Wisteria - A Journal of Poetry

It’s not often that you hear of a young poet launching her collection in Muscat. Vipasha Mishra, who just passed her 10th standard from Indian School Darsait, has accomplished a rare feat. She recently released her collection of poems called More than Words. In a candid interview, Vipasha speaks to Times of Oman about her book, interests and future plans.

The title of my book is, in fact, the title of one of the poems in my book. I deeply believe in the power of poetry and believe that words, when put together as poems, are not a mere collection of alphabets, but are powerful enough to move the world.

I generally write poems to throw the negativity out of my system. The world today is full of vices and that perturbs me. So, most of my poems are an outburst of my emotions after seeing the conditions around me. Some poems are also dedications to people who have changed my life like The Dark Knight, which I wrote for my maternal grandfather. So, ultimately it is my mood that decides the theme of my poems.

I had begun writing at an early age and had collected quite a few poems. It was basically the idea of my mother to preserve the collection in the form of a book so that I’m motivated to write more. Besides, seeing my maternal grandmother, who is a Hindi writer, and my mother tongue being Maithili, publishing the book was quite fascinating to me.

I used to write short stories when I was 7 or 8 years old. But it was in Grade 6, when I was 11 that I was given an assignment to write a poem. The one I wrote was God Is in My Heart and it was greatly appreciated by my teachers. It was then that I realised that I could write more and developed my interest in it. I was exposed to poems at the age of 5 or 6 when my mother read me a Lord Tennyson or a Subhadra Kumari Chauhan poem, which I eventually learnt by heart.