{"id":5614,"date":"2012-05-02T07:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T11:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5614"},"modified":"2012-04-30T17:36:25","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T21:36:25","slug":"process-profile-vikas-k-menon-discusses-othertongue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/02\/process-profile-vikas-k-menon-discusses-othertongue\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Vikas K. Menon Discusses “Othertongue”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Vikas K. Menon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Vikas K. Menon is a poet and playwright whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as\u00a0<\/em>burntdistrict,\u00a0diode, and\u00a0<\/em>The Literary Review, among others.\u00a0\u00a0His poetry manuscript\u00a0<\/em>godflesh\u00a0was a finalist for the 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award and a semifinalist for the Beatrice Hawley award, both from Alice James Books.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His poetry has been featured in\u00a0<\/em>Indivisible:\u00a0\u00a0An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry\u00a0and is forthcoming in\u00a0<\/em>The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians.\u00a0\u00a0He is a board member of Kundiman, the first organization of its kind dedicated to supporting Asian-American poetry and is the Resident Playwright of Ruffled Feathers Theater company.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>This year, we\u2019ve asked several\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/em>Lantern Review\u00a0contributors to discuss\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>their process for composing a poem that we\u2019ve published. In this installment, Vikas K. Menon discusses his poem \u201cOthertongue<\/a>,\u201d which appeared in\u00a0Issue 3 of\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/em>Lantern Review<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0* \u00a0*<\/p>\n

My writing process is both fitful and fickle:\u00a0 at the beginning of a writing session, I tend to move quickly among drafts to see\u00a0which pieces pull me into further play.\u00a0 This method has allowed me to elude the blocks that used to plague my writing life.\u00a0 \u201cOther Tongue\u201d started in quick sketches; in this case, with a freewrite about my struggles with my parents\u2019 ancestral tongue, Malayalam.\u00a0 Malayalam is a Dravidian language that is outside of the Indo-European family of languages, and it is primarily spoken in the South Indian state of Kerala.\u00a0 While I can comprehend Malayalam when it is spoken colloquially, I am otherwise illiterate in the language.\u00a0 Since it was the language of intimacy used by my elders during my childhood, I am ashamed by my inability to speak it fluently.\u00a0 But I can still revel in its aural pleasures and rolling cadences, its stark contrasts with English.\u00a0 So I began writing into the texture of it, exploring the strangeness of its syllables in my mouth.\u00a0 At the same time, I was working on a separate poem that explored my mother\u2019s English, which is heavily inflected by Malayalam.\u00a0 Finally, I realized that the two poems were linked by their exploration of the difficulties of articulation.\u00a0 Despite that theme, paradoxically, the poem works quite well at readings: there is initial laughter at my mother\u2019s malapropism that quickly turns to silent discomfort.\u00a0 I like that sudden turn, something the poet and performer Regie Cabico<\/a> does beautifully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vikas K. Menon is a poet and playwright whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as\u00a0burntdistrict,\u00a0diode, and\u00a0The Literary Review, among others.\u00a0\u00a0His poetry manuscript\u00a0godflesh\u00a0was a finalist for the 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award and a semifinalist for the Beatrice Hawley award, both from Alice James Books.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His poetry has been featured in\u00a0Indivisible:\u00a0\u00a0An Anthology of South […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[318],"tags":[314,353,590,1051,849],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5614"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5625,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614\/revisions\/5625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}