the back list, Booker Prize winners, Forward Prize winners. So it’s an amazing backlist! Do I have aspirations of taking it forward? I do. I just need someone to work with me. I mean, I’d be happy to get it restarted because, you know, it’s a question of continuum. At the moment, my priorities are not that because of sheer time pressure, but if I can get one or two young people who want to take it on from me, I’ll be happy just to guide them. And it’s a very exciting space, especially now. It’s so much easier to print books, good books, and all you need is good laptop with right software, which we all have. And with digital printing, high quality digital printing, you can do limited runs. You can print anywhere in the world. We’re sitting in Luxembourg and printing in Dhaka and publishing a poet in Peru because the Lightning Source Company has an outfit there. It’s just so easy to do it, but it requires dedication. So it’s just a question of people power. If I had one or two people who were willing to give me time, then yeah. I put in so much personal effort in all the designing and the editing and the production, and to me, production values of books is again very important. You know, you could have written a wonderful book, but if it’s shoddily clothed then what’s the point? However, having said that, there are too many ‘branded clothing’ clothed books with very poor content. But that’s another discussion... But you know, every aspect of the book is important, so those publishing ventures are still there. They are still very much alive. But I just need some more willing youngsters who want to take it on. And I’m happy to guide it forward.