Amit Majmudar started his literary journey writing James Bond novels at the age of 11 or 12, full of formulaic elements – from gadgets and chase scenes to Bond girls and a supervillain. He has since moved on to write poetry and religion. His poetry collections are 0Ëš, 0Ëš (2009), and Heaven and Earth (2011). Majmudar has also published the novels Partitions (2011) and The Abundance (2013). He occasionally contributes to the Kenyon Review blog, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. He has earned his medical degree and now works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist.

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You earned your medical degree and now work as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist. When and how did poems, prose, literature happen?

I was a writer and reader long before I became a nuclear radiologist! In the larger scheme of things, that’s a recent development. I’ve always been devoted to my writing, even when it didn’t have a “higher” aesthetic or religious aspect to it. So I was very prolific and dedicated even when I was a 12-year-old spy novelist.

You've said in earlier interviews how you live a disciplined life – do you believe discipline, in the life of a creative person, is imperative?

I know it is imperative for me personally because I have so many different things going on. If I didn’t have a day job and three kids, I could afford to be less disciplined! But as it is, if I slack off, no writing will get done that day, and day after day will go by like that. So I keep a strict watch on myself—specifically, whether I’m making the best use of the time I have.

What does a day in Amit Majmudar's life look like?

That varies depending on which shift I am working. I often try to get into the 1pm to 8pm shift, so I’ll wake up, maybe write a little while everyone is asleep, hang around with my boys while they eat breakfast and go to school, then write a little more, go to exercise with my wife, go to the hospital to work, come home, hang out with my wife and put the kids to bed, maybe write a little if I still have any energy, then go to sleep. That’s an ideal workday. The ideal day overall is one with no work for me, and no school for the kids!

Where do you find yourself fitting within the broader poetry landscape?

That’s always been a problem. In America, most poets are professors and seem to know each other or have a few strong relationships. The poetry world has aspects of a guild; the poetry communities within the poetry world resemble cliques. I’m basically self-taught and don’t have any professional connections in the academic world. Add to that my love of a traditional religion, my unlikely day job, my geographic distance from universities and urban cultural centres, and my highly conventional personal life, and I fear I don’t fit in at all, unfortunately. It’s a miracle I’ve gotten as far as I have, purely thanks to the words on the page.

With Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita and The Sitayana, how does mythology become your muse?

It always has been my muse. Nothing has changed with these works specifically. I have written “within” several other traditions as well. My early collections contain Biblically based poems, and I’ve also written a Sufi Islamic epic about the fall from Eden, which was serialized several years ago in The Kenyon Review over three issues. Somewhere on a bygone hard drive, there’s a play about Prince Siddhartha becoming the Buddha I wrote in my late teens. This is just what I do!

Each rendition of a mythological book must bring something new to the readers. How do you reckon Godsong and Sitayana do that? 

Godsong is a translation, so I bring my command of English language versecraft to it, as well as extensive etymological research. I also have several highly accessible and succinct commentaries for each adhyaya [lesson]. My background as an Indian-American, and as someone with some grounding in the world of human affairs, keeps me from the airy nebulous spiritual platitudes of many an enlightened guru. I speak your language and live within your world. 

Sitayana is special because of its intensity and its architecture. Everyone knows the story already, so the brilliant is distinguished from the mediocre by the intensity of language and the newness of its structure. Sitayana tells the whole Ramayana story but takes up only a couple hundred pages because I wrote it as intensely as I would a poem. It begins in the middle of things, like a classical epic, and proceeds to fill in the back story and plunge forward to its climactic end, all through conversations and switches in perspective among all the characters except Rama. The entire novel has the compression of a poem.

What is the relationship between history and mythology?

I think that historians falsely claim history is less of a constructed narrative than mythology. We can witness these mythologies form in real time and call themselves true histories. That happens all the time in politics. Was Barack Obama a transformative game-changing philosopher-president, or a smooth-talker who blundered on health care reform and foreign policy? You can find both eight-year mythologies fully formed, depending on which side of the American political spectrum you care to consult. History tries to maintain verisimilitude by avoiding supernatural occurrences; mythology doesn’t. That’s the main difference. But it’s all storytelling.

Your poems cover a wide range of subjects. From drones, torture, immigration, weaponry, James Bond, to contemporary themes-often painful ones such as terrorism or the Iraq War – would you call your work and yourself 'versatile'?

Certainly, I skip around a lot. I don’t consider that a virtue, actually. Poets generally perform the same trick, adopt the same tone and style and subject-matter, and over time, that “builds a brand.” You can recognise a poet very easily from the poem itself because it’s so much like all the other poems by that poet you have read. That is probably the right way to do it, but I can’t bring myself to stick to one thing. I can’t build a brand because one poem is different from the next. Even my fiction is that way. I can’t help it. I get bored when I repeat myself.

At the moment, audiences and readers are enjoying a seamless confluence of online streaming and books with one competing with the other for the user's attention. How do you think this will play out in the long term?

Book readers may shrink as a percentage of the population. But because the world population continues to burgeon and literacy rates are rising in many places, particularly among women (who tend to read more books than men), the number of readers will either stay the same or even increase. In any case, before mass printing and mass literacy, book audiences used to be diminishingly tiny. How big, in absolute numbers, was the contemporary audience for Paradise Lost or the sonnets of Petrarch? Even a midlist genre novelist reaches more pairs of eyes, with a commercial dud of a novel, than Daniel Defoe did during his lifetime with Robinson Crusoe. We should be grateful.

What was it like being the first Poet Laureate of the state of Ohio? 

Fun! I got to meet a lot of interesting people and do a lot of readings.

Would you describe yourself as a patient creative?

I would describe myself as creatively and spiritually restless and impatient.

How do you approach writing?

With the assumption that no one is going to read it so I might as well do whatever I like on the page.

What, according to you, pulls a reader to a book on a bookshelf?

Kinship counts for a lot—racial, religious, ideological. For some, the wish to be entertained and diverted; for others, the wish to self-transfigure.

Can you tell our readers who/what you're reading at the moment? 

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Currently, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rudiger Safranski. I think of Goethe as my elder brother.

Do you have any favourite contemporary poets/writers? Any pieces you would recommend?

I revere Cormac McCarthy. Read Blood Meridian. Among poets, I like A. E. Stallings and Christian Wiman. Among nonfiction writers, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has the most incisive ideas. 

What is in the pipeline for you in 2019?

Soar: A Novel, a tragicomedy about two British Indian Army soldiers during World War I, will be out from Penguin Random House India. Kill List, my next collection of poems is forthcoming from Knopf in the United States.

What is the best and the worst criticism you have received as a poet and writer? 

Trying to think of an answer to this question, I realize that I seem to have purged my mind of criticism, good and bad alike. I know that negative criticism usually hurts me more than positive criticism makes me feel good, but I seem to purge all of it because I’m not carrying anything around with me right now, good or bad. I think that’s how it should be, even though I haven’t done it intentionally. I have jettisoned the praise from my memory, so I don’t grow proud, and I have jettisoned the nastiness, too, so I don’t get dejected, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.