Me & My Poetry...

I started to writing poetry at the age of 16.... This was grade 10 and suddenly words came pouring out. I originally wrote poems because it was a way of explaining the world to myself. I had no theories about what a poem might mean in a cultural or artistic sense and had no idea of communicating with anyone else other than my family members.
This was a deeply naïve way to write and to read poems but I did not know differently at that time. I'm not a hundred percent sure I know differently now, though I do have theories. I still write to understand the world, but my sense of what 'the world' has changed. I am more aware of the experience of others and mine over a period of time and the way other people express themselves and more aware of the life and its challenges that we undergo on everyday.
My first poem was Love.. probably that was the right age for me to indulge in thoughts like those and then couple of next poems were very patriotic where I say …"for the land that grew me for this day, the bones that mingle in the soil/After my death that will be royal,/For that sake I give myself to soil..". This phase of my childhood poetry was spontaneous, naïve, play of words and natural attempt to emote through poetic verses. The next phase was of when I was studying English literature at an undergraduate and post graduate level. That was time I was learning the poetics of poetry and reading Milton, Walt Whitman ,Wordsworth and other well known English poets from Victorian era to Romantics.
Some of these writers are dead, some are unknown, most of them are absent, but all the poems I've enjoyed or hated influence the way the my poems gets unfolded.
Now, when I write, I understand the semantics and its theories, about language and about the way language is processed.... the way my mind works upon language, its preferences, predilections and the mistakes it's likely to make. Some of these theories may well be wrong, but they lean on the poem as it is written and get penned.
The third phase of my life of my poetry writing was rearing up my children with lots of fun times and growing up together and other than their birthday ,thank you and sorry notes, I wasn't very productive.
The fourth phase or the present phase of my life is when I started my professional career as an artist, I clubbed my painting with poetry which was appreciated and encouraging by the viewers in the gallery. Hence I found a purpose for my writing poetry. At 40, painting was a revival of my passion and pen was firing that passion.
Today, for me the poem has become a deeply personal and cultural artefact when I take my paintings and poetry in Indian and international Art Galleries.

My poems were recorded by All India Radio in my voice in early70's.Recently Bolji.com featured me with 'poet of week award '2008.Some of these poems on this page have already been published by sahitya Akademi in the English literature section. IL 238.