The Shore Interview #49: Disha Trivedi

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Your poem, “Martha’s Vineyard,” clearly hinges on ruminations of witnessing wealth in its titular location. But while the poem opens on this image, it does not end on it, but seemingly goes beyond it. How do you see this contrast adding meaningful “ripples” to the poem’s surface level concerns?

DT: The poem ends on this “ship of salt and air.” That’s not very substantial. Poetry isn’t either, but we write it, we read it, we need it. Maybe a poem is a ship, an end, an escape. In “a ship of salt and air,” there exists the possibility of nourishment. Salt is so important to the balance of our body’s chemistry and we need air to breathe, but it’s still just salt, just air. It’s not a ship that holds much weight, but it doesn’t need to. It’s like the pixie-dusted Peter Pan ship crossing the night sky—an unlikely possibility that’s nice to believe in. And maybe that’s enough.

EF: Color is highlighted throughout your poem, from images of the speaker’s “brown face,” to their peers as “gold children,” that are “marked” by the island’s “white sails” and “white linens.” The poem goes further, though, complicating these initial colors with “striper” fish and a “silent fishing line…invisible but motion / tugging” and how the poem points to these invisible lines that imply the connectivity of all the poem’s subjects. Can you speak to your process of meaningfully balancing this interplay of color and is there a “color” image you are surprised ended up in your poem’s palate?

DT: It's hard to speak about my process as intentional because my first drafts aren’t very intentional. My poems begin as subconscious image sequences, like a half-remembered film that I’m writing down. Line breaks are like jump cuts, flashbacks intercede, words are sort of actors. I draft poems based on how those images appear and how words sound when I describe them. The colors come from what’s present in those images.

I keep a good record of drafts, so I looked back at the first draft of this poem (which was not titled “Martha’s Vineyard”). “Salmon” was present twice. As were “white pants” and “white marina” and “non-white face,” though none of those descriptions are in the final version. “Brown” took a few drafts to appear. The speaker doesn’t really want to show her face, especially in a place, or poem, where “brown” doesn’t seem to belong.

“Salmon” feels like it catches the color of New England. Salmon shorts and salmon dinners and salmon sunrise over the ocean. I’m not surprised that color persisted through my drafts. I am surprised that I didn’t write about the ocean, which is very color-rich. The poem circles the idea of the ocean, with reference to salt, water, ripples, stripers, sails. I’m curious why I omitted a description of the ocean, but I like that I did. The poem is grounded on the island. Marooned, maybe, in its lines. The New England that I know is a place of lines—hidden, imagined, material and sometimes magical, if we’re lucky, or if we can afford the price.

EF: I am fascinated by the implications of the moment where the “I” of the poem is at a pizza place and explains how “one man stares at me / so deeply I can’t tell whether to be / concerned.” The enjambment on “whether to be” suggests this momentary existential crisis for the “I”, emphasizing the “concern” in the following line more than passing humor or awkward interaction, but perhaps a deeper concern of self-perception. As a physical location, and as a human interaction, what felt vital about writing toward this moment in the poem and its centrality to a poem about Martha’s Vineyard?

DT: I wrote the first draft of this poem a few years ago during a sailboat race at Martha’s Vineyard, the first large race that I’d done. That was a week of salt spray and sprained ankles and sails lifted in changing wind. At night, I fell asleep on the sailboat’s deck, under a blanket of marine fog, feeling the tide shifting beneath me.

That week felt too charmed to be real.

At the race reception with the sailing team I’d crewed with, I looked around at the attendees, other sailors, all haloed by the golden hour, and looking broke the spell: I was the only non-staff person of color present at the party. Then a man as golden as the hour stood up and gave a speech that started with this sentence: “Sailing is a dying sport.” He went on to discuss methods to resuscitate it.

