Purvi Shah seeks to inspire change through her work as a non-profit consultant, anti-violence advocate, and writer. She won the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award for her work fighting violence against women and recently directed Together We Are New York, an Asian American poetry project responding to the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Her book, Terrain Tracks, was nominated for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award. Find her work at http://purvipoets.net, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah/, or @PurviPoets.
Her poem "Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again." appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.
Here, Purvi Shah talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the push and pull of lines, the process of paper to web page, and the many events that culminate to create one single poem.
1. What was the process behind writing “Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.”?
This poem begins in gates.
I first wrote it on July 25, 2012. Some of the gates of that time I unfasten here:
- A summer collaboration – with poets April Naoko Heck, Sahar Muradi & Zohra Saed – on gates as they relate to histories, passages, cities, and our own human transformations;
- My devouring of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, essays by Jane Hirshfield;
- My finishing the first pada and starting the second in The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali by Edwin F. Bryant –– accompanied by active asana practice that week;
- Planning a celebration for a pivotal birthday (think: excitement/vexations spectrum);
- An old flame, who after perfidy, connected with me on social media (WHAT?!? and forgive me my own net stalking/mixed messages to the universe); and,
- My restlessness of spirit and search for THE RIGHT ONE or as I wrote in my journal that day, “I have pulled down the gate & am…a young girl alight…towards my true destiny.”
In this swirl of the day’s gates, an image of Cerberus popped into my head.
“Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.” streamed forth as my solution for not only escaping the hellhound but for rebirth; enacting the rough work of closing and seeding new directions; and, moving beyond the space of regret, re-tracing errors, and enticing detours to the path you know you must take, the path that makes future. This movement from fear to active faith.
Perhaps on the subway to a Kundiman salon where I was reading that 25thevening, I wrote the poem’s first draft as outpouring. Upon review in the next few days and weeks, I altered order and added a few lines. You can see the original and my elements of change (prior to the computer variations) here.
2. One of the things that I think poetry allows a writer to do is break open language that we are already familiar with, in this case, the phrase, “beating a dead dog,” which you’ve rejected. What about this phrase prompted its investigation?
For the reasons above, I had been thinking about how the past can dog you. How we allow the past to dog us. At that moment, I wanted to rise and see if there could be a way to make the future your dog. I sought to break the pattern of cause and effect, human binding through temporality – i.e. a future delinked from pasts. Envision fresh potential to actualize it. Given I sought a new view, the language too had to be a new vista on the familiar: perhaps a slight off-rhythm of sorts, a genesis leading to unexpected births, root bearing radical bloom. Poetry becomes palpable not only when you can see newly but rather when you can grasp that sight – as if it were a bird about to fly from your hand & you can watch and accompany this flight. With “Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.”, I aimed to defamiliarize a phrase and the phrasings of our lives. To bring death alive. To live from the yes that arises from a no.
3. I love how you push and pull the density of your lines and stanzas throughout your poem. Could you talk about this poems form? Did it come organically or in the revisions?
Yay! I love the push & pull of the lines too: thank you! As you can see from my snapshot above, the form came through mainly as I transferred the poem from page to computer. But, for me, the form was embedded already, even though the first draft may look like a paragraph or prose poem. Through the shape of the poem, I sought to enact a sense of gates (long lines) as well as movement (shorter lines) & errors or possibilities (the drifted lines near the right margin). That risk of movement, chance knowings/outcomes.
The published poem is slightly different from my final version. Due to the form of the webpage and its line-length limits, I sliced my second and third lines into three lines (lines 2-4 as published). In my version of the poem, these three lines are two tracks that run across a standard size page. They enact a barrier and the poem enacts a departure from that barricade. Essentially, the push & pull is even more dramatic.
In the past few years, I’ve been working across the page with lines/right margins to embody movement, flight, freedom, departures. I hope the form encourages readers to feel less stable and yet more open – perceive their ability to forge new ground. Perhaps this is my yogic poetics. Though only you can know (and tell me) if such felt reality sparks true for you.
4. What books have been surprising you recently?
Most powerful to me recently have been books in the making. Through the Poets House Emerging Fellowship, I had the great privilege of reading and offering feedback on manuscripts by some poets in our group. The dynamic poems I encountered – so different in voice, form, and preoccupations than my own – continually broadened my sense of poetry, my sense of what is possible, my understanding of what matters. I hope these powerful works will reach you and the wider public soon!
In the arena of published works, lately I’ve been relishing the profound layerings of Srikanth Reddy, the threadings of Lee Ann Brown, the questionings/solutions of Evie Shockley, and the bold heart of Joy Harjo. And I’ve been raptured again by the work of Mirabai: I strive for my own work to have such fire, grace, grip, and soul-speech.
5. What else have you been writing?
Desire. In my writing, I return to desire – which encompasses longing, humor, joy, the world.
In addition to now & then tweeting poems @PurviPoets & my Monday Facebook poetry status updates, I have been writing towards my next collection – a series of poems focusing on women’s desire, social status, and being through re-imaginings from three figures of Indian iconography: Mira, Saraswati, and Maya. You can hear one of the early Mira poems I wrote – and another will be published in Quiddity later this year. I’m excited to be stitching the wisdom of “ancestors” in new terrains, to be writing in conversation with cosmos.
I’ve also been exploring writing poems with more humor and feisty attitude (bringing more of myself into the poems!). These recent poems explore the injury sustained by an Ecuadorian nanosatellite or near-lynched mannequins or unwittingly smiting a mosquito with my breast. These days, I’m generally working the line between the sacred and the profane, the reverent and irreverent, surrender and willing change. It is a fine line to walk.