Getting to Know Vijaya Sundaram

When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?

When I was ten years old in Chennai (then known as Madras), India, I found a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in my local lending library, and later bought it. I fell in love with all the poems, especially those that had lyrical lines, or nature-related themes. That was my first step into English literature – and it was all by chance – I happened to come across it, and was immediately enraptured. I had never read anything of the kind before, and had no one to teach me, or explain anything literary to me, so in a sense, I’m a literary auto-didact.

Another resource: I had a lovely elderly neighbor whose name was “Sunda,” (which was probably a shortened version of my name – Sundaram is a somewhat familiar last name in South India). He was a retired journalist, and owned hundreds of beautiful, leather-bound volumes with gold-edged pages, all neatly arranged behind spotless glass in his
bookcases. I was a pre-teen who read anything in sight, and was deeply attracted to his anthologies of poetry, as well as his volumes of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, and other writers. He lent me book after book, including The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, which I read, and finished during my summer holidays. Keep in mind I was ten years old. I fell madly in love with Wilde, and somehow got him, understood him, humor, pathos, “purple prose,” and all. My neighbor saw how much I loved Oscar Wilde, and lent me Hesketh Pearson’s wonderful biography The Life of Oscar Wilde. I learned about the rise and fall of my beloved writer, came across the word “homosexual” for the first time, and knew, even then, without talking to a single soul about it, that it was absolutely wrong, terribly wrong to imprison a man who loved another man for “the love that dare not speak its name.” I was heartbroken at what Wilde experienced in prison, and enraged that he died penniless and broken in France. Even then, he maintained his sense of irony, saying about the wallpaper, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

To shorten this rather long digression, I borrowed these summer after summer, re-reading them feverishly, and dreaming complex dreams. My neighbor, Sunda Mama (another word for uncle) seeing how much I adored The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali and The Gardener (to go into how much I love Tagore would take another long digression, but I loved his poetry) finally gave them to me when I was about thirteen. My joy was beyond words.

When I came to the US in December 1988, these books came with me in my one check-in suitcase.

How did I discover that I wanted to write poetry? Well, I wanted to write poems after I read William Wordsworth’s sonnets (which I read around the same time as the other books I mentioned above). I was also moved by Shakespeare’s sonnets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s haunting poems, as well as John Keats’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s beautiful Odes. I loved Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, but those came a little later, when I was in my teens. Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge did it for me.

Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?

Alas, I wish I did!  When I was young, I would always write at night.  I used to write a poem a day for a few years as a teenager.  Sometimes, even in the past few years, I’ve tried to write a poem a day in April, but other than that, I have let my Muse down a few times – I try to keep my appointment with my Muse, though.

I would love to have a routine, but I’m a full-time faculty member at Bunker Hill Community College, and before that, I taught Middle School English at a suburban school, so when I write these days, it’s always with the sense that I’m stealing time from myself.
That said, my favorite time to write is in the depths of night.

My favorite place?  Usually my study, or the kitchen table.

Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?

That is almost impossible to answer.  I would say that images play a big role in my poems – but so do ideas, sounds, and emotions.  As to phrases?  I’m not so sure – I delight in words, but I like to produce them!  For me, sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and ideas are my inspirations.  Oh, and my dog, Holly!  She inspires me.

Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?

Another very hard one to answer:  Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Walter de la Mare, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, May Sarton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Milton, W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maya Angelou, Omar Khayyam, Philip Larkin, some Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, some Wallace Stevens, some Lucille Clifton, some Nikki Giovanni, Lewis Carroll, and of course, William Shakespeare. 

What excites you most about your new collection?

Another very hard one to answer:  Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Walter de la Mare, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, May Sarton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Milton, W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maya Angelou, Omar Khayyam, Philip Larkin, some Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, some Wallace Stevens, some Lucille Clifton, some Nikki Giovanni, Lewis Carroll, and of course, William Shakespeare. 

What excites you most about your new collection? (Significance of the title? Overarching themes? Process/experience of assembling it?) 

I was thrilled that Červená Barva Press published my first book, titled Fractured Lens. 

The title came to me, because of two things:
1. Of course, this crazy, broken world of ours, with our varied voices and different perspectives jostling and elbowing each other in the digital and physical world, all asking to be heard, to  be seen.  When I look around, I cannot help but see everyone’s perspective, and it can be confusing at times, and unifying at other times.  So, my vision is both whole and fractured.

2. The second reason is simple: A door between our home library (which is a converted porch, really) and the mud room had glass panels, and one day, we heard a loud, cracking sound, as of glass almost shattering.  My husband and I were in different rooms, and thought that the other had dropped a large glass jar, or something, but this was, clearly, a larger, diffuse, different sound.  When we converged in the space where we had heard it, we saw that the glass panels in the door had shivered into fractured lines, all radiating away from each other, but without breaking fully.  We liked the look of it so much, we kept it as it was.
Hence, my title Fractured Lens.

Here’s a picture I took of my face behind it:

I had hoped they could use it for the cover, but it didn’t have the kind of resolution they wanted, or something.  I’m rather fond of this picture, though!
As for overarching themes, I’m afraid I didn’t consciously think of any, but many of my poems seem to straddle a liminal place – both in this world, and the world of dreaming, of the spirit.

The process of compiling these was interesting, because I tried not to have too many poems talking about loss, or death, or sorrow, nor too many about nostalgia, or longing.  I also had some personal poems that were lyrical or descriptive, so I tried to assemble them with my own sense of what I’d like to see in a book – a blend of different elements, delicately balanced, to satisfy my poetic palate.

Select the cover to read more.