What I Write About When I Write About Bones.
Ilium
When I read — now obsolete[ about a word], the page seems like a cemetery. The only way to resurrect the word is to write it. Alembic.
Ischium
Don’t write for an audience. Write for squirrels. They know all about nuts and waywardness in language. They understand the difference between fractured syntax, a rebuttal and a knee. Squirrels are poets in disguise.
Pubis
Goal is too soft a word. Too flaccid. Lacklustre. I like the word Astonishment. The monumental perversity of it. Geniuses are always saying things like they’re fascinated by monstrousness or they want to astonish Paris with an apple. That’s my ambition. To say something obnoxiously pretty and get away with it.
Sacrum
I want a sentence to be feisty. I want a sentence to follow its nose but it often follows a cat, straying silently at a curled purr. I want a sentence to be portable like a ukulele but it exits with its heels raised — a tiptoeing toddler. I want a sentence that ends like a Wang Kar Wai film: [Fallen Angels]. But this sentence wants a pillow to rest on after the credits start rolling.
Coccyx
There’s nothing platonic about writing. And there is nothing sexier than a well writ sentence. I love to watch the tension between phrases, an ill-fitted, rank outsider word getting acclimatised: the cutting, the pruning, the economy of slitting a word bare, the descent into pithiness, the elevation into a body of leanness. The sheer vanity of sentence creation is nothing short of spectacular love making.
Jennifer Robertson is a poet and a CSR consultant living in Bombay. Her poetry has been featured in several Indian print anthologies and international e-zines. Her poems have appeared in Visual Verse, Moss Trill, RædLeaf Poetry India, Antiserious and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in The Telegraph, The Mint, Scroll and American Book Review. She was the reader and Judge for the RædLeaf Poetry India award in the year 2013 and 2014 respectively. She co-curates Cappuccino Readings in Bombay — an initiative to bring senior and emerging poets together in a cafe environment. Jennifer is a member of the PEN@Prithvi core team. Her first manuscript ‘What I Write About When I Write About Bones’ was chosen for the Editor’s choice award by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective.