An Interview with Indran Amirthanayagam

Jonathan Harrington | September 2022

Indran Amirthanayagam

Indran Amirthanayagam was born in 1960 in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. He is a poet, essayist, and translator in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Hatian Creole. His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. His poem “Juarez” won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Mexico in 2006. Amirthanayagam has published twenty-two books thus far. His essays and op-eds have appeared in the Hindu, the New York Times, El Norte, Reforma, New York/Newsday, The Daily News, The Island, The Daily Mirror, and Groundviews (Sri Lanka).

Amirthanayagam has played with Non Jazz at various concerts where his poems were set to music by Omar Tamez. He directed Mexico’s first ever program dedicated to conversations with poets “Palabras En Vuelo: Poesia en Conversacion,” which appeared on cable television in Northern Mexico in 2006. Amirthanayagam is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow and a past recipient of an award from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations of Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia. He has also translated Jose Emilio Pacheco, Pauline LeRoy, Ana Guillot, among others from Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole.

Amirthanayagam publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions (www.beltwayeditions.com). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com). He hosts “The Poetry Channel” on Youtube: https://youtube.com/user/indranam. Amirthanayagam is a US diplomat, and he has served his adopted country in Haiti, Peru, México, Canada, Belgium, India, Ivory Coast, and Argentina.

Jonathan Harrington: We met in 2019 in Pachuca, Mexico at the Ignacio Rodriguez Galván Festival of Poetry where you presented me with your book Coconuts on Mars. When did you start writing poetry?

Indran Amirthanayagam: I wrote my first poem shortly after arriving in Honolulu in January 1975. I was fourteen then, and I was fascinated by my father’s poem “Eastern Man Western Man.” I wrote my own version, and gave it the ponderous title “Reflections on Western Man by Eastern Man.” I submitted the poem to Ka Wai Ola, Punahou School’s literary magazine, and it was accepted. My first publication!

Harrington: Your first book The Elephants of Reckoning was published in 1993. Tell us a little about your publishing history. Do you still face rejection and how do you handle it?

Amirthanayagam: Yes, I still get rejected. And it hurts still. But I now have twenty-two books published, and in different languages, so I feel I have crossed over the water, caught the ears and eyes of editors, entered some hallowed and not so hallowed spaces in magazines, and now am on the internet. I have arrived in a sense, a migrant, and I have been recognized.

Harrington: You are the most prolific poet I know. Writing several poems a day, every day. Tell us something about your writing schedule and process.

Amirthanayagam: I write when I wake up. With my coffee, after lunch, in the middle of the afternoon siesta I force myself awake and I run hungry and bug-eyed to the laptop. Seriously, I write sometimes several poems a day, sometimes not. I think the best time is late at night or early in the morning before the rest of the house and the world wakes up. Alastair Reid told me that he would limber up every morning by translating four or five poems. He would then go on with his writing day. I translate as well. But translating is exhausting for me because it is really writing the poem again in the receiving language. So, I write poems or I translate poems on any particular day. But writing is a game. You play tricks. You fake, and then you can sail into the end zone. I speak and write in five languages. I may be bone-tired in one but fresh as a skylark waking in another. Each language seems to occupy a different side of my brain. A very successful writing day would mean the draft of a new poem in each of these languages.

Harrington: As I mentioned, you are so prolific I wonder what percentage of your poems end up in books? How many stay in the desk drawer? How many are tossed out?

Amirthanayagam: I no longer have a desk drawer. My desk drawer has become the sent folder in Gmail. I write a poem and I send it to a few friends. When they read the poem the poem has achieved its end, found an audience. Most of my poems don’t get published. I have no idea how many are waiting to be put in books. I have lost poems as well. So, my filing system over the last several years has been the sent items folder. When I make a book, I go through those sent items, cut and paste and cut and paste again until I have the manuscript ready. Then I find the theme. Recently, I have been assembling a book of love poems, another of political poems, and another about the pandemic. There are so many poems about the pandemic that I don’t think my Covid book will ever be published. I wonder even if it should be published. But the love poems, yes, and the political poems, yes. They have shelf lives. They are community and heart matters. As for the virus, well, I am contradictory like Whitman. Or Eliot. I murder and create. And that is because I am human, with the potential to make and to destroy. We are in a battle to save the ecosystem from ourselves. We need to assure that the making wins. Make poems I say even if most of them will not be published. At least in books. But we should redefine the word publish. If the poem is spoken into the ear of one listener, if it is read by another in her email, if it is quoted by yet another in a voice mail to a friend, the poem has won. Memory has won. Goodbye, see you later forgetfulness, forgetting, disappearance, denial, loss and country.

Welcome migrant to your brave new existence. Welcome to all of your homes. Welcome.

Harrington: Your prolific output is reminiscent of the story about the poet William Stafford, winner of the National Book Award. As the story goes, Stafford would write a handful of poems in a day, send them off to magazine as he finished them without a self-addressed stamped envelope but with a note to the editor saying that if the magazine can’t use any of the poems then just throw them away, and he would write some more. He published some powerful poems but was criticized for writing too much. What would you say to someone who said that you write too much?

Amirthanayagam: Does the Sun send too much light? Do waves break too often on the shore? Do rosebuds open to the eyes of the beholder? Enough! Too much! is a proverb from Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” I say instead, who are you to cast the first stone? And I will write as many poems as my heart and mind conspire to concoct.

Harrington: Some of your books address specific environmental, social, or political issues. The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, was written in the aftermath of that devastating catastrophe that killed an estimated 200,000 people in Asia. Your book, Uncivil War, directly confronts (in two hundred pages of poetry) your own political struggle for the civil rights of Tamils in Ceylon during that country’s internecine blood-bath. Do you research these topics? If so, tell us a little bit about your research. Do you interview people, read accounts of these events?

Amirthanayagam: Yes, I research, I talk to eyewitnesses; I remember my own witness. In the case of Uncivil War, I wrote a lot of the book during a deeply traumatic year (2008 to 2009). I had gone to Sri Lanka to read from The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems. I had been invited to the Galle Literary Festival. Galle is a city in the south. While I was there, the Sri Lankan army, air force, and navy, with logistical support from Israel, China, and Pakistan in particular, and India and Europe—and the United States was not exempt from casting a blind eye to the government’s machinations (we were at the height of our War on Terror)—carried out the Northern offensive. The Sri Lankan government took advantage of that, labeling the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist group no different from others around the world, one that must be defeated. Putting aside the Tigers’ terror tactics, we were all hoodwinked by the government’s drowning of the Tamils’s legitimate dream of a nation. The Sri Lankan government shut the garage door and sprayed poisonous gas to kill the rats. They killed the civilians as well, bombed hospitals, tents, tens of thousands were annihilated. The poems speak of these atrocities. I wrote them after reading news reports, watching cell phone videos, investigative journalism. I followed news in different languages. I believe the poet is a witness even if far away from the bombs. Of course, I have my own searing experiences of the war. I remember when a huge bomb went off on Flower Road in Colombo, and the impact caused the ground to shake and my grandmother fell down in her home blocks away. I saw my grandmother fall. I remember her education by Irish nuns. The Irish Question was her question as well. Tamils. Irish. Independence struggles. I have been writing in all of them now for years. 

Harrington: You have recorded two albums of Haitian music. Can you describe that process?

