interview :

Taryn Hubbard: I wonder if you could talk about what you’re doing [in your poems] with culture – I don’t know if I would say “multiculturalism” (cringe!) – and language...

Renee Sarojini Saklikar: Language, I think, is a ground zero for all these “isms” that many of us as writers battle with, and the challenge as a poet is how to evoke, how to make material, how to conceptualise, how to make it a song, how to make it into something. And for me, this is the place, this image of language coming together with concept.

TH: ... There’s also something going on in your poems... you do this thing with a colon where you have your word and a space and a colon and a space. And when I’m reading them I’m wondering “are these equals signs?”, “are these quotations?”, “are these bookmarks?” How are you using them?

RSS: ... For me the colon is an effacement of the lyric “I”... I think for poets who want to be informed by conceptual, structural, post-structural, post-modern, et al... and also cleave, cleave if we are honest, to a lyric voice, how do we deal with the confessional “I”, the “I” of the speaker of the poem? And I want to both have if present and efface it, almost deface it. That's what I'm working on with space and colon.

- Renee Sarojini Saklikar, in interview with Taryn Hubbard for The Storytelling Show. You can listen to the whole thing, in which Taryn and Renee interview one another about their recent writing projects, here.

You can get a small sample of Renee's : colons : on page 29 of the Spring 2012 issue of Wordworks (PDF).