Vesmir Interview
Q. Your bio says,“I feel, therefore I can be free.” When did feeling stop being a weakness for you and start becoming a philosophy?
A lot of my life was led by logic and reasoning. But as I explored more readings, as I understood life more through what I read, through my day-to-day experiences, and specifically through poetry, I realised that my life is centred around emotions.And if I don’t tap into those emotions, if I don’t work hard enough to understand them, where they come from, how they settle in my body and mind, how they show up, where they are leading me, and what they are indicating, then I will always be stuck in a loop that never ends.
Logic and reasoning will never help me figure all of that out, because at the end of the day, you cannot look at your emotions, be it love, anger, or anxiety, through the lens of logic and truly understand them. In logic, one plus one means two, but in emotions, one plus one can mean something completely different.
I once wrote a poem in which I mentioned that in emotions, or through emotions, one plus one can mean an entire lifetime. Over time, I have realized that my emotions are not my weakness. In fact, I never really thought of them as a weakness to begin with. They are a gateway to a kind of freedom that logic and reasoning can never get you to.
I also don’t think my emotions are a philosophy, and I don’t think they ever will be. Calling emotions a philosophy implies a sense of standardisation, and that’s what philosophy often does. When we talk about a philosophy of life, there is a certain structure or framework to it. But emotions don’t work that way.
My emotions cannot be a philosophy because what I feel, how I feel, and how I see the world is completely different from how everyone else does. Eight billion people experience the world in very different ways every single day. So I don’t think my emotions are any form of philosophy. I think they are simply what they are meant to be—completely raw, completely human, and completely me.
Q. Many of your posts feel like fragments of a larger inner conversation. How do you know when a thought deserves to become a poem?
That’s a very well-made observation, and it’s also very true. A lot of my posts and the things I share in social spaces are fragments or smaller pieces of a much larger inner conversation, or of an experience I’ve been through, or something I might have observed, discussed with friends,or overheard in other people’s conversations.I don’t think I fully understand the exact mechanism of how a thought deserves to become a poem, because a large part of my writing process involves literally sitting down every single day with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and writing down everything that comes to my mind.
Through this process, I begin to connect dots and link things with each other. But I believe that you don’t really get to decide which thought becomes a poem or which thought becomes an art piece. It’s the other way around. It’s the thought that decides to be realized into the world through you. At the end of the day, every artist is a vessel, and art is a flowing river that passes through that vessel. So you don’t decide what you create.
In the act of creation, it is what wants to be created that comes through, and that is decided on its own. I’m not sure if I’m making complete sense here, but what I’m trying to say is that when you sit down to write a poem and allow the act of writing, what I would call the devotional act of writing, to take over, it is the writing itself that shapes you, not you as a writer shaping the writing.
When art is done devotionally and honestly, it shapes the writer, not the other way around. Of course, later on, once a thought is out on paper, we make corrections and changes.
Q. Your writing feels deeply personal yet widely relatable. What do you choose to reveal, and what do you intentionally leave unsaid?
I think it’s about how you create an art piece that speaks to the world, and the intention behind that creation. I truly believe, and I am a firm believer, that at the end of the day, the intention of creation always shows up. If your intentions are not honest, if they are only for the sake of selling an art piece, it will show.
If your intentions are just for the sake of going viral, that will show too. And if your intentions are honest, true, and rooted in actually creating art, that shows up as well. For me, when I write a poem or a piece of prose, I write it for only one person, and that person is myself. That is my audience. I am not writing with the thought that tomorrow I have to put it out somewhere. That is not my goal.
My goal is simply that I have felt something, maybe today, maybe ten days ago, maybe five years ago, maybe something I saw growing up, or something I noticed at some point in my life, and I want to write about it. I want to dissect that moment, that thought, that feeling, understand what was going on, and then put it down on paper.
In that sense, I write entirely for myself, or more specifically, for a younger version of myself. There is an intentionality in leaving certain things unsaid sometimes, but mostly, I stop writing when I feel complete on my own terms. A lot of my writing is also very rhythmic.
