Musings: From the Valley to the Seaside - An Interview with Siddhartha Menon

Musings: From the Valley to the Seaside - An Interview with Siddhartha Menon

Siddhartha Menon has lived for several years at the Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, as student, teacher and principal. Three collections of his poems have been published and he is currently working on a fourth. Siddhartha visited Manipal Centre for Humanities in January 2019 and conducted several informal, interactive sessions on the craft of poetry with the Bachelors and Masters students currently enrolled in the programs here.

The following interview was conducted over email by Laya Kumar, currently a Bachelor’s student at MCH. She was taught literature and poetry by Siddhartha during her years at Rishi Valley as a student.

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LK: So, the first question has to do with Rishi Valley. You have spent a good part of your life there as a student, teacher and principal. Would you say that it has influenced your poetry and you as a poet?

SM: It is an interesting question, I have never thought about it. But it is in Rishi Valley that I first got interested in poetry, though I was sceptical about it. I used to have this question that I would ask our literature teachers - What is the purpose of poetry? If somebody has something to say, why can’t they say it in prose? And in a way that question has remained with me, and continues to be important to me. Because each time you are writing a poem, you are so implicitly dealing with why you are writing whatever you are writing in a particular way. Or it may be that you have something in mind that is very clear and needs to be said, which is usually not the case for me, and so this becomes a problem.

Anyway, that question began when I was in Rishi Valley. Over the years in Rishi Valley, teaching literature has stimulated in many ways my thinking about it, my need to be clearer about it, including about the writing process. So that is another thing; as a teacher, you are looking at poetry more closely, thus the process of writing and the process of teaching are connected in some way, maybe more fundamentally - and this has to do with Krishnamurti; I think central to the Krishnamurti schools is the need to be more inwardly aware, to sharpen your capacity for attention,

53 Chaicopy | Vol. III | Issue I

was easier, a letting go.

And now, after all this time, I am still wary of letting go, of missing a step coming down, or being toppled. I am less emphatic about accomplishment, less likely to pronounce death.

I wonder how she is faringnow, after all this time,on stairs.”

60 Yours Truly