an interview with Rajinderpal S. Pal

CV2: You were born in India, grew up in London, England, have lived in Calgary since 1980—where do you consider home?

Rajinderpal S. Pal: I would say all three places. I feel pretty much at home in all three places. My family is still in London—I am there at least once or twice a year—so it is very much a part of me still. Calgary is a place where I feel completely comfortable after living there for twenty-two years. I have been back to India twice and I still do feel a huge connection to the place in terms of the people and the culture.

CV2: Which of these homes does your poetry come from?

RSP: I think my poetry again comes from all three homes and I am very interested in the intersections between the three homes. Not just geographical, but cultural and language-based intersections between them.

CV2: With your sense of place, in which of these locales is poetry itself a home?

RSP: I grew up with a sense of poetry around me because my father was a poet. So I think when you ask that question what I am immediately reminded of is growing up in England between the ages of five and ten, and being surrounded by poetry and poets visiting the house—impromptu readings in our home—going to my father’s poetry readings—having access to my father’s library, his collection of poetry. That is what immediately comes to mind.

CV2: In your book Pulse, your poem “Pineapple” is about England; “Ritual of Bereavement,” a story of a cousin returning to Delhi. There is also “The Family.” There is a sense in this collection of home being many things. Can you talk about what the word “home” means to you, and how this, perhaps, has become a source of creative inspiration?

RSP: I think home is something that is very much inside yourself rather than a physical location. I don’t define it as an actual physical place; for me it is a sense of being within. How does that contribute to my poetry? I think because my poetry tends to have quite scattered narratives, in terms of jumping geographically from one home to another home, back to another home. I think I have an interesting perspective on home, having had three distinct ones to draw from.

CV2: Pulse is a collection of poems about love, love of family, romantic love. There is the sense of profound love and devotion to family in these poems. How does poetry allow you to describe this affection?

RSP: I wanted Pulse to be an exploration of personal journey related to understanding the many types of love that exist—family love, sexual love, love of culture­—and all that mixed into one book. I also wanted to have a voice that was individual, one that was very much my own voice, but have enough universality in that voice that other people would connect with the place I was speaking from. The poetry I love reading and the poetry I have become obsessed with over the last couple of years is poetry that is grounded in a sense of the personal and the universal at the same time. In people like Robert Hass, who was the former U.S. poet laureate, you get very much a sense of a life going on in and around the poetry. This is a man who has got these tools of wisdom and judgement that he is bringing to his poetry and you get a sense of how his family is changing, growing. You get a sense of his divorce. You get a sense of his everyday life in California and how that informs his poetry. Even though I have very little personally in common with Robert Hass, I find myself drawn to his work just because there is such a sense of universality in his voice.