Amirthanayagam: Actually, one album Rankont Dout and two music videos They Died Not In Vain, and another called Tan Zaboka Te Fini. I arrived in Port Au Prince as the Public Affairs Counselor of the US Embassy. I had been fascinated by Haiti for a long time, my imagination stirred by The Black Jacobins of C.L.R. James, the first black revolution, the second in America. I had already experienced writing poetry beyond English—in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. So, learning Haitian Creole, and then writing poetry in that language made sense. I was lucky. On arriving at the embassy, I took a Haitian class with Alex LaGuerre, a brilliant poet and novelist in Haitian and French. In class, one on one with him, one poet to another, I wrote a poem with my limited vocabulary. He then corrected the poem and responded with one of his own. This exchange went on for a few classes, and then I realized that we had started a dialog in poetry. This dialog became eventually the book Pwezi a kat men (Four Handed Poetry). My life in Creole, in Haitian, had come out of the womb. Two years later, as I began to face the reality of my departure (my tour would last three years), I felt a deep, piercing nostalgia. I was at home on the island. I was in love on the island. It was hard to imagine leaving. I began to write about what I loved. And that led eventually to the book Sur l’ile nostalgique published by L’Harmattan in 2020 and the album in Hatiian Rankont Dout. To make the album, I got together with musicians I had heard in different clubs and festivals. I reached out to Lafrance Cisco, Gogeri LaForest, Titi Congo, and Donaldzie Theodore, and I formed a band, hired a producer and a studio, and we met there in the late afternoons to jam and record the songs—the poems sung on the album. I later made one of those songs into a music video Tan Zaboka Te Fini. (The Avocado Season Is Over). It is a very sad and beautiful song of leave taking and preminotory as well. I speak in the song of a girl who marries across the water. The girl and loss were imagined, but they became real later on. Poem making is ultimately a settling of accounts, the telling of a history, the marking of land, to say here I stepped and here I loved. Rankont Dout means “meeting in August.” It also means “meeting with doubt.” I am grateful for the love and force that the island and its people and culture have given me to overcome my private losses. I am grateful for the love that inspired the poems of Sur l’ile nostalgique, the songs of Rankont Dout, and the poems of Blue Window (Ventana Azul)

Harrington: How has your connection to music informed your poetry?

Amirthanayagam: At Haverford College, eighteen-years-old, steeped in British music, and its latest variant—punk, new wave, an angry young man, a sad young man—I began to write lyrics about the powerful of the world, the ones who had trodden on me, who had tried to take my power. I was immature, and I ascribed to powerful women my woes. So, I wrote about Margaret Thatcher, the Queen of Sheba, and “Cleopatra.” Then I wrote about an odd (at that time) ecological phenomenon....snow falling on April Fool’s Day... and I wrote “Snowman” with obvious but unintentional double entendres. “Snowman. Heaven’s trash can. Welcome to my snow; I’ve got you no matter what you do.” That song survives still. We have a half dozen recorded in the refrigerator room at the dining center at Haverford College in 1980. The only record along with a few photos of the fundamental shift in my poetic life, when music, dance, and poetry met and made love. The band was called The End. I founded the band with my roommate Sigurt Vitols, and then we invited Richard Straus to join, and we completed our group with Kenny Budowski on drums and, at first, Doug Birdsell then Charlie Sturrock on bass. Like the Kinks, we went through two base players in the early days. But we were together for only half a year before the band wanted to play covers and pushed the experiment in original music out into the cold. I froze, turned into myself, and became the most solitary of poets. I then started to ask women out on dates. Eventually, I found company in the last year of college. We embraced outdoors, in Quaker graveyards, a delicious meeting of eros and thanatos, of love and death.

Harrington: How did you react to recent developments in Haiti: the earthquake, the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, and the recent hurricane?

Amirthanayagam: Haiti is my home. Just like Ceylon. Peru. Argentina. England, and in the United States, Oahu, New York, and now Rockville. I have many homes, many lands where I have left a portion of my heart. So, I was shocked by the assassination of the president, and deeply saddened as well. The same feelings came up with the earthquake, the second major one the country has suffered in eleven years. And yes, the hurricane too. This country is in the gun-sight of all kinds of malicious and furious winds. But the Haitian people have amazing fortitude. They rise up. They do not give up. But they need support and help. Give to local organizations. Direct your funds to hands on the ground not the mega-donors with high overheads.

Harrington: In addition to twenty-two published books of poetry, you also have a large following on Facebook and other social media, frequently posting your newly-written poems. How is social media, in your opinion, changing the nature of traditional publishing?

