The Shelf That Raised My Words

Tagore taught me that tenderness and profundity are not opposites. Before I read Gitanjali, I believed that seriousness required a certain austerity — that poems about the soul had to be cold and formal to be taken seriously. Tagore broke that open.

He writes to God the way most people are afraid to write to anyone they love: directly, simply, without performance. There is no rhetorical distance in Gitanjali, no hedging, no irony deployed as armour. Just a voice, waiting. “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high” — the whole of it arrives like light through a window you forgot you’d left open.

What I carry from Tagore is permission to be sincere. In a literary culture that sometimes mistakes sophistication for complexity and complexity for worth, he is a reminder that the deepest things are often the quietest ones. His longing is specific and patient. It never performs itself.

He also wrote songs. Thousands of them. The music carries what the words leave out — which is itself a lesson about what poems can and cannot hold.

Ghalib feels like someone who has suffered, laughed at himself for suffering, and then written the most beautiful line about it.

What I love about him is that he never makes heartbreak feel simple. He does not write like a person trying to sound wise. He writes like someone who has been hurt enough to understand how strange love can be — how it can make you proud and helpless at the same time.

Before I read Ghalib, I thought sadness in poetry had to be soft or dramatic. But his sadness has wit. It has intelligence. It looks at pain from the side and almost smiles at it. That is what makes him feel so alive to me. He does not just cry over longing; he questions it, argues with it, and sometimes makes fun of himself for still wanting what has already wounded him.

What I carry from Ghalib is the comfort of contradiction. He makes it feel normal to be full of opposite feelings — to want distance and closeness, to believe and doubt, to move on and still look back. His poems do not try to fix that confusion. They sit inside it.

There is a loneliness in Ghalib that feels very human. Not loud loneliness, but the kind you carry quietly while still showing up to the world with humour and grace.

Ghalib reminds me that poetry does not always need to heal you. Sometimes it just understands you before you have found the words yourself.

Ocean Vuong writes at the intersection of things that don’t usually coexist in the same room: war and tenderness, queerness and filial love, American violence and immigrant longing. The poems in Night Sky with Exit Wounds do something I find almost impossible to explain — they hold multiple devastations simultaneously without any of them cancelling the others out.

The poem “Notebook Fragments” is one I’ve returned to more than any other single poem. It does what the best journals do: makes the fragment the form, makes incompleteness its argument.

What I owe Vuong is an understanding that the personal history of the body — where it comes from, what it survived, what it carries — is not beside the point of poetry but is its very subject. He doesn’t aestheticize trauma. He accounts for it. The difference is everything.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as a novel taught me something about letters: that you can write to someone who cannot fully read you, and that the writing still matters. The letter is as much for the writer as the recipient. I think about this every time I write a poem I’m not sure anyone will understand.

Bachchan taught me that sorrow does not always arrive dressed as silence. Sometimes it sings. Sometimes it raises a glass. Sometimes it walks into a tavern and calls it Madhushala.

Before I read him, I thought pain in poetry had to be still, almost sacred in its restraint. Bachchan showed me another kind of depth — one that moves, repeats, chants, returns. His poems do not simply confess suffering; they transform it into rhythm. In Madhushala, the wine, the cup, the drinker, and the tavern become more than images. They become a way of surviving the contradictions of life: desire and discipline, pleasure and grief, loneliness and companionship.

What I carry from Bachchan is the courage to make philosophy feel human. He does not place thought on a pedestal. He brings it into the street, into song, into the mouth of the common person. His language has music without losing weight. His metaphors are simple enough to remember and deep enough to live inside.

There is also a strange defiance in him. Not loud, not angry, but persistent. The world may wound you, confuse you, deny you certainty — and still, the poem can keep walking. Still, the voice can keep singing.

Bachchan reminds me that poetry does not always heal by becoming calm. Sometimes it heals by becoming alive.