HT Brunch poetry special: Haikus, ghazals, free verse and more

We got India most exciting young poets to compose original poems especially for HT Brunch. See how they put their own poetic spins on the idea of New Beginnings

What is a poem? School led us to believe that it was anything that rhymed. Lyricists still seem to think so. Poets, however, see it differently. A poem finds new ways to express an idea. It puts vague feelings into words. It needs no hero or villain to separate good from evil. A good poem, in fact, reveals its secrets slowly, over multiple readings, offering interpretations long after you’ve turned the page.

Poems record history, spark revolution, tear you apart and put you back together. For this issue of Brunch, we asked poets (clockwise from left) Akhil Katyal, Akhila Mohan CG, Virat Nehru and Janice Pariat to compose work about new beginnings.

Janice Pariat’s poems are the blueprint of modern-day love, loss and life. (Anurag Banerjee)

Janice Pariat, 39, is based in Shillong. Her first book, Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (2012), shot her to instant fame. She has handled delicate topics such as love, trauma, healing, self-care, growing up and grief with depth. Her most recent work, Everything the Light Touches, a novel, combines prose and poetry.

Virat Nehru’s works, in Urdu, help him stay connected to his roots. (kamal khajuria)

Virat Nehru, 30, was born in Delhi, grew up across Lucknow, Prayagraj, Meerut and Bhopal, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. He turned to poetry, he says, as a response to bullies, when he was growing up. “ You want to know what our history truly is? Read poetry,” he says. “I like to think that astute poets are actually historians. The world around us is constantly in flux – how we interact with each other, socio-political issues, the language we speak, surviving a pandemic – poetry is a witness to all these changes.”

Akhila Mohan CG’s haikus are almost a form of therapy. (Vivek M)

Akhila Mohan CG, 36, is a Bengaluru-based poet and author. She took to poetry during the pandemic, to process her experiences as a survivor of domestic violence and a miscarriage. Mohan works with haikus, a Japanese form in which a poem has three lines, with five syllables in the first, seven in the second, and five in the third.

Akhil Katyal’s verses, posted online, bring a sense of permanence to everyday emotions. (Sanchit Khanna)

Akhil Katyal, 37, published his third book, Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, in 2020. He also teaches the creative writing Master’s programme at Ambedkar University’s The School of Culture and Creative Expressions. But it’s Katyal’s poem posts on platforms like Instagram that have catapulted him to the limelight in the last few years.