::2012 Resolutions::

I have never accorded much importance to Resolutions or list-making. I am not a very organized person (euphemism for "scattered"), and lists and such have always seemed a little superfluous to me. I have always believed in going with the flow, to take things as they come, and take one day at a time. I still do. But as I am growing older, I am realizing, I don't have much time left. It's important for me to make the best use of the time I have, to be accountable to myself, to stay focused on things I want to achieve. Lists can be really helpful in that-- I can always log in to this page, and see for myself how much of my own stated goals I have achieved. So, here is my 2012 resolutions, with one caveat. I think, a year is TOO long a time. And the way my life is right now, I cannot really plan an entire year. So, here, I am trying to come up with a list of goals for the next six months of my life.

Academic

Finish my dissertation, defend and get my PhD. This can be achieved by writing and revising everyday. For that, I will also need to read articles, monographs and such everyday. Right now, I am working on my Introduction. I hope to get it done by the end of this break.

Teaching

I am teaching a class called "Food And Asian-American Popular Cultural Imagination" this Spring. I have the syllabus more or less planned. I am excited about the topic, and hope to do the best job I can. I am hoping to come up with some kind of a pedagogy article from my experience of teaching this class. So, I will try to keep extensive records of day-to-day teaching. I will also use this class as a springboard to conceptualize a conference paper, later to be developed into a journal article.

Writing

I have been working on my first collection of poems while working on my dissertation. A lot of these poems have come out individually in journals, some I am still sending out. Now, I need to make that leap-- collect, collate these poems into a coherent manuscript. I have begun that work during this break. By June 2012, I want to have a collection that is more solid, and send it out to two of my readers. Like the dissertation, for this too, I need to keep working on it everyday. I don't have any lofty goals for it yet, since my first priority is to get the dissertation done. But I want to stay with this project, keep thinking about it, revise the poems, tweak their orders, just so I am in touch. My aim here is progress, not perfection. The latter will come in the post-dissertation stage.

Reading

Three Bengali Novels: Keyapatar Nouko by Prafulla Roy, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga by Jyotirmoyee Debi, Meghe Dhaka Tara by Shaktipada Rajguru

Three English Novels: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh

I am not making a list of poetry collections here. Since, in my experience, I do a better job of reading poems while working on the dissertation and regular pressures of teaching.

Food And Cooking

Learning six new recipes and blogging about them. Fall 2011 had been plain bad in terms of this. I was so tired that I failed to cook on most nights. Either I was fed by a friend (thanks, Ani) or, I would make some mush of rice, lentils and onions. I didn't even feel like making an one-pot stew. This needs to change. I do have a few recipes memorized which I can cook, improvise on etc. at the drop of a hat. But I would also like to get a little bit more adventurous in terms of my cooking skills.

Find A Job

Keep on applying...and ....er, finish the dissertation.

Developing A Consistent Offline Reflection Journal

I have tried this before, and have consistently failed. But as I am growing older, I feel this increasing need to write, reflect on things. But very few of these can be shared online. I recognize, so many of my reflections, memories, tidbits will be lost if I don't keep a regular log of these. So, I will try it one more time this year. Devote 10 mins. to it. Everyday.

::{Me}::

The past year has been hard in many many ways-- emotionally, financially. But I have learnt a great many things too. Amongst them, my realization about my own work. I have always felt that my academic and creative work are inter-related. But on a regular day, when I am struggling between grading, conversing with crazy supervisors, multiple deadlines, unpaid bills-- I mean, all the travails of an overworked, underpaid graduate student-- it is very very easy to lose track of those lofty feelings. But then, this past year, while struggling to keep sane, I recognized certain things. As much as I struggle with the institutional work of academia, I Love engaging in knowledge production. Knowledge production itself is one of the most profound political acts, and when done in a mindful kind of a way, politicizes and empowers the producer. There are lots of ifs and buts and complexities within the folds of the sentence I just wrote, but this is something I have come to believe in strongly in the last few months. In the same way, the more I engage with creative writing, art-making, I become convinced, writing a poem too is an act of knowledge-producing. A poem acts differently than a piece of academic essay-- on a more affective plane. But then, isn't my dissertation bound to my life-quest? If I didn't necessarily grow up within the politicized, lefty sub-culture, would I have been interested in writing a dissertation on representation of women in slave rebellions? Isn't my dissertation an expression of my pre-occupation with the ways in which philosophies, discourses, imaginations of class-struggle interpellate women? It is. And that is hugely autobiographical in some very fundamental way.

