Dialogue:

Smitha Sehgal and Lavinia Xu

Smitha Sehgal in response to Lavinia Xu’s “In a Wild Dream” and “The Girl Mediates the Meadow”

Xu’s poems represent the coming of age of an irreverent Goddess who knows her failings and revels in her flaws. The voice alternates between the unabashed beauty of ethereal creatures and a conflict-ridden world seen through blur and leap of sensibilities. This self-portrait is soaked in the surreal images of a girl whose hair is being woven by dragonflies ( not damsel flies), her copper body sweating like Sun’s belly. The heron leaves the unborn fish in her calloused hands. This is perhaps an allusion that a woman’s body need not be necessarily bound down by its ability to be a childrearing bio-machine. The choice of the word ‘heron’ instead of the commonly used word ‘stork’ is unmistakable. The heron could symbolize the predator who in the patriarchal world always has unblemished wings. The motif of calloused hands sharply draws the reader towards mundane realities of the struggle, defeat and resurrection even when her body is lost in cliff. 

Her meditations invoke fear. The imperfections in which they are carved, complete with the stutter make them beyond beautiful.  They are unafraid to jump into molten lava or hiss in the tongue of a snake. Unafraid of bloodshed, they embrace the challenges with a savage lust in which there is only one finality. And that is to emerge victorious.

 The interplay of images with the searing heat of emotions in these poems herald a new world order where women are not trapped and dissected in the definitions of beauty and virtuosity. I warmly embrace Xu’s poems in the reflection of my own failings and irreverence. 

Lavinia Xu in response to Smitha Sehgal’s “A Deer Could Paint Grass” and “Race Horse nee Fire Fly”

In my life as a human being and as a poet, I have always drawn to animals and bits of nature in my life and in the surrounding neighborhood. Sehgal’s two poems invite me to experience a different kind of magic nature creates. In both poems, animals have the power of transfiguration. “Deer wears her burnt skin, becoming leopard” and “horses are fireflies.” With such transfiguration, these poems move through the border of nature and human space, between roads and homes and between different landscapes. “A Deer Could Paint Grass” takes me to the site of a roadkill, the intersection of human and natural violence full of multiple colors, voices, and visions. Through the poem, I witness the artistic potential created through the dead deer, and to feel the vibrant tensions of a “strange forest.” The poem balances nature’s panorama and fragmentation through variations of line breaks. From “long strokes of viridian,” the deer paints from the details to unravelling the uncanny space of the forest. The still object is never stable, as “light floods inside the song of a deer carcass,” and the dead in nature revives to make art.  

“Race Horse nee Fire Fly,” on the other hand, shows that domestic and quiet space unfolds multiple landscapes in winding and sensory lines. The domestic objects move readers to the “earth’s hollow where snakes nest,” and to the marooned water and the sea, and to eventually return to the whitewashed walls of my barn. Like the “train journeying through the hackneyed earth in those hinterlands,” the poem moves from the distant or omniscient end stop lines to the lines that run down the page. The poem is a journey that moves from domestic to nature and back to the domestic with layers of memories, which culminates in the intimate moment in which “I smell placenta” and yearn for the energy of birth in home. 

For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.

If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.