Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India and attended the University of Virginia and Indiana University, where she earned her MFA. Her first collection, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and her second collection, Afternoon Masala, was the co-winner of the 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. Ms. Khanna's work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as Crazyhorse, Callaloo and The Indiana Review, as well as the anthologies Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry.

 

One of the first things that struck me about this sequence of poems was the voice of the persona. A favorite line of mine is “So you can see I am an empty bowl careful / with my wanting.” Parvati’s longing, which arises in different ways, threads itself through each piece. Could you talk about your use of persona in these poems?

For this particular sequence of poems, it felt necessary to use persona to bring the myth of this goddess from the pages of a book, from the stiff, pink-cheeked statue in my mind, into a woman with a mix of human desires and faults, who wants to be accepted, who wants to make someone notice her.  I’ve always been drawn to persona poems, to their complicated, back-talking nature. I’m thrilled by the way they argue with what I think I want. Their pretense and performance offers some small measure of “truth” that goes beyond my own self and beyond expected ways we view “icons” and “gods”. Thus, Parvati becomes a girl who can’t help but try to please, who wants to be “good enough”. Persona felt like the best way to translate the complexities of these emotions, to allow them to be difficult and uneasy. Also, it was my one chance to play at being a goddess—who wouldn’t want that?
 

One of the things I love most about these poems is the complexity of emotion that you mention, and how it changes based on the situation of the persona. Parvati becomes very much a part of the human world with her complex desires, which don’t just rest in sexual desire. As you mention, she’s a woman who wants to be noticed, but she also has the power to obtain that attention, as we see in “Parvati Tires of Waiting for Shiva.” Could you talk about the theme of desire in the narratives of these poems?

There are many stories surrounding the goddess Parvati (as she is often referred to by hundreds of different names and myths), but the ones that intrigued me the most were about her resolve to lure Shiva from his isolation in order to marry him. The idea that Parvati’s “worldly” desire for Shiva required her to give up life’s pleasures, to give up participating in desire, captured my imagination. I wanted to explore how the difference between desire and austerity can be thin, how wanting and not wanting are intricately tied together. It makes me think of what we do to achieve our desires—of what we are willing to hold on to and what we are willing to give up.I find this idea very intriguing, about what we’re willing to do to achieve our desires, and am interested in the ways this idea threads its way through these poems.


Are these poems part of a larger project? Could you talk about other ways you’ve explored this idea in the story of the goddess Parvati apart from the poems included here?

These poems are part of a larger collection I’m working on that focuses on some of the stories of Hindu mythology. As I was writing these Parvati poems, another voice, the voice of an unnamed goddess, started emerging. This voice was more suspicious; she questioned everything in the world around her. She was looking for answers beyond her own personal experiences. She wanted to know what it really takes to be a goddess and who gets to decide. What makes someone holy? And, why would anyone even want to be “seen” as a goddess? The idea of desire in these poems transcends the individual narrative of Parvati to consider more universal or elemental desires: the longing to speak a “truth” and be heard, to make a lasting impression on the world, to be holy. These poems try to investigate why we need or want these things from our lives.