Apparently, the academic work I do, has nothing to do with me per se. I am not working on Bengali women's writing. I am not working on Bengali or even South Asian literatures. Although there is a strong South Asian component in my work. Yes, in amy academic work I branch out. I explore who I am not. What history is not mine. While in my poems, especially in this collection, in my insistent writing of the private-space, of domesticity, a very specific form of post-Partition, post-Naxalbari Bengali domesticity, it is all about figuring out who I am. Writing in, so to say. But then, isn't my dissertation also about figuring out who I am through an exploration of who I am not? The am exists in the guise of not. Besides, aren't the histories of slave rebellions also mine? Who will determine what history is mine and what is not mine? Is there only one way of laying claim to a history? Through a lens of ethnic-national-racial "authenticity"? I don't think so.

So, right now, I want to stop for a minute, and celebrate the fact that I can both move in and walk out. It's a rare privilege to be able to do so. And I AM privileged.

(Bleh)

These days I feel everything is a little bit up in the air. I am plowing through my dissertation, trying to finish the Introduction, and once I do so, I will have the entire first draft done. But with the job market stuff, the uncertainty over next year, I am not just in the space to do any kind of serious writing. One thing I have learnt from writing, after finishing the four chapters of my dissertation-- things will always take longer than I think. I cannot really say I know more after spending the last three years on churning these pages. All I can say is:

a. I now know what I don't know

b. I now know the questions

I was really hoping this post would be a New Year Resolution one, but instead it turned out to be a reflection of the state I am in right now. I will try to live with that.

::In My Kitchen::

I don't have a fancy kitchen. What I have is more of a half-kitchen than anything else. And I am not the most organized person in this planet. But, I like to eat. And I like to cook. And as much as I problematize domesticity, there is something about walking into my (relatively) clean kitchen during the break, grind the coffee-beans, make myself a cup of coffee, sit down to work. This semester had been particularly stressful for lots of different reasons. I didn't have much time to cook at all. On most days, I depended on another friend to feed me. On other days, when I did make something for myself, I boiled rice, potatoes, lentils and eggs, mashed them up and ate them with a bit of butter or ghee. Yes, the classic Bengali shedhho-bhat. So, it would be nice to get a chance to cook some simple dishes in my modest grad-student kitchen in the next few days. So these are the things I am planning to cook during the next week or so:

Chicken Adobo

Kosha Mangsho

Some kind of a vegetarian dish (I am not sure yet).

Tonight, I will marinate the meat for the adobo. And then, tomorrow I cook.

~;; Creative Policing;;~

I received some good feedback for my chapbook manuscripts from my friends. So, I am all ready to do the next set of edits. But, as I was reading through some of the comments sent by my friends, I noticed something-- a lot of them said things like "editors don't like this" or "you'll have to do this in order to impress the contest judges." And I recognized, I do it too. It was a moment of recognition, of fright. I know my poet-friends who say that, are trying to be on my side. As I try to be on their sides when I write such comments on their margins. Because, my friends want to see my work published. I want to see my friends' works published. But, at the same time, by doing this we police each others' works. And this kind of policing has nothing to do with creativity, providing rigorous feedback and critique. Instead, by reminding each other of what the editors, contest judges--the authority figures-- like, we create a culture of reinforcing established norms of creative expressions. We destroy each others' capacity to take risks, to push against the established norms of culture-making. Thereby, we take up, without necessarily being asked to, one of the most important works of the poetry industrial complex-- the production of technically competent but creatively challenged works of art.

This time, when I got comments like that, I had to stop for a minute. On the one hand, I am not one of those poets who trivializes feedback. I believe in providing and receiving feedback, revising my poems according to the feedback received, although there have been times when I have rejected feedback too. But these comments disturbed me. Poetry is important to me, it is my vocation. But it is not my profession. I do not expect my poems to pay my bills. For that, I do other kinds of work. And in my day-job, I have to accept compromises, presence of authority figures and lots of other crap, precisely because food and a place to stay are important for me. I like them! But when I come to my poems, I want to retain that little bit of creative arrogance. I do not want to bow down to the rules established by the authority figures, to the rules established by literary marketplace. That does not mean I do not believe in the art of a professional cover-letter or I want to pass my bad poems as "creative rebellion." I want to do the best job I can of my manuscript. I want to revise and re-revise it, and provided I have money, I might also put it up for contests. But what I am not ready to do yet, is to mould my work according to some arbitrarily accepted market-rules. I will try to do the best job I can, and if that is "good" enough for the market, well and good. If not, I will look for other venues of propagating my work.

::In My Father's House::

I have a title for my chapbook:

In My Father's House

A working title, and it might change. But there are reasons why I went for it. Will blog about that later--when I have a more definite plan of action.

