K. K. Srivastava: Poetry stems from perplexity

“Poetry is an exacting genre, a thinker’s paradise: those who prefer to quench their thirst with the water from the glass filled from Lethe’s wharf cannot write poetry,” says Indian Civil Servant and poet K. K. Srivastava in this interview for Kitaab.

Srivastava is a poet with three poetry collections–Ineluctable Stillness (2005), An Armless Hand Writes (2008) and Shadows of the Real (2012). Adolf P. Shvedchikov, a Russian poet who has translated Shadows of the Real into Russian, interviewed Srivastava regarding his books.

In your poetry, what are the main themes?

K. K. Srivastava: Unlike fiction, no poet proceeds with or on premises. An honest confession on my part would be to admit that when my poems get written, irrespective of their shape and form, they defy any logical sequencing and symmetries; the unevenness is important. But later I spot themes in them and I wonder if this is a correct process. Still I consider it as an adequately equipped methodology to detect later what is invisible earlier. Ephemeral and the unconscious are as important as real. Time is also a character in most of the poems in as much as it acts as a lighthouse with turning signals with periodic flashes. It is through time that many themes in my poems-longer ones in particular seek themselves. Besides, I have also dealt with relationship between whole and parts, man-woman relationship, dreams, emotions and emotional distortions.