In a new interview series for "A Collection of Quaint Intensities", I talk to poets to discuss life, writing, and everything in between. Our third poet is Megha Harish, who describe themselves as "a queer writer and facilitator from Bangalore, India with a day-job in philanthropy."
Phoenix Tesni: I love that you do so much experimental work with the shape of poems. Can you let us know about the process and inspiration behind these?
Megha Harish: My favorite teacher of all-time (Jacob Sam-La Rose) did an exercise once where he showed us macrophotography (ie. super microscopically zoomed-in) of parts of the human body that went down to the cellular level. I was probably around 21 years old then. I hadn’t yet started looking for words to better describe my gender identity, but I did have a lot of more traditional feminist rage. I was in university, I had just gotten on birth control, I was doing lots of unlearning and relearning. So I felt compelled to write about estrogen and testosterone cells and noticed how different they were in shape. That visual prompt was the first time I wrote a pair of short poems in a “shape” and I loved it.
I’m a big fan of form in general, I often refer to the “magic of constraints” when teaching too. Newer ways of playing with poetic form appeal to me far more than meter and rhyme, and shapes are a fun and accessible way to begin experimenting.
There’s a Tishani Doshi poem called “Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers” that I absolutely adore. Not only is it an absolute banger of a title and poem, it’s also shaped like a menstrual cup! I stumbled upon it while flipping through her collection at a book fair and the shape of the poem is what caught my eye and made me buy the book. (She’s also written a longer piece for The Poetry Foundation, In Praise of Shape Poetry, in case anyone is interested in a bit of the history of shape poetry in our subcontinent)
PT: You identify strongly as a queer writer—it’s also reflected in your work. I see that you’ve run workshops for The Queer Writer’s room and that your work has been published in Queerabad’s Tilt and Gaysi. How have these experiences enriched your life as an artist and as a person?
MH: This is such an interesting observation, thank you Phee. It hasn’t really occurred to me much in recent times how front-and-center my queerness is online. Poetry was actually the reason I “came out on the internet” in the first place, actually.
I got picked to participate in Language Is A Queer Thing (LIAQT, a poetry exchange residency facilitated by the Queer Muslim Project) and while I was already out to all my friends and many of my colleagues and in most in-person spaces, LIAQT was a very high-visibility thing to participate in and I wanted to get to be proud of the work we did there, so there was no question of hiding it from anyone. The experience of finding community with other poets on that project, collaborating so closely with them, and combating some of my stage-anxiety with them, is one I can’t imagine having shared with anyone else. I was actually just texting two of my friends from the project a few minutes ago!
I also absolutely love facilitating in spaces that include (or are exclusive to) queer participants. They feel safer, more comfortable, and just a bit more relaxed overall. I think knowing that we all have bit of something in common really helps strip away layers of explanation and “coming out” that other spaces might require. It allows people to really get excited about poetry at a deeper level. I’ve been told by lots of my students that it’s also really meaningful for them to have a teacher who’s out-queer. I’m just about 30 and they already call me “Boomer” and an “elder queer” but despite that, I love being able to show them a little slice of what queer joy and possibility could look like.
Additionally, being a gender-unsure bisexual person in a relationship that might appear heteronormative to the outside world is another thing that pushes me to be loud with my identity. I don’t want to be erased by other people’s assumptions.
PT: We’d love to hear more about your dissertation and the women who inspired it.
MH: Oh my gosh, thank you for this question! I am always so excited to talk about them and don’t get to enough. So, I entered my MPhil degree with an over-ambitious idea about liberal arts degrees in Asia potentially perpetuating the colonial values of the Western “canon” on students, but in our first meeting, my supervisor (the incredible Prof. Shailaja Fennell) told me that was a PhD level project and I needed to come up with something simpler.
Education was my primary interest at the time, so we brainstormed a bit and she told me there had been an Indian woman in the 1930s who had studied at the college I was at. Finding Kamala Bhagvat’s name and signature in the college matriculation records was so thrilling—just the push I needed to get into archival research. As I got deeper into the research, we felt it would be even more interesting to make the dissertation a collective biography of three Indian women in the early 1900s who had fought a colonial system that only wanted them to study home sciences to go on to earn their own PhDs in the sciences abroad and return to India.
