5 Questions with Prithvi Varatharajan
Prithvi Varatharajan is a poet, literary audio producer, and literary/media scholar who lives in Melbourne.
His collection Entries was published by Cordite Books in 2020. He is a commissioning editor of essays at Cordite Poetry Review, and is one of the 2020 recipients of the Sydney Review of Books' Emerging Critics Fellowship.
No.1
What prompted the birth of Entries?
I’d been working in different cultural forms for a while, producing literary radio adaptations, poems, essays, and literary/cultural scholarship. Then a few years ago I deleted my social media, and that inspired another kind of writing. I felt programmed by social media to communicate often, and immediately to an audience, and I found myself sending letters to myself by email, with a changing group of people as BCC recipients.
The letters were introspective and explored a wide range of subject matter, from love to family to national politics; some were argumentative and others were akin to prose poems. I decided to see if I could, for once, harmonise the different forms I work in—so I started editing those letters and setting them alongside poems from a much longer period, to see what resonances there were between them. Experimenting in this way, setting poem next to prose poem next to prose, led to the manuscript which became the book Entries.
No.2
In the book’s preface, you write that these poems come from a period of 10 years. That’s a lot of notebooks and .docs to look through. What was your process with regards to selecting the work that made it into the collection? How do you find the links that make Entries into the coherent collection that it is?
I’m not a prolific poet, which helps! I didn’t have folders and folders to look through. I also had a clear sense that certain poems were not good enough for publication, or for republication in this project, with its particular thematic and formal preoccupations (which I sketch out in that preface).
Initially, when I did the brickwork of laying down poems and other objects, deciding whether or not they might one day be cemented together, I’d chosen seven thematic containers for them. These were provisionally titled ‘Experience’; ‘Reflection’; ‘Literary’; ‘World’; ‘Nation’; ‘Ethnicity’; and ‘Family’. The first three sections moved from the world into text; the poems and prose there often drew on books, or were about them. The remaining sections had to do with individual experience written through concentric frameworks (they went from the macro to the micro, each frame fitting inside the last). That’s how I ordered the manuscript. Then in the editing process we took out the section dividers, and started moving things around. But I think the book retains the spirit of that early structuring.
No.3
It’s obvious that perceptions of self evolve over time as we grow, and I admire how you’ve shared this journey in the book. But the few constants in Entries I’ve observed are sound, movement and memory. Can you speak more to this?
That’s an interesting observation. I think the preoccupation with memory comes from that letter writing process I described, and what prompted that: the retreat from social media, which is a memory machine. I’d gone from platforms that were composed of image, sound, and text—and that encourage us to package our recent experiences in a chronological timeline, to be gazed upon by everyone later—to email, a purely word-based medium (at least in the way I was using it for this project) where the articulation feels private. This encouraged longer reflections that delved deeper into the past, without respect for chronology, and where I could link experiential memories with memories of reading and thinking.
I’m a radio producer, and a watcher of artful films, so that may explain the presence of sound in the book. I think poets are preoccupied with sensory experiences, too. I’m glad you’ve picked up on movement as a constant in the work, as I wanted to create a sense that poetry and prose were always moving into each other (in the collection); I tried to foreshadow this in the epigraph by Jahan Ramazani. The occasional urge to jiggle my knees when seated could be a sign of my restless spirit, which must also have imprinted itself on the book.
My publisher described Entries as “a very peripatetic work”. There have been periods in my life when I’ve travelled a lot, and the writing happens to have overlapped with a couple of those periods. So maybe a feeling of movement has come into the work that way too (even if its subject isn’t always travel).
No.4
In the poem ‘Speak, Memory’, you write of writing, “It preserves memory while at the same time killing it.” How do you navigate this contradiction in your own work?
You’ve actually pointed out a tautology there—I’m realising as I think about your question—as preservation requires death (then permits an afterlife in vinegar or formaldehyde). So maybe there’s no contradiction in that, and all memories are dead before they’re written; you’d hope then that the writing would revive them.
In that piece I was thinking about how some experiences feel extinguished when you pin them down in writing, but that you can avoid snuffing them out by writing them again and again: blowing on them and reshaping them a little, till they catch. If there’s no true or authentic memory of an event, only that which we story in speech or written language, then the more we story them, the more alive they’ll feel. That’s my fantasy for what writing could do for memory and experience, anyway; I think it often falls short of the mark.
No.5
Who are some of your favourite poets? Or poems which have stuck with you over time?
I struggle with favourites! I don’t think I can answer that well for anything I consume. But I can name writers who had a formative effect on me. The Indo-American poet, translator and philologist A.K. Ramanujan was one, in that his work and life offered me a mirror to scrutinise my own, back when it seemed important to stabilise a sense of who I was in the world and in writing. J.M. Coetzee, though not a poet, was another.
I wish the following weren’t the case—as then I’d have more dependable sources of literary nourishment—but poetic language can feel alive to me for a while, then dead, which means that individual poems rarely feel branded on my mind. I wrote my doctorate on Poetica (a show that used to air on ABC Radio National), looking at the representation of Australian identity in its adaptations of Australian poetry, particularly its programs on John Forbes, Vicki Viidikas, Ouyang Yu, and Ali Cobby Eckermann (the former two died in 1998). I love all their work, but I often seem to think of Forbes’ poem ‘Europe: A Guide for Ken Searle.’
Find out more
Buy a copy of Entries direct from Cordite Books or from all good independent bookstores. Don’t know which ones will deliver to you? Check out this very good bookshop map by Alan Vaarwerk.