Amirthanayagam: I am not sure I have a following but I have the proverbial 5,000 Facebook friends. Usually more, but I have to keep eliminating some. I should start a fan page and see how many followers I get. Thanks for the idea. Social media is obsessive, attractive, gossipy, and necessary... sweets that must be limited in case you become consumed. I enter Facebook several times a day, Twitter daily, and Instagram less than daily, but I am there, too. Traditional publishing is changing as I write. Now there is Substack which champions the serial novel, the serial adviser, and Salman Rushdie has joined. And where Salman goes, Indran follows eventually. But I am a poet not a novelist. And the poet lives only when the poem is shared. So, social media is one way of sharing quickly. But I am a lover of the book. I have published twenty-two of them, and have two more on the way. I will write books until I evaporate. Social media has democratized the literature space but the elites still make elite decisions. There are “A” lists and “B” lists and off the lists. There are poets who write memorable musical verse, and others who write turgid prose, and they put a ribbon on it and call it the prose poem. (Forgive me true prose poets.) All of us need to teach, to guide, and to make poets understand that their art is not a minor irrelevant matter. It can change hearts and minds. It can overthrow dictators. So write. But learn how to write well. Adopt the models of the greats, of Cavafy, Yeats, Castellanos, Plath, Neruda, Hikmet, Blake, Ginsberg, and Sharon Olds.

Harrington: You also do many live readings, Zoom readings, radio interviews; you edit the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, codirect the translators association DC-ALT, produce the spoken word series Poets & Writers Studio International and Poetry at the Port. You also write a weekly column “La Voix du Port” for the newspaper Haiti En Marche in which you present a poem you have written in Haitian Creole or French, and provide your own translation into English. You write a similar column in Spanish for the newspaper El Acento in the Dominican Republic. I think of you as very much a public poet. Is that a fair assessment?

Amirthanayagam: That is right. A public poet. Like Neruda or Paz or Yeats. Politics is key, the Greek root of the word, polis, community. Politics. The business of the community. A community matter. Like the environment for example, the air we breathe, the forests we cut down, the glaciers turning brown. Politics, yes a matter of votes, economics, human rights, animal rights. Write about your brothers and sisters. And other living beings on this multi-dependent, fragile ecosystem we call Earth. But it should really be called Ocean. Eighty percent of it is water. And there are worlds within worlds to discover in the depths. And we may never discover their secrets because we are starving the surface, depriving it of oxygen, creating dead zones, deserts in the middle of the ocean.

Harrington You head up Poetry at the Port in Silver Spring, Maryland, and edit magazines, a YouTube channel, and host live and virtual readings. How has the pandemic affected that aspect of your career?

Amirthanayagam: It has made me a talking head on video. It has brought me friendships sealed through virtual windows. It has shown me the world distilled in somebody’s face, in her living room. The living room, the size of the world, seen on a screen. The pandemic has made a mockery of in-person events, and has added a delicious but deeply nostalgic and regretful feel to an actual kiss or hug. Of course, now we rub elbows but if vaccinated, if in love, we might venture towards a kiss on the cheek. What an almost Victorian world the pandemic has created. The pandemic has meant I sell less books, certainly, but ironically, I reach more people via zoom. I am the most well-known poet with the least number of books sold. I contribute to this by offering poems for free through The Poetry Channel on YouTube. Subscription is free. The poets who send their videos do so out of love and, yes, need. Immortality certainly as YouTube is likely to survive floods, earthquakes, forest fires. But the explosion of the Sun. Well, by then we would have emigrated to another planet, YouTube a chip in our brains.

Harrington: What poets would you say have influenced your work?