Those three women were E.K. Janaki Ammal, Kamala Bhagvat, and R. Rajalakshmi. They each went on to become the head of an institute in independent India—icons.
The dissertation is a bit long to share, but I wrote a shorter article about them and their work for The Life of Science in 2021, which is here.
PT: I enjoyed reading the article and can’t help but notice how you refer to her as “Kamala Bhagvat, later Sohonie”, instead of “Kamala Sohonie, nee Bhagvat”. There are so many such things that can be interpreted as linguistic microaggressions. I’m interested to know if you can think of more such cases—within the context of poetry or otherwise, and how you deal with, or challenge them in your own ways.
MH: Great question, thank you! I was very keen throughout my research to refer to Kamala (we’re best friends in my head) as “Bhagvat” because the Kamala I got to know had signed the Newnham College records with that name. It was still her family surname of course and power rests with fathers before husbands, but she studied with that name and I wanted her to first be recognised for all she accomplished then.
I stopped italicizing non-English words and phrases in my poems many years ago, whether they’re in Tamizh, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam or any other language.
I’m also resistant to reading poetry from the Western Canon for this reason and attempting to emulate those more “traditional” forms. I’ve written one sonnet ever, I think, in a workshop by the incredible R. A. Villaneuva, but I refuse to teach Shakespeare and Wordsworth. They may have done ground-breaking work and I’m sure I’m missing out by not studying Shelley in-depth, but my practice has been built on a foundation of contemporary poetry and experimental form (thank you Jacob), and that’s what I try to pass on to my students too. There are endless resources for people to learn about Tennyson by themselves on the internet, but fewer SlideShare courses on Terrance Hayes (alive! Dating Padma Lakshmi! Keeping it current) and Fatimah Asghar and Akhil Katyal.
PT: You’ve performed at such a spectacular variety of places. Tell us more about the performances and experiences you hold dearest!
MH: I always remember performances at which I’ve had loved ones show up to support really fondly. I’m very lucky though, because this has been most of them.
Two experiences of performing itself that I hold very dear are both performances that had tiny audiences. The first was in June 2022, at the British Council in Delhi, the first time I performed with Amani Saeed. We were later paired together on the project and did a bunch of writing and performing together. This first time though, we met only the day before our performance, and had about 24 hours to bring together and rehearse the set we’d been compiling on a Google Doc. I was super nervous but man, it was magic. So so so good. And such a beautiful omen of the partnership to come.
The second, more recent, performance that I’ve enjoyed was in November 2023, alongside a Gujarati folk band called The TAPI Project. They wrote an ethereal song called Mehsoos, and invited different artists to collaborate and perform with them as they toured the song. I wrote poetry and performed alongside them to a room that ended up being mostly my friends and family. Very daunting being on stage with such strong performers, but it was the most exhilarating experience. I love cross-disciplinary collabs, wish we all did more of them!
PT: I love the idea of cross-disciplinary collabs! I love experimenting with as many mediums as possible—I like visual art, songwriting-singing, photography-filmmaking, just about anything I can get my grabby little raccoon hands on. What other art-forms do you find yourself gravitating towards?
MH: I was actually just talking to my partner today about my favorite music x poetry album, Let Me Out My Room Please by Gabriel Jones (aka Bump Kin). He’s a friend, and the sweetest person, and did these recordings over 2018-19 and I think it’s the coolest thing. I tend to have extra admiration for art forms I’m more removed from and music is definitely one of those. I have zero rhythm and coordination too, so I have super high regard for folks who dance as well and weave that in with other forms. All the “stage” artforms: music, dance, film, theater, and even slam to some extent feel inaccessible or intimidating to me as an artist, though I love them as a viewer.
My personal zone of comfort and understanding is between words and visual art (of all kinds!), so that’s definitely where I gravitate.
PT: The art of poetry encapsulates so much. There’s the inspiration, the writing, the performance, the publishing. Which of these do you find yourself drawn to the most?
