From Robert Frost to haiku: Bengaluru physician-poet finds her voice in three lines
Bengaluru: Dr Vaishnavi Pusapati’s path to poetry began in a school classroom with Robert Frost. The Bengaluru-based physician, clinical researcher, and poet says she was “enamoured by his style of writing.”
But Frost’s biography almost stopped her before she started. “I read up about him and discovered that he was a Harvard graduate who went on to teach poetry there. That made me feel a sense of dissonance: that poetry was far away from me. Maybe I could read it, but not write it,” she says.
She found her way back through haiku. The brief Japanese form became her favorite mode of expression, with nature and grief as recurring themes.
Pusapati’s work recently reached an international stage when her poem ‘Cheers to Science’ was performed by Seattle-based Infinity Box Theatre Project as part of InVerse Functions, a theatrical event of science poetry.
For a doctor balancing medicine and verse, haiku offers precision — three lines to capture a moment, a loss, or a leaf. Nature, she notes, remains a key theme in many haiku, reflecting both her scientific eye and poetic instinct.
