Vivek Narayanan leads poetry workshops for both MFA and BFA courses and is the co-editorial director for Poetry Daily. He also serves on the board of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. Before joining the faculty at Mason, Narayan taught at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the late 1990s, and he worked from the mid-2000s at Sarai-CSDS, a center for experimental practice and theory in New Delhi; he also served as a co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal 2007-2019.
Narayanan's books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S, and, most recently, After (NYRB Poets, 2022) and The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions, 2024). His poems, stories, translations, and critical essays have appeared in journals including Poetry, The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books, and elsewhere, as well as in the anthologies The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry.
Narayanan recently shared some perspectives on his new books, his poetry in general, and his teaching.
Your two latest books, After and Kuruntokai and Its Mirror, both seem to be in direct conversation with classical texts—translating, reconfiguring, responding, building on, building from… What about classic literature specifically excites, informs, and inspires your work?
Although this would have been quite a surprise to my younger poet-self, these days I find myself really excited by classical/ancient/traditional texts from every part of the world. They can be obscure to us, but also startlingly immediate, and it’s this combination of strangeness and familiarity that is so compelling, because it exposes our assumptions. Much has changed, much hasn’t. The human heart, it appears, has changed very little; violence and trauma echo through the ages. Strange to say it, but the past can be a rich source for new ideas—every great age of innovation has begun with a mining of the past. And while I love the Greco-Roman tradition, it’s unfortunate that we see it as isolated and still blandly synonymous with “classical,” that too many contemporary poets limit themselves to it. The future, I think, lies in a deeper and more comprehensive excavation of the human intellectual heritage across six continents. For instance, when you compare epics from around the world, there are startling similarities. We have so much to learn from studying the interrelatedness of the past.
As a follow-up, the word “experiment” has come up in blurbs and reviews of each of these books. Would you yourself define your poetry as experimental?
On some level, all good poetry is experimental, a step into the unknown, for writer and for reader. It’s true that I sometimes have a penchant for exploring the limits of poetry—into abstraction, document, pure sound, visual design and so on—but I also like to bring it home. What counts as experimental really depends on time and place: what is oppositional in your time, what is likely to move things forward? Some people treat “experimental” as a synonym for “difficult or obscure,” a legacy of high modernism which, truth be told, isn’t even experimental anymore—it's a hundred years old! I’m a big tent guy. We have a lot of discussions in our workshops about “direct” vs “slant” approaches, but it’s all about what you find necessary in that moment, that place. What I’ve always loved about the Mason MFA is that there is no “house style”: every graduate student is writing in a radically different way, one that is their own. We have to meet each other there.
In the courses you teach at Mason, both MFA classes and undergraduate workshops, how are you encouraging students to balance engaging with tradition and building their own voice?
I’m great believer in “riffing”–channeling poetic traditions through you but then allowing them to be transformed in and through your own body. The “mistakes” or “distortions” in the channel become the elements by which you can develop your own style. One way we do this is in my classes is using experimental translational practices, where you transmit another text, maybe from another language, but with an interest in divergence, play and possibility, not accuracy or expert authority.
How does your teaching inform or enhance your own writing?
It doesn’t happen in a conscious way, but it will creep in, and reading a poem I’ve written after the fact, I’ll see it was a veiled response to something that was discussed or explored in class. When we write in class, which I find fun and communal, I will usually join in. When I have students write sonnets, with a slight delay of some days I discover the desire to do it myself when sitting down to my writing desk, to see if I still have it. The poets I have to read or reread for a class, that I myself have assigned, become a source of inspiration. And the circle completes when I share my personal experience of writing poems in class. So while I try not to think about it too much, I can definitely feel there’s this constant subterranean tide of energy, forms and ideas back and forth.
What’s the best new book of poetry you’ve read recently—and what made it stand out?
Three simultaneously jump to mind!
The first isn’t exactly a new book of poetry but the translation by James Montgomery is new, and it’s the book I loved the most last year. Fate the Hunter (NYU Abu Dhabi Press, 2023) is a breathtakingly beautiful and poignant anthology of early Arabic hunting poetry that showed me how deeply poetry and ecology have always been entwined. [Read the poem "Fate the Hunter" at Poetry Daily.]
Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, 2024) is the ninth book of poems by a major writer—perhaps one of the greatest of my generation—whose work is varied, rich, intricate, fearless, playful and continually pummeling forward.
Prageeta Sharma’s Onement Won (Wave Books, 2025) will become a landmark in American and South Asian and World poetry, I think, given the ferocity and tenderness with which it explores what it means for us to be with each other, to relate to each other, to be one or many. It’s forceful, plain, awkward, sonically sumptuous, and deep.
Editor's note: Prageeta Sharma will be part of the Spring 2026 Visiting Writers Series.
December 19, 2025