Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in
the small press ecosystem
Interview #21 (part two [see part one here]: Aakriti Kuntal is a poet,
writer, and multidisciplinary artist whose creative pursuits span literature,
visual arts, and experimental film. She finds inspiration in nature, often
retreating into its embrace to write and reflect. In addition to poetry and
prose, she explores photography, asemic writing, and short experimental films.
Her work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rasputin: A Poetry
Thread, IceFloe Press, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Poetry
at Sangam, among others. Recognized for her contributions to literature,
she was awarded the Reuel International Prize (2017) and shortlisted for the RL
Poetry Award (2018). She is the author of the chapbook God, Am I Your Eyelid? (Sigilist Press, USA). Her debut book Night Breaks apart, like pomegranate seeds in my palm (Seagull Books), was listed in Ms. Magazine’s
best poetry books for 2025-2026.
Michael Sikkema: Can you tell us how these poems came to
be? How does poetry start for you? What is your writing process? Do you feel
like we are more inside poetry or poetry is more inside us?
Aakriti Kuntal: These poems emerged and ripened over the
last decade. I’m not sure what pushes me to the threshold of writing, to the
very act of creation, but usually there is a strong sensation in my being, an
urge, an overwhelming need to pick up the pen and start jotting. All the
emotions that have been marinating in the flesh catapult into being. I remember
in my earliest years, I sat in front of my garden window. It was praise that
first incited poetry in me. The grandeur of earth, manifesting itself in my
simple garden, drew the poet out of me.
At
other times when it isn’t a pressing urge, and I go with a deep intention to
create, I usually like to become empty. Barren, like a blue landscape. I listen
to music—usually classical, and begin observing things. I pay my utmost
attention to all that surrounds me. Whatever whispers its way through a poem
does.
Sometimes
I jot down ideas or fleeting thoughts—fish in the phone's cast net. These I
return to later and allow them to sleep into me again. The act of writing is
more an act of allowance, of surrendering. The words mutate their way into the
very chorus of existence.
Poetry
is the abacus of being. The way things, events, and emotions are arranged and
rearranged. These then become fertile spots, a plucked string, where poems
occur. I feel we are inside poetry— always swimming inside its large stomach,
swathed in its saliva, and occasionally these transform into poems. It seems
like while we do go fishing for ideas, there is an unconscious from which the
ideas arrive. I feel this collective unconscious is kind of like poetry. The
way the elements of life coexist, their diameters and diagonals. The space in
which thoughts bunch and become lines.
After
a health issue and the consequent brush with mortality, I slipped back into the
cocoon of my former self. A self that used to dream along the tangents of
death. These poems touch that tissue of mortality and how, in its shadow, it
makes life glimmer.
Ekphrasis
is also a practice I have often followed. Art as a response to art, filling the
vacancy that only art can fill. Poems have emerged in response to photographs
I’ve taken or to classical music. The congruence of colours, rhythms, and words
inspires me to wave from one form to another.
MS: Can you talk a little bit about how you think of
the term surrealism in relationship to your writing?
AK: A dissociative experience lends itself to
shaping the membranes through which I express my world. This world is
particularly shaped by the landscape of the body. After some health issues, the
body slipped into my work unconsciously.
Many
poem drafts do not commence with a rational thought in mind or an intention to
express a particular idea, but rather are the overwhelming, brimming sensations
finding themselves in the current of words. The mouth, the eye, and the body
occur repeatedly as motifs that draw out the urgency of one’s primal existence.
Blood pukes and occurs, dreaming a surrealistic portrayal of life’s most vital
pulse, that which extends through us and is unnameable.
There
is a disjointed energy to the flesh of the poems, their organs working in many
directions and yet somehow finding a confluence, a binding tether. I think the
mind, at any instance, does not think only in a linear fashion, as is usually
exploited in poems. It is thinking along many parallels at any time. While most
poems coalesce in this collection, there is invariably a haphazard movement in
the process of arrival. It mimics the threaded thought processes of being alive
and is a vomit of incoherent feelings and thoughts.
Surrealism
perhaps requires an automated response. An almost involuntary impulse takes
over the body, and the body starts creating. There has been festering and
cooking that has been going on as we interact with various elements of life. We
have assimilated our environment and woven it with our thoughts. This fermented
brew then suddenly hiccups at a trigger, at an image, a line, a fleeting
thought.
MS: Do you think your art is continuous with nature?
Are you mimicking nature or collaborating with nature when you create?
Sometimes it seems like some of your poems are ecosystems of images and
ideas.
AK: I think art begins for me in the lap of nature.
There is a lullaby, a screech, sounds, and echoes drifting in nature’s magical
landscape. The poem Evening, for instance, sprang open in the silence of an
evening. The day slit, it was as if the same silence that permeated everything
as the veils opened and closed, entered me too. I was connected to all living
things around me, stretching inside their bodies to invite a large yawn.
