I have just finished a workshop with Rachel Kann. Rachel's overall feedback to me was: I need to challenge myself to write more directly. I have been thinking about that a lot in the past few days. I do have a tendency to play with language, with the inherent symbolism of it. But I think my tendency to use indirect language comes from two things:
1. Having grown up around lots of ganasangeet, and people trying to write "socialist-realist" poems, plays and stories, I have a tendency to keep myself deliberately away from what I call Red Sun and Internationale Aesthetic. I want to explore the political through different kinds of images, through different kinds of symbolisms. Hence, a lot of my indirect explorations.
2. Since I also write short stories, essays, and political pamphlets, I don't always feel the need to explore experiences and languages in straight, direct ways in my poems. I feel my prose can do that better, in a different way. What I therefore, try to do in my poems is to explore the abstract, the magical. I like to stretch the limits of an image, a word, a sentence, the inherent symbolism of a form.
But it is also equally true, my writing tends to get more indirect and immersed in language and image plays whenever I am not exploring something very deeply. In short, in my own writing, obscurity in the guise of beautiful language often follows my own lack of clarity about a topic. So, when Rachel pushed me to think about more direct ways to write my material, she had done me an immense service in trying to make me see something.
I am trying to think this through as I am revising my first manuscript.
PS. the word ganasangeet in Bangla means "people's songs."
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