MH: The writing, hands down. If you’d asked 15 years ago, I might have said “the inspiration,” but I’ve come to learn that writing, like most other things, is a craft that requires discipline more than anything. I don’t have enough of it myself, but I know in my good phases and from watching other incredible writers that that’s what works. Similarly, I used to be really enamored by the idea of “publishing” as a teenager and student, but I now find teaching and the little bits of writing I do with others most fulfilling, irrespective of the public-facing outcome.
Performance is a space I entered with a lot of trepidation. The first two times I went to an open mic night, about a decade ago, I was so nervous, I read poems by others I admired and the audience were very sweet and supportive. When I finally read my own work, it was straight off my tumblr on my phone —the poem was about body hair and called “Chewbacca Girl.” I don’t find performing as nerve-wracking anymore but wouldn’t say it’s my strength. I love being on stage with people I love though, there’s a strength and comfort in a shared performance that’s very hard for me to feel on my own.
PT: You say you enjoy cooking! Can you share your best recipe—lavish, comfort, or in between?
MH: Being extremely Type A in most parts of my life, I’m actually spectacularly disorganized in the kitchen. I don’t bake because I can’t follow recipes at all! Not being from a traditional family structure, I didn’t really have anyone to turn to as a kid to learn how to cook from, and I’m also not a fan of YouTube tutorials for anything, so I figured a lot of it out with friends in college just based on vibes. I’m a big eater and a huge MasterChef Australia fan so some random things have just settled in my brain over the years. I also lived alone for most of the pandemic, during which I finally craved “home food” and had to learn how to make it off the internet.
I’d say the only recipe I regularly followed in that time was a simple, one-pot sambar recipe, because it came out so perfectly even on the first attempt. It’s from the mother of a friend-of-a-friend (a Malayali household).
PT: I’m doing a pass-it-on question at the end where each poet passes on a question to the next person being interviewed. Your question, from Tyler Auston Jones, is “When it’s all said and done, what do you want your words to say about you, and what do you hope they don’t say about you?”
MH: I’d like my words to show people that I loved other people wholly, cared about our world deeply, and tried to follow Mary Oliver’s Instructions for Living a Life.
I find it really challenging to write poetry in the face of ongoing injustice. I’ve never been someone who has been eloquent in rage, so in times of crisis, I tend to lean on the words of others and share those as widely as possible. I hope then that my words don’t say about me that I was an ostrich during war (w.r.t. Ila Kaminsky’s incredible poem, We Lived Happily During the War).
Overall though, I think it’s far more important what my words say to others about themselves and whether the words are able to provoke feeling and fit into their contexts somehow. It’s not really about me.
PT: What question would you like to pass on to the next person?
MH: What are some ideas your past selves have had that you don’t think you’re the right person to write anymore but you’re still oddly attached to?
Thank you for your time!
Megha Harish is a queer writer and facilitator from Bangalore, India with a day-job in philanthropy.
They are an alumnus of the Barbican Young Poets programme and have performed in spaces including the Tate Modern Gallery, Southbank Centre, Birmingham Hippodrome, and Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum. In 2022, as part of the British Council’s UK x India Poetry Exchange, Megha collaborated with five other queer poets from India and the UK to write for and perform at the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival in Birmingham (September 2022) and TATA Lit Live in Mumbai (November 2022).
Megha also really enjoys facilitation and has designed and run stand-alone workshops and longer courses in contemporary poetry for the University of Oxford, Azim Premji University, and The Queer Muslim Project.
Phoenix Tesni (she/her) is a poet & multidisciplinary artist. A Best Small Fictions finalist and Best of The Net nominee, her works also appear in Surging Tide, Limelight Review, Sage Cigarettes, Celestite Poetry, and many other places. Once she worked in hospitality management and teaching, now her life revolves around consuming, curating, and creating art. Her latest projects include “darling, mister graphophone”, a short experimental film that was selected for the International Bornova Shirt Film Days festival, and “Water”, a digital interactive fiction game. When she’s not immersed in creation, you will often find her watching a South Korean film, or petting a cat.
This series is currently on hold until further notice.
Comments