This collective yawn felt like the poem Evening.
The
unsayable, the permeating flesh of life, the spores of nature are as much the
catalysts in poems as the agent that is the poet. We begin in nature and
breathe and hiccup in it. Nature is the somatic cycles of plants, the climate
of dust, and the animacy of microbes. We are lulled by beauty to sunrises and
sunsets; we carry the many sounds of all that exists. I believe we are
invariably connected to everything. Nature binds the rhythms of the body and
the mind. Nature provides the visual landscape against which we flit and sweep.
Nature enters us, if we allow it to. We can feel the weightlessness that comes
from being untethered. At other times, we also feel the breath and hiccupping
weight of so many living things. A single plant can get woven into our own
living imprint.
In
that sense, I feel I’m often collaborating with nature. Nature, too, is
translating itself through us. Our pains, illusions, bodies get woven into this
geography of thin air—the night breeze that calms us, creating a lap and echo
on the cheek. The ear is no longer separate from the cuckoo’s song; it has been
enshrined into the memory of the lobe and the terrains of the spiking heart in
joy. Also, the locus of light—how it moves like gelatine through the sieve of
trees. The mind transforms in these slowly stirred songs. When it stirs you, it
works through you.
I
like how metaphors and images can embed themselves in another, like a tree
flowering. It is not a singular emotion or thought that is being alluded to
then, but a tapestry of mycelial impulses, like an ecosystem.
MS: Can you talk about your interest is asemic
making? I find that that kind of mark making can really light up parts of my
brain that little else does.
AK: I feel that when you try mark-making that is
asemic, you allow a rhythm to overtake you and scratch at the innards of your
consciousness. There is a vast sea that occurs and bears at our seams. I feel
like with asemic making, we create a bridge, a switch to something that
transcends language. Language facilitates communication and expression.
However, I feel many emotions cannot be captured in the substrate of words.
Just like thinking is not exactly done in words, but is something more primal.
I feel asemic writing is similar to accessing more primal and unseen plateaus
of the self.
The
reader enters a multi-plane dialogue with the asemic marks. The reader brings
her own consciousness and entwines with the currents of the marks. Since no
intentional meaning is being forced, the mark-making is like two seas meeting.
Each wanders into their own recesses and excesses, creating a garden.
Asemic
is at the brink of language; this boat shelves right at its edges, courting
language’s first instinct. The instinct to express is primordial. The first
instinct that may have occurred in man when he held a pen or a brush. The
volatile explosion takes place in the chest. The knowledge at the brink of the
discovery of language and art. This ability of man to reflect on himself with a
tool. Asemic marks channel this energy of the unconscious. It employs the
movement of the hand; the synaptic symphony between writing, wrist, and the
mind/soul as a means to span consciousness or emotions onto the paper.
Personally,
I feel it taps into the fluidity or conduction that occurs when one writes and
is very innate to both writing and painting, at the same time taking a
departure from both. The process of writing employs the body or hand as an
intuitive medium where the hand becomes a passage, transmitting thoughts and
emotions at great speed. One could entertain that asemic writing takes script,
geometry, space, art forms, curves, and ink as its mediums.
A
leap one could take is with phonetics. Asemic writing in an aural space could
dissolve the units of phonetic sounds as we employ them, or allow phonetics
into play but not words. An incoherent language where sounds/phonetic sounds
merge into another in a manner that each phonetic syllable is deconstructed,
and all stray particles roam. Asemic sounds would be unintelligible. They could
then perhaps be anything. They could carry a likeness to how language sounds,
and yet stray from it completely.
MS: Maybe related? Can you talk about your interest
in the invisible, or in making the invisible visible, maybe visible is the
wrong word?
AK: Poems touch the bone of intangible bodies. For
instance, the poem Presence presses upon the emergence of being that occurs in
the overlapping field of connections to other life forms. The poem tries to
capture this wick, this thread that binds life through simple acknowledgement
of each other’s existence. The language does not use a narrative fashion, but
rather, through more amorphous channels, attempts to elucidate the energy of
this field.
Vispo
too captures the rhythms, the textures, the energy fields like a bird’s song or
the sound of a sea by making use of visual elements along with language’s
innards.
My
interest is in making intangible energies that our world is tethered to bare.
The poems rarely explicitly try to explain the substrate but rather use a more
surrealistic language to capture the many parallels and energies of the poem.
The
language that snakes through the world we inhabit, outside and within, doesn’t
fall into neat categories and compartments. It instead flows like rivulets,
meandering outside of meaning into threads of pure feeling. Poetry, I think,
transcends language or at least attempts to. It catapults the slime that is at
the bottom, and gives it a shape, a colour.
Michael Sikkema is a poet, visual artist, forager,
amateur mycologist, and an enthusiastic but bad drummer. He lives in West
Michigan.
