During this talk, Nair talked about his process of writing. He spoke about how urban experience, our lives in the modern world really dominates poetry. He also performed for us many of his poems, including PLASTICPELAGO, PAN-ASAIN and 10 SYRIANS. I found all these examples to be very heartwarming and deep.
Identity, Density, Otherness were also three points he talked about when speaking about his inspiration. One thing that he talked about that really stuck with me was what he said about how when using a photograph to write a poem, the photograph must lead the poem and not the other way around. I really like the way he said this because I think it is really important. I feel like some poets, myself included like to write a poem first, come up with something that may have just randomly popped into our head. After writing a poem, we find a picture, something that connects with our poem. I think that through this process, we spend too much time thinking about what to write about and what picture to take that we don’t spend our time doing important things like writing our experiences or inspiration down into a wonderful poem.
One of the poems that I found strange to listen to was the PAN-ASAIN poem. Because I am mixed race or ‘pan-asian’ , when listening to the poem, I started to defend myself from the things that I was hearing, for no reason at all. In the poem, there were no rude things said about pan-asian people, however, whenever I heard something weird or a strange description, I would defend myself from the words.
