Anil Petwal is a writer from Dehradun,India.His writing has been published in several global online and print magazines like Outlook India,The Punch Magazine,The Hooghly Review, The Provenance Journal,Lavender Lime Literary,The Ayaskala etc. His poems have been chosen to feature in The Yearbook Of Indian Poetry 2022 and The Yearbook Of Indian Poetry 2023. He has also translated the poems of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and the poems of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska for Aadharshila, a Hindi magazine published in Nainital,India. He can be reached on X , formerly Twitter, on @IamAnilpetwal. On the work front, he is a public servant, posted presently as Additional Commissioner( Labour) with the Governement of Uttarakhand.
You can read A Dream of the Dream City in the January 2025 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
This poem began as residue of a memory from a movie I had watched long back. Traveling one summer to attend an official meeting in New Delhi, the protagonist in the movie stays at a friend’s home in a newly-built massive residential complex. He is struck by the huge way technology and extravagance has permeated these new homes in the hyper urban spaces of New India. To him it clearly is a shift from the way of living in more traditional, smaller cities elsewhere. In these new spaces–the dream cities of the post-globalization India–people are more ambitious than ever, hungrier for novelty, for newer forms of consumption that separated them from the preceding generations of Indians and also their own peers in smaller towns. There is something dystopian about this lavish display of wealth and power, a kind of abnegation of our older, more rooted ways.
Needless to say that with any memory one is not writing about the memory per se but the impression it produces. Of course imagination gets to play its own game too, alchemizing several memories, exaggerating or diminishing their impression to produce the final work. So it was with this piece too.
The catastrophic end with the angry river devouring every pretty thing that the city owns is allegorical, symptomatic of the chaos that eventually awaits a skewed world.
Why was the poetic form the best for this particular piece of work?
The memory of the images, the feeling they bred was, in a way, a poem in becoming. As in most cases this deep feeling always leads to a quick jotting down of the first impressions. The longer the feeling stayed with me, the more it took the shape of a lyrical exposition. It was an organic thing, a seed that had its birth in the form it finally took.
Is there a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as touchstone for you?
There are several, but the one that comes to mind the most is Joseph Brodsky’s last volume of poems in English, ‘So Forth’.
How do you revise your work?
I don’t always revise the first draft immediately but whenever it is compelling enough to do so, I revisit it after completion. I read it over and over again in my head to get the hang of the rhythm. Then with a certain idea, that always seems to decide the tone of the poem, I alter the length of the sentences if needed or decide if an image/ sentence is not needed and should be done away with in entirety or must be replaced by another. Often the process takes days but there are times when comparatively lesser time yields satisfactory results. It boils down to the genuineness or completeness of a feeling/idea, as opposed to trying to create something with an idea/ image/ feeling that isn’t bone-deep yet.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
Time is a big constraint and since I don’t always have the unrushed state of mind to write after every work day, I try to allocate time for reading each day if writing is not possible. Sometimes it is as little as one hour but I try not to get worked up about it and use the little window reading and rereading my favourite writers. On weekends with some time available, it is a mix of reading and writing. On the days that don’t allow much reading or new writing, I go back to my older work and try to revise it.
How do you know when a poem is finished? Is a poem ever really finished?
To me a poem ends when nothing more can be added to it without spoiling the effect or compromising its core feeling. It’s the point when one simply knows ‘more’ will mean an unnecessary detour or a corruption of the core.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I just finished reading Roberto Calasso’s magnificent ‘La Folie Baudelaire.’ Translated from Italian into English by Alastair McEwen, it’s a brilliant study of the life of Charles Baudelaire and nineteenth century Paris. Next on my list is rereading Teju Cole’s ‘Open City,’ a novel I can’t stop marveling at for its sheer intelligence and lyricism.