Amirthanayagam: Pablo Neruda. His Book of Questions, Extravagaria, 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair, The Captain’s Verses, Residence on Earth, Isla Negra A Notebook, Elemental Odes. There are almost 3,000 pages of poetry much of it breathtaking. And I have not yet mentioned “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” which is part of Canto General. Yeats. His late poems “What Then,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Politics,” as well as “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Easter 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and the glorious early poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and much more, the Crazy Jane poems. Yeats is a master craftsman. T.S. Eliot. His “Waste Land” and “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are fundamental. Same for Four Quartets. And he wrote amusing poems about cats. Then there is Constantine Cavafy, a great among greats. His “God Abandons Anthony,” “Expecting the Barbarians,” “Days of 1903,” and so much more. And the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, also a great among greats. Read his “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” and “Straw Blond.” Dylan Thomas: “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Sylvia Plath, her “Lady Lazarus” taught me rhythm, and audacious and startling imagery—the Nazi lampshade. I did it first when I was ten; I did it so well, it felt real.

Harrington: Who are some of your favorite poets writing today?

Amirthanayagam: There are so many that I am bound to offend someone by leaving him/her out. Some American favorites who have passed on include Jack Hirschman, Stephen Dunn, James Tate, Sylvia Plath. There are a number of contemporary poets I dearly love.

Harrington: You write in five different languages. Do you find that one particular language is more suited to a particular theme? For example, your latest book, Ventana Azul (Blue Window) was written in Spanish, and translated into English by Jennifer Rathbun. It is a book of love poems or poems about love. It is hard to think of a serious contemporary poet who has written on that subject recently. Do you think Spanish is more conducive to this type of poem?

Amirthanayagam: Spanish is a beautiful language in which to love. As are French and Portuguese. These are romance languages, made to whisper in the ear, to coddle on the tongue. Haitian is a language of love as well, of its energy and rhythms, of its body in motion, hips and buttocks in sway to the konpa. English produced Shakespeare and Keats. And Donne in love with his three-personed God. Yes, love is not the subject of the most fashionable poets today. But then not long ago Li Young Lee wrote The City in Which I Love You. And today I have published Blue Window. I also have a manuscript of love poems in English that is not yet published. I hesitate to say any one of the languages I know is better suited to the love poem or to any other theme. But a casual sifting through my work by a polyglot critic will find that my poems of war, in Uncivil War, resonate with savage precision in English.

Harrington: Why do you not write in Tamil? Was English your first language?

Amirthanayagam: English and Tamil were my twin mother tongues. But my mother spoke to me more in English, and my father as well. I also knew Sinhalese as a child. But I studied in Tamil. Then, as an eight-year old boy, I left with my family for London. I never spoke Tamil or Sinhalese again for that matter. I believe that the shock of landing, of assimilating quickly was responsible. I remember telling myself that I would never say another word of Tamil. It must have been after receiving some filthy verbal abuse in London. But I am not sure. As I answer you I think of some basic words in Tamil, thani, water, anna brother, thambi, little brother, akka, sister, thanga, little sister. And I remember the Ceylonese anthem sung in Tamil while my grandfather played the piano. That anthem is no longer allowed at official functions in that island, which has turned a paradise for zealotry and ethnic arrogance in government. Two steps forward, one step back. It applies to the United States, and it applies more extremely to the back and forth of politics in my birth island.

Harrington: You follow in the line of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and other poets and writers who have served their countries as diplomats. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa ran for President of Peru and Pablo Neruda considered running for president of Chile before supporting his friend Salvador Allende. Neruda also represented Chile in a variety of diplomatic posts. Octavio Paz served as Mexico’s Ambassador to India, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. You have represented your adopted country (USA) in Peru, Mexico, Canada, Cote d’Ivoire, Belgium, Argentina, Haiti, and India. But you are an exception among American poets. Why do you think Latin American governments honor their poets and writers by making them representatives of their countries while North American poets are rarely (if ever) given diplomatic posts?

Amirthanayagam: Travel used to be difficult and expensive (it has become so again during this pandemic). Diplomacy became a way to travel and earn a reasonable salary and to enjoy certain protections under the Vienna Convention, and a privileged view into the society of the host. To be a published author is a great badge of honor in Latin America. Rewarding authors with diplomatic posts bodes well for the government, shows that the government is committed to sending its best minds as its representatives.