One method that he mentioned is to make sailing more accessible to people who look less like him and more like me. That’s easier said than done. Sailing is a world that is very much about who you know, how they know you, how you get along. I’m a brown girl who picked up sailing in her early twenties while pursuing higher education at an institution with a robust sailing program. I’m not who you might expect to be a sailor, but I love it anyway. I love the grit of salt between my palms and ropes, the days of sun and water, the self-reliance the sport requires, even in a community of sailors who welcomed me into this strange, exclusive world. I love everything about sailing except that exclusivity.

This poem came out of writing into the dissonance of feeling at home out on the ocean and out of place on the island. The poem is caught in the middle distance, under the sails that flocked the Vineyard’s waters for the duration of my time there.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

DT: A friend sent me the latest issue from Occulum and there’s a lot I love about it, like Helen Victoria Murray’s poem “Prometheus waits for the eagle to text him back.” Rattle is a mainstay, especially their “Poets Respond” series. Other places that I read include Maudlin House, Broken Antler, body fluids, Rust & Moth and wildness. Recently, three writer friends and I co-founded a literary magazine, M E N A C E—a space for modern gothic horror and the “literary weird.” We’re actively seeking poetry submissions for our summer issue.

I’m also in a workshop with Sam Cha about long poems, so lately I’ve been reading more poetry collections to understand how poets arrange a set of poems or a long poem. Jimin Seo’s OSSIA has been on my shelf for months; now that I’m finally getting around to it, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. Musical, tactile, eerie. And so beautifully designed. Other collections that I’ve recently enjoyed include Good Monster by Diannely Antigua, savings time by Roya Marsh and Return by Emily Lee Luan.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

DT: I love how this question sent me on a quest to close-read the poems in this issue. Here’s two poems who explore science, hope, and loss through wildly different forms: Elizabeth Wing’s “Rasputin asks for a second cup of wine” and Ellis Purdie’s “Elegy for a Biologist.”

“Elegy for a Biologist” works in compact paragraphs that mirror their subject matter—the eponymous biologist’s “work of honoring carcass.” Grief, like a carcass, is “a specimen too broken to keep.” Yet the speaker suggests that when a loved one dies, the entropy of grief can be ordered in a way that borrows from scientific order, which categorizes death and its disintegration. In the poem, the speaker finds meaning in the mess of grief by condensing grief  into a series of keepsakes sent into the afterlife with loved ones, and finally, with the speaker themselves. Through these objects, the poem asks, what do we bring to death and beyond? What do we hope would persist beyond death? For the speaker, the hope is that love persists, in the form of “the gray fox skull I would cradle / in the crook of my arm, hold my hand / and hand to you, should we wake again.”

In contrast to the order that defines “Elegy,” “Rasputin asks for a second cup of wine” breaks form, with lines and phrases that leap across the page in the same way that the speaker, who I read to be an adult revisiting their memory of childhood, would do. Much like “Elegy,” the poem ends with a direct second-person address that holds both finality and hope. While “Elegy” uses science to process the death of beloveds, “Rasputin” uses science to frame the death of innocence, the death of the idea of infinite knowledge and infinite selves, as the speaker admits a variety of magical yet scientific occupations: “Sometimes I said I could make the blood clot . . . Or an egg yolk examiner / or the one they bring in to keep the heart pumping when they cut a / man open, / or the one who studies the sun.” 

The next line is both devastating and resigned: “But it is a fact that I am a child up after bedtime. / Please. I am eavesdropping in the hallway.” The speaker seeks to be let into the dizzy world of wine-tinged knowledge yet knows that knowledge strips away the infinite possibility of imagination and the innocence that accompanied that childlike sense of possibility.

Through forms that diverge as much as their subjects converge, both poems explore the containment and curiosity that science offers to make sense of grief, whether the grief that follows the death of loved ones or the grief that comes from growing up.

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Disha Trivedi is from Northern California. Her poetry and fiction appears in Rust & Moth, Rogue Agent, The Women's Issue anthology from The Harvard Advocate and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.