The Star Poet

Nina Bahadur, a junior from London, is already an accomplished poet. She has won prizes, has her own website (www.ninabahadur.com) and her first book, “Every Single One,” has just been published by Flipped Eye Publishing. In addition to singing with the Tigresssions and serving as the “Culturally Cap” co-chair of Cap & Gown Club, she is concentrating in anthropology and pursuing certificates in creative writing and gender and sexuality studies. I talked to her about her experiences with writing, the excitement of having a book published and what’s next in store for her.

Q: How did you get started writing?

A: I’ve always written. When I was very small, I wrote short stories and things like that. And when I was in high school, I had a lot of teachers who were very encouraging. They taught us to write a lot, workshop a lot and send our work to magazines.

Q: Are there any poets who have particularly influenced you?

A: Clare Pollard. She started writing when she was very young. Her first collection came out when she was, I think, 17 or 18. And it was about being a young person and all these experiences that aren’t typical poetic things — going to a nightclub on New Year’s and taking exams in school, that kind of thing. And I got to meet her once. I was blatantly in awe; I couldn’t say anything. The stuff she wrote about really resonated with me, much more than very serious stuff. And I also like Anne Sexton. We had to read a lot of Philip Larkin in high school, which is so depressing but also incredibly well-written stuff.

Q: How did you shift from writing for yourself to sending things out and getting published?

A: I had a teacher who really encouraged me, who really encouraged all of us, to send our work out. And I had a stroke of good luck when I was quite young and got something published. That made me realize that there were people out there who actually might be interested in reading what I had to write, which was a huge revelation. So once I had one small success story I felt like it could be an avenue for me. It was something that I might be able to do in the future, so I persisted with it.

Q: How did your book end up getting published?

A: I entered this poetry competition called the Christopher Tower Competition. It’s a competition for British kids between the ages of 16 and 18. I placed third in it, which I was really pleased about. I actually missed the awards ceremony because I was at Princeton Preview. The publishing company that my book is done with, Flipped Eye Publishing, read the entries that placed and contacted me out of the blue. They asked to see some more of my work and then they said, “Okay, we want you to write a small collection with us.” So it was completely unsolicited and incredible to me, completely out of nowhere.

Q: How did you go about putting together the collection in the book?

A: That was actually very hard because I had never written with a specific theme in mind or anything that connected different pieces. I would just write whatever came into my head and I’d never thought about what order to put the poems in or how they sound out loud in comparison to other ones. So I was given an editor, Jacob Sam La-Rose, who worked with the press and he would push me very hard in terms of trying to make it cohesive without being the same. If he felt like there was something missing, he would keep going with it until he saw what he wanted. There are 17 poems in the book, and I started by sending the company six, so it was quite a lot of work.

Q: How does it feel to have friends, family and strangers reading your book?

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A: It’s very scary. I read this quote once that someone very clever said, that writing is spending a very long time making yourself as completely naked as possible and then walking around outside. So it kind of feels like that. Even having friends read it makes me very nervous — no one’s allowed to read it in front of me. But I hope that when people read it, they’ll find something in there that interests them, some word that they like or anything.

Q: Where do you get your inspiration? What’s your writing process like?

A: I’m a big journaler. I do a lot of that. I always have, since I was maybe six years old. I really like words — I will hear words that I don’t know much about or that I think sound cool, and I’ll write them down. It’s a very nerdy, language-centric process where I just see how words go together. But I think there’s this impression of poetry and people who read it as incredibly serious and somber and sometimes very depressed people like Philip Larkin, but that’s not at all my personality or my way of approaching it. So a lot of people have been very surprised when they hear that I like to write — you know, they’re like, “But you’re so fun! I don’t understand!” I don’t really know how to navigate that in terms of how I work. I just write stuff down. It just sort of happens.

Q: Have you been involved in poetry at Princeton?

A: Well, I took two intro-level poetry classes, and the department kept rejecting me for the higher level ones, so, you know, I tried. The workshop setup can be quite frustrating at times. But it’s always good to have a forum where people are giving constructive criticism. People would always ask me, “What is this supposed to be about?” and that’s never how I’d approached writing. I never sat down and thought, “I’m going to write a poem about Newman’s Day!” It’s always a much more organic process.

And I’m going to be doing a creative thesis so that will be a very different experience. I’ll get to work with Tracy Smith, who’s incredible, and I’m so excited. Because I’m an anthropology major, I haven’t figured out a way to write a creative anthropology thesis that’s not incredibly contrived. So I’ll probably do two separate theses. I mean, there’ll be some overlap, given my areas of interest, but it’s not going to be one piece or anything. The plan is to have an experience where I’m intensely working one on one with a poet and just see what happens.

Q: So you’ve clearly achieved huge success at a young age. What’s next?

A: I really want to go into publishing. I’ve been interning in the publishing industry for the past couple of summers and I’ll be doing it again this summer. I just love it. Your job is to read and work with words, which I absolutely love doing. I’ll hopefully eventually pursue a master’s degree in creative writing, but I don’t know if it will ever be what I do full time. I think it’s very hard to have a day job where your job is to be creative on your own all the time. And I can’t imagine how people do that — I think it takes a huge amount of energy. Also, there’s not enough structure for me in that lifestyle. I’d just sit there with a blank page all day and probably start to hate myself.

Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Molly O’Neill.