Pooja Nansi

Jollin Tan

Pooja Nansi is a poet who also does performance poetry (alone, but also in a duo called Mango Dollies whenever they can get together). She curates a monthly spoken word event (Speakeasy) that is warmly received by many in the literary community of Singapore. Her poetry is charming, funny, and absolutely heartbreaking, most of the time. She has two books out – Stilleto Scars and Love is an Empty Barstool, both of which are frequently asked for at local bookstore BooksActually. 

As a sort of pre-amble into the more intense questions, what are some of the things that influence your writing/poetry most?

As a sort of preamble into the more intense answers, some of the things that influence my writing the most are music, my personal history, the stories of my grandparents and great grandparents, the delicious and disastrous moments in relationships. Effectively things that are very close to my heart or hit me in my gut.

Does your job as a teacher shape your poetry in any way?

I suppose teaching great poetry gives me the great opportunity to dissect how the best poets write, and examine the tricks of the trade a little more closely. I think it works more the other way around, my work with poetry keeps me passionate about what I teach because I always see it as a living, breathing thing, a way to approach the world around me.

I love sharing poems with kids who think that poetry is inaccessible and seeing them write quotes from their favourite poems (or even better, Shakespeare) on their water bottles, or bags. Literary nerd-dom ftw. I feel quite good about playing a small part in creating an army of word lovers in our society

You do spoken word a lot. What is it about spoken word that drew you in at first, and continues to do so now? In that vein, how is spoken word different from written poetry?

I’d describe what I do more as performance poetry than spoken word. Although I think the lines can overlap. Spoken word is a far more encompassing term – to me – which goes beyond poetry; it could even include monologues.

What draws me to performing my work is simple. A good reading of a poem often makes it immediately accessible and can lead layers to it that may not exist on the page. I like pairing poems and songs that speak to each other and I get pretty excited when I find unlikely or unexpected dialogue across music and poetry, for example Elton John and Bukowski, or Leonard Cohen and E.E. Cummings.

When you think about it, poetry is a kind of music and music a kind of poetry and I am absolutely fascinated with how a poem comes alive when you use music, even if it’s the simple music of the human voice. 

That being said, I think it’s incredibly important that a poem also works on the page.  Just as with any other art form, there’s a vast variety of styles when it comes to poetry. And I think it’s cool and necessary that people experiment with what has come to be accepted as ‘traditional’ written poetry.

What annoys me, however, is when poets use the ‘spoken word’ label as an excuse not to edit their work. Ranting is not poetry. Neither is reciting your diary entry. Poetry isn’t about going up on a stage and emphatically shouting a phrase and getting an audience worked up. That’s probably, at best, an effective performance without craft.

The best poets and performers for me are the ones who pay incredible attention to their written material and an equal amount of attention to their delivery of it. 

What are some of the things you pay attention to most when you craft poetry?

My images and my endings, when I am first writing. I think a good ending can make a poem. And then when I’m editing, I try and work towards economy: using the best words and arranging them in the best way. The old cliché of the best words in the best order I guess. Most importantly, I try to write about what I know because I feel like any art works best when it comes from a place of deep honesty.

Your second book is out! Tell us more about the creative process of this book/the things that are being said?

Love is an Empty Barstool comes out 6 years after my first collection and a lot of people have asked why it took so long. To be honest, the poems in there have been performed – a lot. Many of them were written in 2009/2010 and I just never got around to putting them together in a coherent collection, mainly because I’m a procrastinator, also because after I had performed them so many times, it sort of felt like I had wrung them dry. I had also started writing new material and so these poems seemed to be “old writing”.

But I am incredibly blessed to have two amazing poets who I can count as my friends and mentors of sorts. Jacob Sam La Rose and Alvin Pang – who I look up to and respect immensely – asked if I wanted these poems dying in my hard drive. Obviously I didn’t. So I got my act together and the wonderful people at Math Paper Press have done their magic with getting this book out.

What I love about this collection is that it is compact, and captures a precise time in my life when I felt like I was figuring out how to move beyond loss and also wondering what it meant to love.

I was also questioning if I had the capacity to be as vulnerable as I needed to be in order to let someone in or and as brave as I needed to be to let someone go.  The title suggests loss, but also possibility, which is exactly what being in my twenties felt like. So it’s a little time capsule in a sense. It’s a collection that feels bluesy and a little drunk and empty in a content, exciting, exploring sort of way. I’m happy with it, and I’m glad I listened to the wise men in my life, who said the poems needed to get out into the world and breathe.

It’s also special because many of those poems are Mango Dollies pieces, and performing with Anjana is always special because she’s my best friend and gets what I might have been feeling when I wrote them better than anyone else could. When she puts a song to them, it’s always a little bit of extra magic. So it’s a songbook, and snapshot, and I’m pretty happy with it.

What kind of poetry speaks most to you, and why?

My two absolute favourite poets are Anne Sexton and Charles Bukowski. I love the brave pain in Sexton’s poems, the jazz and humour and sudden vulnerability in Bukowski’s poems; they always feel like the best, drunk nights out with your friends. I also love Pablo Neruda’s stunning imagery, Yehuda Amichai’s poems that read like simple, beautiful prophecies, Kim Addonizio’s unabashed spunk and sheer coolness. I love Alvin Pang’s gentle beautiful poems, the heartbreaking emptiness in some of Cyril Wong’s poetry. The poems I tend to love best are the ones that are honest, feel deeply and present this in a way that makes me stop and have to catch my breath or think about what it means to love and live.

How do you think poetry/literature in general is important to our society?
Nobody questions why Math is important to a society. Or Science. In the same way, I think anyone who is a thinking, feeling human being knows, that poetry and writing and literature are about hugely important, universal things.

Plato once said “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history”. And in a sense it’s true because it’s the unfiltered point of view of an individual living in a time and place. It doesn’t claim to be objective, but how can human beings ever really be objective?

Being a part of this planet we are on is about knowing how people lived before us, how people now live very similar and very different lives than our own, how we are a small part of a much larger whole. And that’s what literature does. It connects us, not only to our present and our own past, but also to others.

It may not have a quantifiable product to show for its efforts in the way Engineers can construct bridges that people can use. But being a human being isn’t just about practicality, it’s about figuring out why we are here, where we came from, what is our purpose, and ultimately, I think all writing addresses that in some small or big way.

I guess in a society that values quantifiable measurable things, literature will keep struggling to be seen as a worthy cause. But that’s only because we have the luxury of access and so, take it for granted.  I don’t think even the most practical calculative, unimaginative bureaucrat could live in a world where stories and thoughts and feelings did not exist, and I hope we never have to find that out the hard way.