He stands there at the entrance, welcoming you warmly into his cosy drawing room that wears the look more of a writing room - books outnumber everything else here. This internationally acclaimed poet has authored numerous books “ poetry, short stories and anthologies. Published by Copper Coin, ‘Morning Light’ is Manohar Shetty's sixth book of poems. Very recently his work has figured in a new anthology, ‘House Spirit, Drinking in Goa’ edited by Palash Krishna Mehrotra “ the anthology features stories, essays and poems on drinking in India.
One of the very few talented, creative writers in English, Shetty did several stints in journalism in Bangalore and Mumbai before the practical impossibility of working in the metros brought him to Goa for good in 1985. It took him a long time to get Goa under his skin. He was surely and certainly not enamelled by the external beauty of Goa and it took him 20 years to write his first poem on Goa. “Now I have a handful of them,” he smiles.
Unlike abroad, it's a sad picture in India - poetry is usually not on the graph of economy and so, writers, especially poets, do not survive only on poetry. To be a poet in India one has to be born schizoid. Poets are marginalised, they are outcast, all the focus is on the junk literature and poetry is never sold in India. One or two mainstream publishers publish one or two books of poems a year. For survival, one has to write novels and that too, best sellers, 1000 copies of which could be sold easily in the market. Apparently, this does not happen more often. “But poets can surely sustain on creative satisfaction if not on money,” boasts the proud poet in Shetty.
A Senior Sahitya Academy Fellow Shetty’s work features in several anthologies, including those edited by Eunice de Souza, Vilas Sarang, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and latest by Palash Arvind Mehrotra. His poems have been published in leading literary journals in the US and in the UK, among them London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Baffler (MIT, Cambridge, Mass.), Atlanta Review and The Common (Amherst). Edited by Shetty, a Homi Bhabha Fellow, his pioneering anthology ‘Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa’ (Penguin) has gone into several reprints and is a standard text in colleges in Goa. His anthology ‘Goa Travels: Being the Accounts of Travellers to Goa from the 16th to the 20th Century’ (Rupa) has also received wide acclaim.
Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell and Derek Walcott continue to be his leading lights. His all-time favourite still remains Ted Hughes. Among the Indian poets, Shetty greatly admires the works of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Eunice D’Souza and Adil Jussawalla, all of whom played a pivotal role in his life.
With formalistic approach towards poetry Shetty scribbled his first few lines as a teenager, in early 1970s. His first book of poems ‘A Guarded Space’ saw the light of the day in 1981 with Indian writer and poet, Dominic Francis ‘Dom’ Moraes’ blurb. Since then the trajectory of his poetry has gradually shifted from the intensely personal to embrace and encapsulate a wider and increasingly fractious world. Some of his popular books are “ ‘Domestic Creatures’, ‘Borrowed Time’, ‘Personal Effects’, ‘Body Language’, ‘Living Room’, ‘Creatures “ Great and Small’.
A graduate in commerce, Shetty’s journey into the world of poetry has fortunately been a very satisfactory one. Today, at 63, Shetty has no regrets. Creativity needs time and space to deliver and deadlines can never squeeze out the best output from creative writers and poets, he feels.
Most writers follow no strict routine, they don’t stick to a fixed schedule and one can’t give a deadline to a poet to deliver a poem “ Shetty is no exception to this rule. “I have no routine for writing,” he declares. But he is swift to catch the first few lines of a poem when it comes to him. “Words quickly slip away from the mind. So I put them on a piece of paper to work on later. Poems are never finished, they are abandoned,” he shares his own style of writing.
Why do today’s poems lack rhythm? “Poetry evolves with the language. Today, very few poets use rhymes as it is not challenging enough to most contemporary poets. For them rhyming is the easy way out. Anyone can write a rhyme where the second line is dictated by the last word of the first sentence,” he explains.
Shetty was never taken in by the Beats poets whose outpour was anti-establishment. They did not challenge him in terms of language and the sentiments expressed were outdated, he felt. “Modern contemporary poetry struck a chord in me,” says Shetty whose advice for young writers is to indulge into a great deal of reading to have perseverance and knowledge of contemporary poetry trends. One must focus on contemporary living poetry.