If you read my pieces in a flow, you would notice that much of my writing follows a certain rhythm. Every time I write something, I read it out loud multiple times, feel the vibrations in my body, and then decide whether something is unnecessary or if something needs to be added. So what I choose to reveal depends largely on how I feel about the piece when I read it, and how that one-person audience, which is me, responds to it.
The rest is not something I concern myself with. I don’t think, as an artist, you should be overly concerned about what the rest of the world thinks. As an artist, your responsibility is to write for a singular audience, and that audience is yourself.
Q. With a poetry book on the way, how is writing for a book different from writing for Instagram—emotionally and creatively?
Well, there are a lot of differences, and it also depends on how you’re approaching it. But I think the most obvious difference is that on Instagram, every post exists for itself. It does not have to be connected to the rest of your work. But when you’re writing a poetry book or any book, there has to be a common thread that runs throughout.While each piece in a book has to stand on its own, it also needs to be somewhat interconnected with the others, or the book as a whole won’t make sense. For example, if you’re writing a poetry book with multiple pieces, they should ideally be linked through a common thread. That’s at least what’s recommended. On Instagram, nothing has to be interlinked; each post can exist independently. Emotionally and creatively, it’s also very different.
Emotionally, it can be a little overwhelming because there is a kind of comparison pressure. You find yourself comparing your work to peers who have already done very well. For instance, I often compare myself to Ocean Vuong, and that makes me nervous because I deeply admire him as a writer. There’s also a lot of performance pressure that comes with creating something for a book. Imposter syndrome shows up, and doubts arise, questions like whether you’re ready or if your work is even worthy of being shared.
You never really know if a piece is ready to be out in the world. Posting on Instagram, by contrast, feels low risk. Not much can go wrong, and while good things may happen, the stakes are relatively low. Writing a poetry book, however, comes with much more pressure. For me, it’s stressful and nerve-wracking at times. I constantly compare my work to pieces by people in literary spaces who have done exceptionally well. The stress definitely gets to me, but I know it’s all a part of the process.
Q. Visuals play a strong role in your work—chairs, doors, blurred landscapes, ordinary objects. What draws you to these everyday images as carriers of emotion?
I think a lot of life is held in the cup you use every day for tea, in the plate you eat from. A lot of life is lived in the mirror you look at while dressing up. A lot of life lives in your favourite sweater, the one you wear every day to work. A lot of life lives in the creaking of doors, in the tables where you place your book to read, in the cafés you visit. I think an entire life is lived through these very simple objects, which we often overlook as if they are unimportant. When was the last time you looked at your coffee mug and felt a sense of love toward it? When was the last time you kissed the walls of your home and thanked them for protecting you, for giving you a safe space?
For me, these little things have always mattered because there was a time when I almost lost all of it, when I lost my home, when I lost things I had collected over years in a single day. That was a deeply personal experience, one I don’t often talk about. It made me respect these little things even more.
I don’t know what I would do if tomorrow I woke up and my favorite diary or journal was gone. I think I would go into full panic mode if I realized my favorite mug had broken or my favorite book had been torn. These small objects carry so much, they carry an abundance of life that the bigger things cannot.
It is the little things you use every day, that witness you passing through life, whether animate or inanimate, that hold the entirety of life in them. For me, these are the real carriers of emotion. These are the things that make up our entire lives, and they are the true backbone of my art.
Q. If your poetry had a soundtrack for a late-night walk, would it be silence, rain, or a song on loop?
I think neither. It would be you humming a song your mother used to hum when you were young. You don’t know the lyrics. You just know that if you hum it for long enough, you will feel at home.
Bio
Vesmir is a writer and poet who has been writing for over seven years. He is the founder of Tangerine, a book and poetry circle. His work has been featured in The Hindu, The Hindustan Times, and Times Now and he is currently signed with Penguin India and is working on his upcoming poetry book.
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Interviewed By Tarunanshi Sharma
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