conducted by Betsy K. Brown on July 11th, 2023

Betsy K. Brown: Today, we will be hearing from poet, novelist, and doctor Amit Majmudar. Majmudar is the author of seventeen books, with three more forthcoming this year. He also served as the first poet laureate of Ohio.

As a fellow Ohioan and poet, I’m particularly curious about how Ohio has influenced your writing.

Amit Majmudar: A good thing about Ohio for me has to do with the isolation of it. I’ve frequently lived in very low-population-density areas of Ohio. I’ve never needed a large community of writers. I like to dwell among books and just do my thing, and sometimes it comes out and hits the world in a favorable way. However, if you do want a literary community, there’s one here in Columbus. You can have the best of both worlds, the hermetic isolation and the community.

I’ve lived here basically my whole life. In second grade, my family relocated to India and I went to school there for two years. Then I came right back to a suburb of Cleveland. Living in Ohio so long has given me a lot of perspective on the different Americas that exist within America, and it makes it more difficult for me to write off any group. I know that Ohio’s a punch line for much of the country, but it’s difficult for me to go along with writing off of large tracts of the country as racists or rubes, or however they get characterized. I see the reality of it, and I see that it’s a diverse place. There are very interesting people here, very kind people. It’s a mix, but it’s been important to prevent any closed-mindedness toward my fellow citizens of this state.

BB: Are your Ohio poems focused on certain threads or themes for you?

AM: There is something sad or tragic that runs through mine, and I think all of them have an elegiac quality. I think that’s inevitable when you look at the trajectory of the Midwest as a whole, and of Ohio in particular. Cleveland and Cincinnati used to be thriving centers of trade, of commerce, of culture. And if you look at Cincinnati, it was where the Union built all its ships. If you go down to the river, you can see there’s nothing there to indicate that, just a little plaque. It’s just astonishing to me to think that Cincinnati was once such an important site, not just in the war effort, but in the economy of the early United States. This is part of the tragedy of the Midwest. You go to these areas and they’ve been gutted of their young people and gutted of their vitality, so inevitably there should be an elegiac quality to your writing if you are writing honestly. There’s a lot of history that’s taken place, but much of history has now moved on.

BB: Yeah, there’s a really distinct melancholy that I have a hard time naming because I only lived in Ohio for my adolescence, and then I left the Midwest for Manhattan and never came back. So it’s helpful to hear from someone who’s stayed but is also looking at the world through the eyes of a poet who loves people in Ohio. So, let’s look closer at your poem, “State of Being.” The poem opens with, “Between O and O / is a lowercase high, / a quick hello.” I would love to hear more about what comes to mind with that imagery.

AM: “O” is the classical sound of woe, and “hi” has a double entendre of elevation or “high,” like marijuana high. That high is something someone might use to overcome the woe, or deaden the melancholy that we were talking about earlier. And at the same time, it’s a greeting.

BB: And it’s a lowercase “high,” so it doesn’t go all the way up.

AM: It’s “high,” but it’s not HIGH. As high as you’re gonna get, right?

BB: Later in the poem you write:

I have spooned the local honey

and failed to taste a difference.

I have rummaged

among the blotchy fruits

at farmer’s markets.

Forgive me, Ohio,

but apples genespliced in Wisconsin

trucked in from Michigan

glisteny with wax and pesticide

in artificial light

have always pleased me more.

That part always gets me. What is it that makes the honey not have any difference, or the local apples not taste as good? Is there an artificiality in Ohio? Something unappealing, or that can’t find its identity?

AM: I think the crucial term there is “genespliced,” and that is referring specifically to the Honeycrisp apple, which was made in a lab to taste better and have better texture. Ohio in the past was creating naturally spliced apples, and meanwhile the rest of the country is creating through modern technology, and outcompeting the native apples. The passage of time is ruthless, and progress is ruthless.

BB: And there’s something tragic about that too, because their naturalness is part of their beauty and goodness, but here they’re something blotchy to rummage through, not something popular or appealing. Okay, I can’t talk about this poem with you without bringing up the final lines: “I do not want to leave / a place / I never loved.”

AM: I wonder about that now, because truth be told, do I love Ohio? Probably I kind of do. It’s home. Probably that’s poetic license, because I have been playing with “leave” and “love” a lot. Maybe it’s more complex than saying that I never loved it, since if I really never loved it, would I really have lived here voluntarily for this long? To be honest with you, I love Ohio the most when I’m hobnobbing in Manhattan. It’s weird. You think of it mentally, New York must be so cool, this university on the coast must be so cool, but then you get there and you want to be back in the metro parks of Ohio. It’s weird. Home has that ability I guess.

BB: That makes a lot of sense. Is the line “In Rootstown mine was not the root. / In Mayfield mine was not the flower” related to being an immigrant?

AM: To being the son of immigrants, and to being technically an ethnic and religious minority, a one percent minority in the country, but an even less than one percent minority in Ohio. I’m not as deracinated as the typical Indian- American who was brought up in the United States. I have more of a connection to my religion and history than the typical Indian-American doctor that I know. They’ve sort of let all that go, and they become cosmopolitan elites, with the standard roster of liberal progressive ideas. They become part of that community and that segment of society, where I’ve always had a particularly strong relationship to my traditional ancestral Dharma, and it’s the same for my wife. So there’s an element of alienation there relative to my immediate environment. Other than being made fun of as a kid in high school, we’re free to practice our religion and be who we are, and that’s a wonderful thing, and that’s an American thing, and I hope it never goes away.

BB: On another note, I’m curious what being Ohio poet laureate was like.

AM: I became poet laureate when it was just starting out. I had certain projects I wanted to do. I had a dance drama with poetry performance that I coordinated with my wife and a bunch of classical Indian dancers from the area. There were readings and appearances. In retrospect I could have done more of that, but I was also working full time as a radiologist, and there’s only so much time in the day to do that. It was a wonderful experience. There was an opportunity to do another term, but I thought “let’s spread the wealth,” so to speak, and so just did two years of it.

BB: Who are some Ohio poets that you highly recommend looking at?

AM: In Columbus you have Hanif Abdurraqib and Maggie Smith. Up in Cleveland you have Dave Lucas and Philip Metres. David Baker is another highly regarded poet based in Ohio. Rita Dove was originally based in Ohio, if I recall. Those are all wonderful people to start with.

BB: Do you notice in their works if there are any common themes running between authors? And do you think that Ohio writing has a particular character?

AM: There’s no single way to characterize the writing that comes out of Ohio, and that’s a good thing; it just shows that we’re representative of the whole country in that sense, which is now a very heterogeneous country. I think each Ohio writer does their own thing. They’re very distinct writers, but I do think an appreciation of nature is a through line for sure.

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Betsy K. Brown is a poet, critic, and curriculum writer. Her work has appeared in First Things, The Classical Outlook, and AWP’s The Writer’s Notebook.