‘Poetry is about truth, difference, and breaking form’: Debut poet Adil Parashar aka Aranya

I know Adil Parashar, who uses the pen name Aranya for their writing, in many capacities: poet, friend, curator, editor. One thing that’s common across all these personas is the innately polyphonic nature of both his poems and his thoughts – something that’s easy to see in his book The Map is Not the Territory. Much like separating a song from an album is to lose its surrounding richness, its place in the history of things, you cannot know a tree in Aranya’s mind without glimpsing the large forest inside. It is for these reasons and more that I made an attempt to tease out his thoughts on his poetics and his poems in this conversation for Scroll. Excerpts:

In many ways, a title is the first impression we get of a poem or a book. What moved you to choose Korzybski’s words “the map is not the territory” as the title of your book and do you think your poems deal with this title in both direct and slant ways?
The question of the “map-territory” relationship has fascinated me for years. For me, it is about representation, but more importantly, about metamorphosis. Most art is consumed by rasiks as a map – that “explains”, or helps them...

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