The Poem Sequence

Have been trying to write a series of poems which would chart the processes through which fairytales begin to attain contradictory meanings in the lives of Bengali women. I do not want to exoticize fairytales in my poems. Rather, I want to open up a personal/political history of reception of the fairytales from the perspective of Bengali middle-class women. It is an inter-generational history, and that's why, also has to be multi-vocal. I am struggling with the use of the pronouns in this particular sequence. There are too many shes. I am still trying to find my ways around it. One thing I have realized in the last few months. Writing is a form of art which needs intense engagement with the world. Craft is important, but it is just one element in the equation. What one needs to do is to keep on enlarging one's world. That happens with continuous interactions with the social world, and and and...reading. What I am trying to say is that, most of what we call inspiration, is, in reality, back-breaking work and successful appropriation of the work that is being done by others. For example, I had been reading Kwai-Yun Li's The Last Dragon Dance, a collection of short stories about the Kolkata Chinatown. The book is not "great" by any means, although very very interesting and raises lots of questions about diaspora and representation. But what it did for me was to give back a sense of place, which I am desperately trying to etch in the words of this particular poem sequence. Once the whole book would be completed, it would be interesting to go back and see how Kwai-Yun Li has begun to reside in my poems! Yes, I am the one who would be writing these poems, but I am not alone in this. I am, in fact, in writing something, thrusting my own voice within already existing collectivities.