Harrington: You are not shy about writing about current events. Obviously you believe that poetry is an appropriate medium for expressing ideas about events that are happening now. Some might argue that poetry should be above politics or current events. Or that some of your poems are so topical that many years from now, few would understand the context of those poems. Can you comment on these issues?

Amirthanayagam: I too wonder for a moment whether a Martian, or some future human, would know the story of Prince Andrew, or that bombs fell on a people at Nandikadal. But the poem is grounded in time and space and memory. It is an act of memory, inscribing names and images and stories into the collective consciousness, and I would suggest, conscience. We all know that a Holocaust took place in the ’30s and during the Second World War, don’t we? That other exterminations of human communities have taken place since, in Rwanda, Sri Lanka. We can debate terms. The poems help. They are aids to historians, just like newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, poems presented on The Poetry Channel I run on YouTube. And then there are the deniers, of holocausts, of vaccines, the luddites of every generation, the invaders of the seat of democracy. We need to call their bluff, write our poems in their faces and about them as well. But we want to heal the fractured polity. We want to be priests to everybody. So, poets must work despite the idea that poetry should be above and below and outside of politics. I disagree with Auden, that poetry makes nothing happen. I disagree and I use poetry in my debate preparation. And I want to win the debate. I want to say “you are no Jack Kennedy.” I want to then lead the people not into the sea but into building bonds that will cause greater and more fitting harmony.

Harrington: Do you write in any other genres besides poetry?

Amirthanayagam: I have written essays, plays, short stories, song lyrics. But the stories were written a long time ago, and they were more like poetic sketches. The plays were real dramas. I may try my hand at making dramas again. I may even try now to write a memoir, to write everything I remember in poetic prose.

Harrington: Why do you think so few people in America actually read poetry, while the number of creative writing programs grows, open mics flourish, Zoom readings have become popular, and the list goes on. In fact, you host your own reading series near Washington DC. If so few people read poetry, how do you account for all this activity? Is anyone out there listening?

Amirthanayagam: I don’t know the statistics. But I do know that more people read and write poetry today than ever before. Just look at the American population, the world population. Statistics insists on these cheerful realities. So poetry is not dead. It will never die. But I agree that it is not on the front pages of American media. But it is everywhere on the net. And it is the raison d’etre of The Poetry Channel which I direct on YouTube.

Harrington: Speaking of Zoom, do you think perhaps the pandemic has actually created a new medium and audience for poetry via Zoom readings?

Amirthanayagam: It has created a couch potato audience for poetry. You can get your pretzels and tea and sit back and watch a poet recite through your Zoom window. And if you are connected to poets through social media, you will receive invitations almost daily for some reading or another in some once forsaken corner of this great now connected globe.

Harrington: Tell us about your revision process. Can one revise too little? Too much?

Amirthanayagam: One can revise too little. And one can revise too much. “Cut half of the first draft out,” Allen Ginsberg once advised me. I say you must at least revise, let the poem sit for a bit and then go back to it with fresh eyes and ears.

Harrington: What would you say has been your most successful book not just in terms of sales but in terms of critical response and reader response?

Amirthanayagam: The Elephants of Reckoning, my first book. But one is always closest to one’s most recent book. I really suspect that Blue Window (Ventana Azul) will capture hearts and minds, and be recited by lovers around the globe.

Harrington: You have an undergraduate degree in English Literature and a graduate degree from Columbia University in journalism. What do you think of these creative writing programs such as a PhD in Creative Writing?

Amirthanayagam: I used to be skeptical of them. I did not want my metaphors to be homogenized. But I am more sanguine now. I value feedback. And the great benefit of a writing program is the chance it gives to learn from discussing a poem, from examining it on the operating table, the class a team of surgeons.

Harrington: What are the actual mechanics of your writing process? Pencil, pen, paper, and later transcribed to computer, etc.

