Touched by the Ordinary: Kamol Karmakar on Writing from Life’s Smallest Shocks

Kamol Karmakar is a young Bangladeshi writer and academician. Erotemes is his first poetry collection. Through these poems, he explores identity, existential uncertainty, and the fragile contours of our shared humanity.

Since 2021, I have been following the poetic works of Kamol Karmakar and his growth. I saw how he was moving from writing poetry to becoming a proficient poet. When his first book, Erotemes, was published, I read it with enthusiasm. That curiosity led me to interview him.

Porter House Review: There is a haunting beauty in the way your poems seem to channel pain, anguish, and crisis. What truths or experiences do they arise from?

Kamol Karmakar: Mostly what happens to me is, writings do not happen on a regular basis. They only happen when things really attract me. And those things might come from, you know, everyday experiences. Like, I’m going to my office after breakfast and suddenly I see something that is not normal. It could be a person, a thing, a tree, or a bird. It could be anything, but it has to somehow touch me, you know, and then the writing happens.

For example, just a few days ago, a friend of mine and I decided to enjoy some fuchka, you know, near a graveyard by the riverside. Then we went there, and suddenly, we found out that across the river, there is a pyre, a funeral pyre, and it was burning. We had gone there many times, almost every week for the past three to four months, but we never saw it–the burning pyre, the funeral pyre. Then that evening, we saw it. And suddenly, she, my friend, said, “I can see you on the pyre.” She said, “I can see you on the pyre. Someday, you will be put on a pyre like that, and you will be gone.” That one single thing made me think for the next two or three days. It is just a random thing, and it’s the universal truth that we are going to end one day.

PHR: There’s something else I also noticed in your poems. They tend to reveal the most by leaving certain things unsaid. That’s how I felt it. If that is the case, how do you achieve that effect?

KK: Okay, actually, what I think is that poetry is not what we say; it’s how we say it. If I keep some parts of the poetry, some sentences, you know, mysterious or things that are not clearly clarified, it beautifies the poetry. And it keeps the theme enigmatic for the readers to, maybe, you know, explain it in their own ways. They can have their conclusions in their own manner, and that makes it even more beautiful. I think this is only possible in literature. I mean, we speak less, we say more, in verses. We don’t say things plainly, but we say a lot, like Dickinson. She clearly had a very deep impact on my writing. She writes very little, but her sentences and her verses speak volumes of her imagination and thoughts, and they’re really powerful.

PHR: Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned Dickinson and liking her. Your poems also explore a wide range of subjects, and their form and style are striking and experimental. So, what inspired you, during the writing and composition process, to do such experiments with form, style, and subject matter?

KK: When I was teaching at the USTC, I taught courses titled American Literature I and II. In American Literature I, I taught poems by Dickinson. While teaching her poetry for the first time, since teaching is learning twice, I revisited her work, which I had read during my undergrad but hadn’t paid enough attention to then. Or maybe I was not careful about her poetry. But when I started teaching her poetry to my students, I think I finally paid enough attention to her writing style, her punctuation marks, her irregular capitalizations, her pauses. You know, those things really made me stop and go through her verses over and over again. And I tried to feel what she was really trying to deliver.

Besides the poetry that I taught, besides those experiences, there is another crucial factor, and that was the accident that took place in 2019. I had a very severe road accident, and I consider that a success I had never seen before. After the accident, when I started relearning to walk or exercise in the morning, I started seeing those tiny little ants that we humans tread on.

PHR: Yeah. Let’s talk about approaching rhythm in your poems. Are there particular patterns or meters you gravitate toward?

KK: In some of the poems, when I was trying to compose at the very beginning, that particular factor disturbed me a lot, like what meter I should follow and what rhythm should be there. At the beginning, I even tried to follow different writing styles. But later, I kept composing and writing, and then I thought that was not really significant. By following certain patterns and rhythms, I focused on translating my emotions into sentences. When you do this repeatedly, you don’t really have to worry about structuring your sentences perfectly.

PHR:  Right, now you talk about emotions. In your poem “Snakes and Ladders,” you balance both devastation and hope within the same poem. How do you approach blending these contrasting emotions? Was there anything deeper you wanted to express through this poem?

KK “Snakes and Ladders” is one of the very first poems that I composed immediately after COVID. At that point, I thought that everyone had become, you know, equal, similar. It was like coming back to the selves. There was no one forcing you. But still, there was that hope that taught us, that pandemic taught us not just equality and fraternity but also hopefulness, even when we had no reason to be hopeful.

PHR: Yeah, that’s a deep revelation. In “The Salt Can’t Leave the Sea,” you turn personal grief into a meditation on inheritance and identity. So, how do you see love and regret coexisting in the process of remembering someone you have lost?

KK: I somehow have a feeling, you might disagree, that I only knew love immediately after I lost love.

PHR: You lost who?

KK: Love. I lost love. When love was within me, when love was surrounding me, I did not recognize it. I misunderstood love. And probably, you know, I ignored it my whole life. The moment I lost it, I realized that I was wrong, and then I was inheriting what I had lost. It’s like the sea, you know; however you try to lose the salt, you can never lose it. It is not the sea, or it is not the salt either, but it is both, because, you know, without either of them, the whole thing would remain incomplete. It’s a great loss that I suffered, and I actually tried to do something small about it. I dedicated the poetry book in memory of him, my father.

PHR: In another poem called “Immunity,” you contrast empathy for some lives with indifference toward others. For instance, you wrote, “Childhood lost in Kyiv grievens us a lot—The same lost in Gaza moves us not.” How do you see poetry as a medium for confronting moral hypocrisy and selective compassion in this world?

KK: It’s easy when it is poetry. You can reveal the injustices you are seeing right now, and still, there will be no voices, because in today’s world, people are becoming so blunt. The people who read truly understand the importance of writing, the importance of reading, and they are sensible. The people who do not read, who are indifferent, you know, you can write them off. That’s why I believe poetry can address this problem. It gives us a way to express whatever we want to say, and we can do it through verse.

PHR: I’m glad that you are processing lots of things that you couldn’t say otherwise, but you were saying them through your poetry. And thus, I would like to ask you my last question. Across your work, there’s an undercurrent of resilience, a belief that meaning can still emerge from despair. Do you think poetry can redeem suffering, or does it simply bear witness to it without offering any solution?

KK Poetry becomes my source of hope when all else seems hopeless. Poetry truly gives me hope, and there are marvelous poems. Immediately after COVID-19, I decided that I would stop eating meat, and I wouldn’t touch it ever again. And I did it. I even posted on Facebook that I had stopped eating meat. A lot of people reacted and said good things. Then again, some people said, “What rubbish! Why would you stop eating meat? Your whole life you ate meat, and suddenly you stopped. So, are you trying to set an example for people, or is it just for showing off?” I did not listen to them; I kept following what I believed. But after one year, I read a book, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Just a few sentences in the book. The next day, I had Chicken Biryani. And the sentences were: “It’s not what enters a man’s mouth that’s evil; it’s what comes out of it that is. Now, drink and enjoy yourself.”