Relational Emphasis: Interview with Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Sneha Subramanian Kanta.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is the author of five chapbooks including Ancestral-Wing (Porkbelly Press, 2024), and Every Elegy Is A Love Poem (Variant Lit, 2024). Her multi-genre work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Meridian, Salamander, West Branch, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized by several institutions including Ontario Arts Council, Tin House, The Charles Wallace Trust, The Vijay Nambisan Foundation, Writers' Trust of Canada, and Rutgers University. She is one of the founding editors of Parentheses Journal.
Sneha won second place in Canthius’s 2023 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award.
In this interview, Canthius’s Digital Content Editor Manahil Bandukwala talks to Sneha about the winning poem.
Manahil: Congratulations on securing runner-up in the 2023 Priscila Uppal Memorial Award!
To start out with, could you speak to how you wrote your winning poem?
Sneha: Thank you, Manahil. My academic work and writing have several intersections. I facilitated classes on art writing for The Southern Alberta Art Gallery. A poem we read includes “Vermeer” by Wisława Szymborska, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak.
The poem and painting stayed with me in several ways through years. It led to me writing “Letter to The Milkmaid”.
Manahil: I’m curious about your choice to use Vermeer’s painting of “The Milkmaid” to explore themes of colonization and diaspora. How does imposing a poem such as “Letter to The Milkmaid” onto “The Milkmaid” resist colonization and the colonial isolation you speak about in the poem?
Sneha: Maya Angelou addressed the Senior Convocation for a class of 2008 at Cornell University with vital words: “Courage is the most important of the virtues, because without it, no other virtue can be practiced consistently… You can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even merciful, occasionally, but to be that thing time after time, you have to really have courage.”
This brings us to an important question. Who labors and who can afford the labor? Many organized front porches, mowed lawns, and neat houses are built upon the labor of another person.
I don’t necessarily think of the poem as being imposing. I write in the tradition of courage.
Manahil: Ekphrastic poetry is challenging to write because of the way the writer needs to push the piece beyond the artwork. How did you decide to approach this ekphrasis in this manner?
Sneha: When engaging with ekphrasis, we move beyond the supposed distance between the page and artwork.
Step into the artwork. Engage with the people and landscape. Roam in the lanes. Discover what it means to be a part of the scenery. Interact with the character(s). Become friends. Write them a letter. Infuse velocity. Dance together.
You can utilize contrast with ekphrastic poetry. For instance, you may situate your poem within the chronology of time. This can mean writing a poem which aligns with the epoch when the artwork was created or writing from the present moment. There are several artworks which transcend time as we know it— often from a root of difference in thought or ideology.
“Letter to The Milkmaid” is an epistolary poem. The relational emphasis now moves between two distinct timelines where certain social norms are called into question. The questions about labor and affordability continue to be one of the most important ones.
Manahil: T. Liem, the judge who selected your poem, describes the way your poem pulls together the space of the kitchen with spaces of religious significance. How do you view the connections between these places, both within and outside of the poem?
Sneha: It matters to record who is allowed entry into a kitchen in varied spaces. There is a correlation to capital, patriarchy, access, and systems which propagate certain beliefs. It often begins in the family— taking on from the larger mirroring of society.
Manahil: Can you recommend a book or poem that has resonated with you lately?
Sneha: An interesting correlation I recently found is that I share a birthday with Eavan Boland. I adore the multiple juxtapositions in her work.
Harshal, a co-founding editor at Parentheses Journal recently gifted me several books written by Boland. I’m currently reading In A Time of Violence and recommend the collection.