by Sheryl Lee
I attended Tembusu College’s Student’s Tea – a sort of informal chit-chat session where students can invite a guest to share his/her experiences with the rest of the college – with Pooja Nansi as the chosen guest that night. Having been taught and lectured by her in Temasek Junior College before, her face was a familiar sight and her snarky humour needed no introduction. Starting off the session with a cursory glance around the room and remarking: “My popularity here is a farce! Half of you are my ex-students…” – which incited guilty laughs from the audience.
She then proceeded to introduce her latest poetry collection, “Love Is An Empty Barstool”:
This collection is on emotionally constipated men (“one of which I’m about to marry” she adds with a chuckle), and the title is from a Charles Bulowsky poem. “It’s beautiful, this line… someone’s either left you or you’re waiting for someone to turn up”. Going on to explain her collection, Nansi muses that it largely deals with her anxiety at hitting 30 and her coming to terms with being alone. She also hints at the book as being a “return” remark to her mother’s endless conversations (and nagging!) about getting married.
To all the poetry-writing hopefuls out there, she advises: “Sometimes I edit the poem 8-9 times… We have to look at the repetition in words, how to put the best words in the best order… Do pauses make the line more meaningful? Substitute adjectives, remove unnecessary words… For instance, in the line “I sat down today”, we don’t really need ‘down’, unless ‘down’ is a central idea in the poem. I don’t actively think of devices when writing, unless I’m experimenting with them, or if I need to cut down on a particular device.” Indeed, it is hard to make the words in your poetry sound like the way it is supposed to sound – here’s where her advice on free-writing comes in handy: “Sometimes, when you’re unable to write anymore, just shut your inner editor out and do free-writing – you’ll be surprised at the amount of quality work that comes out from that.”
Speaking about the right timing to read her poems, she recounts – “You know the feeling you get when you’re at a bar, and you’ve had just enough alcohol to be in a happy place? It’s a delicate balance… one more cup and you’ll have had too much. Well, this is when I like to perform”. Unfortunately, when she started performing her poetry with the guitar, we hadn’t got to the wine yet – but it made me teary just the same. Nansi’s poems are very honest and confessional; they come from a deeply personal place. However, she assures us that she does not feel as though her privacy has been ‘violated’ or ‘infringed on’ when people read her poetry, because different people take away different things from each poem. In that sense, her poem is still her, but is no longer ‘her’ anymore. This struck me as really true: poetry is not a dead thing, but a living, breathing thing. No two people can read the same book the same way.
“Sometimes the blues / can make the kisses of a wrong man / feel like a healing”
Perhaps the words that resonated within me the most were on her musings about loss; loss is always with you, in your blood (“like the blood-jet”, a reference to Sylvia Plath). While the collection is bleak, the poems are intertwined – we have to lose someone to find someone new, and in the process of losing, find out how far we can go and how strong we can be. In that sense, loss is not all that depressing after all.