Amirthanayagam: I used to write on paper with a pen or a pencil, in notebooks. Then I moved on to writing on laptops, desktops, on smart phones. I still turn to paper to jot down notes, to scribble ideas. But my writing for some time has been typing into a computer.

Harrington: How has being a translator affected your own work?

Amirthanayagam: Translation is writing the poem again in the receiving language. It creates synapses and associations that lead to new poems; in my case, in all my languages. Translation is a service to another poet’s work, translating it from the original language to another. It is also a service and inspiration to one’s own poetry. Everybody involved, and every poem, benefits.

Harrington: If you could give aspiring poets some advice what would you tell them?

Amirthanayagam: Read first and copiously and widely. Then write. Then read again. Then write. A tango between reading and writing. Each of these leads to thinking. And you need to think to find the words and the meters to make the poem.

Harrington: Indran Amirthanayagam, thank you for taking the time to share your ideas with us today.

Amirthanayagam: Thanks to you Jonathan for unleashing a geyser of reflection. You remember Pound writing to Whitman in “A Pact”: “Let there be commerce between us.” I say to you as we speak near the 20th anniversary of the event that defined our political lives, 9/11, “let us roll.” 

Excerpt from Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant

Migrant Poem 

We need your poems now. We need to hear 
the songs of your migrant heart. We need 
to understand the meaning of your voyage 
throughout the planet, each trip unique, 
each trip the prodigal feast. Who are we? 
You, me, the neighbor, the friend up the 
road, up country, on the other side of the 
world. Who are we? Those who believe in 
the beautiful, foul, yet saving grace of the 
word. Who are we? We sing and boogie.
Move the word through its steps, to the 
pulse in our bodies, to the last breath. We 
dance the song of Siva, the song of Roland,
the Song of Songs. We carry history on our
backs, in our hearts. We are Tamils and 
Armenians, Jews and Palestinians. We are 
all people who have moved, who are moving 
now, through these migrant states. 
We write poems for our tribes, making one tribe of 
every beating heart sending blood through 
the veins of one earth. We are the first and 
the last. And we are singing, dancing, 
writing now. We are your friends,
neighbors, unknown, left out. Let us open 
our minds and hearts wide. Let us admit all
the migrant states to this feast. Let this feast
become a poem, a pill, that we can eat every 
day. Let us say hello, aloha and leave this 
party and never say goodbye. Let us meet 
again as soon as the word flies, the heart 
opens, the bird sings in the morning, the
world wakes up from this pandemic dream 
alive and ready to move, to make,
to fill, and to rename the void.

Notes for the Days After 

I will not allow the virus to seep into every conversation,
every glance out of the window, every reading of the news. 
And it would be most unseemly to publish an entire book 
of Covid poems even if I have written a rather large number. 
I will clean the inbox, throw some into the bin. Yes, there are 

poets defined by circumstances beyond their own small steps.
Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth foretold his demise 
and the end of a generation. But the human race survived. 
Now there are many asymptomatic carriers and untouched 
ones. And there are already a lot of dead and a lot more 

emotionally scarred. And yes, hotels on my paradise island 
will become vast halls for visits by wind and elephants. 
Or the sea. Every grand illusion gets its tsunami one day. 
That is the fatalist’s view. It has not been contradicted. 
Look at how swiftly the virus has changed our culture, 

our ways of greeting, our decoupling. But after the war 
has ended, after we have put this quarantine into a back 
pocket in our collective mind, we will venture out again 
into the forever-changed world to see who is moving 
about, who has come out of the dark night, alive.

Excerpted from Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant by Indran Amirthanayagam. Copyright © 2022 by Indran Amirthanayagam. 

Reprinted with permission from Broadstone Books. All rights reserved. www.broadstonebooks.com

Jonathan Harrington has published twenty books. His most recent collection of poems is Lift up the Stone: The Gospel According to Jonathan (bilingual English/Spanish). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He was recently awarded the International Medal of Culture and Art from México.