Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India and divided her childhood between India and the Sudan. She is the author most recently of the volumes of poetry Raw Silk (TriQuarterly Books, 2004) and Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her memoir Fault Lines one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993 appeared in a new edition in 2003, with a Coda entitled `Book of Childhood’. She is the author of The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience and two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Indian Love Poems (Everyman’s Library/ Knopf, 2005) and is currently working on a new book of poems and a book of essays on migration and memory. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Buy her books here. See some work here, here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Verlaine’s `Le ciel est, pardessus le toit’ I adored the sound of the words and the simple truth of it and also because I learnt French as a child in Sudan and no one else in my family could read French at that time (though they were all quite literate in English and in Malayalam) I felt that Verlaine’s poem was my secret knowledge. It lulled me. I wept when I came to the lines: `Qu’as-tu fait, o toi que voila.../ De ta jeunesse?’ 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I try to read the horoscopes in magazines I find at the check out counter of supermarkets, or in the hairdresser’s waiting room. I do so like checking out the stars to see what’s round the corner. Mercifully I forget a few minutes later what I have read. So I read again and again! I also try to read murder novels but nowadays it takes me about a year or two to get through one, so its not really a fast read for me. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Philosophy is crucial to me. Husserlian phenomenology fascinated me, the notion of the intentional inexistence of the object of knowledge, and on the other hand in later developments of existential phenomenology the sensuous, fleshly being in the world that Merleau-Ponty tries to evoke. As a child I was haunted by some of the hardest questions – What is a stone, how am I like it or different? Is God real? What is real? Is the tree? The wind? . I think children do ask themselves these questions but as adults we try to forget all this in order to live more easily in our own skins. Now, in my poetry, I am trying to get back, ask those questions again. There was a time when I wrote philosophical papers for journals like *Annalecta Husserliana* and *The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology * but all that is behind me now. Another life. I realized I could only ask the hardest questions in poetry, the slipstream of sound and sense commingled. I love reading the philosophical reflections, Sankara for instance in an aphoristic work like the Vivekachudamani. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I love the poetry of Mirabai and of Akkamahadevi, two extradordinary women poets of medieval India, each crossed her own threshold to wander abroad, write poems of loss and ecstasy. I also love the poetry of Milosz, the way he combines the uttermost refinements of the intellect with a fierce devotion to things of this earth, luminous, perishing. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Reading poetry is terribly important to me, and often when I am in between writing, I read, slowly, carefully. There are also times when I do not read poetry, gaps, spaces I need to just look and things. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? There are several novels of Jane Austen I have not read. I was never very good at reading that sort of fiction, though I certainly acknowledge her greatness. I far preferred Proust. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? *** Dancing words *** 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I think of a story that Gunter Grass told when he visited India many years ago. He said that as a citizen he gets in his car and drives people to the voting booths, that he keeps to the yellow lines, the traffic lights, the rules of the road. But when he sits and writes, his task as a writer is to question those yellow lines. I think that as a citizen I have the right to march in the streets, to stand at the barricades, to protest. As a writer? I need the silence that comes to me, in which I can think and be, away from the noise of the street. I need to search out lyric beauty, to flee rhetoric. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**tart tart tart Chiseled**cut cut cut I**OOO Of**Why? Why? Why? Form**Of course! 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? This is something I have asked myself or think I have asked standing in front of a mirror, but of course the mirror is very old, made of mica from my mother’s country, cast in bronze and all one can see is caught so dimly, in silhouette as in one of those ancient Egyptian frescos I learnt to study as a child, the back of the person tilted into darkness, nose forward pointing like the prow of a boat. Perhaps this is all of eternity that we know. But to continue, in another voice which is also mine -- The text comes out of the body but saves us from the body and its dangers and longing. Elsewhere I have written (in The Shock of Arrival) about a `back against the wall aesthetic’ and yes, there the links between the body and the text, some so immediate that the hands of reader almost burn. Because there are no other tools but those so near at hand and common. Yet when things get so very close one needs to hold up that ancient mirror, even if it’s so very heavy.