::The Chapbook Manuscript Done::

I finished assembling my chapbook! I have assembled chapbooks before, but never before have I felt this sure of a particular project. During the last three days, I have succeeded to edit a lot of flabs from the poems, attain a specific narrative arc, and an ordering of poems. I just emailed it to a poet friend of mine, for her feedback and comments. I will also hand in a hardcopy to another friend of mine tomorrow. I am not hoping for great things here, since I will have to finish, edit, revise the dissertation, and find a job. Besides, I know, I still have lots of work in terms of strengthening individual poems. But I am hoping, by the next contest and publication cycle (ie, fall 2012), I will have a manuscript to send out to.

In other news, I went to Mi Madres for brunch yesterday with a friend. Their tacos were heavenly. I tried Pork Adobado,onions, avocado and Barbacoa served with picco de gallo. I will definitely go back whenever I have a chance. I need to begin to resume work on my dissertation. It will happen-- tomorrow.

Putting This And That Together

I have begun to work on my poems again. Day before yesterday, I assembled my chapbook. Yesterday, I revised about half of it, taking things out, making notes to myself about the possibility of adding things in. I also made a few edits. I have assembled chapbooks before. But never before have I felt sure about the project in the way I am doing now. Probably because I have worked on these poems longer than I have done with the other ones. Probably because the chapbook-project itself, in its entirety, feels a little bit more complete to me than the previous ones did. Reading them, after assembling them together, I always felt there is something missing. This one feels relatively complete. This afternoon, I will finish reading the rest of it, and do some more edits. Hopefully, by the end of this week, I will have a draft to email to some of my friends.

One of the things I noticed while reading the poems, my lines were short. I have tried to avoid "weak" words at the end of the lines. But when I was writing these poems, I wasn't necessarily thinking about the line-breaks. My attention was more towards developing a language capable of expressing what I was trying to express: the claustrophobia of a girl growing up in an over-protective middle-class Bengali home. One almost characterized by a sort of benevolent patriarchy. Where girls are taught to be economically self-sufficient, working hard in school, while retaining the essential respectability of middle-class gendered norms. In other words, I am writing about a bag of contradictions. Some of these are very hard to pin down. Some of these, depending upon where a reader stands, might not look "oppressive" at all. But the primary focus of my manuscript is the persona-narrator. She is the one who observes, comments upon her own upbringing, her parents' lives, her own sense of claustrophobia. And most importantly, her desire to leave. In other words, in finding a language to express her own frustrations with her own upbringing, this persona-narrator is going through a process of expansion. Yesterday, as I was reading through and revising the poems, I realized my lines are too short. They do not necessarily reflect the process of expansion this girl is going through while evolving this language through which to provide a critique of Bengali middle-class benevolent patriarchy. So, one of the changes I will have to make when I begin to make the changes, is to expand the lines. Make my persona-narrator take up space on page. Visually, materially, metaphorically. I am not sure if that will give my poems the intended effect. But I am psyched to be even able to think this way! I know I wouldn't have been able to think about form this way couple of years back. This is all very exciting, and I am looking forward to my time in the coffee-shop, with a hazelnut latte, my manuscript, pen and collections of poetry.

Back!

Today I got done-- not done done, but done as in grades submitted, no job-application deadlines showing its tongue at me, wanting to be taken care of NOW. Between the last time and now, I have finished a rough structure of my chapter four. Now only the introduction needs to be written. Then, I will have a "complete" dissertation. It will still need lots of work and revision to be what I want it to be, but I am desperate for it to exist as a first draft by the end of 2011. Meanwhile, I have written two poems. Yes, count them-- two. I have submitted to a few places. Some that were accepted during the summer are beginning to come out. Right now, I am sitting in a coffee-shop, and I am hoping I will get some poetry-related work done. At least, a plan of work. It is not that I will be devoid of deadlines during the next one month. But at least, I won't have to teach. And that does make a whole lot of s difference.

Updates

I have been neglecting this blog—between the fourth chapter of my dissertation, teaching, writing job applications and keeping up with some other deadlines, I am all blogged out. But I have been forcing myself to spend some time with my writing, even if it's 15 mins every day. I have also enrolled in a short story workshop, just so I can get some writing done. It is not that I am hoping I will achieve some huge feat, but just trying to keep up with some deadlines, getting some feedback for my work, all these little things make me feel that I am still within the process. Meanwhile, I am doing some work on the poetry manuscript. I have a better idea of where it is going. I know what poems I need to write for it once I am done with the dissertation. I am doing lots of thinking about it, drawing up a list of books I need to read.

But I am also learning, as I am writing the dissertation, that any long project, involves lots of painstaking moments. At this point, my mind and body are really ready to jump to the finishing point without going through the hoops. At the same time, I know, this is what the process is all about—taking a few pages everyday, editing them, making notes, writing a page or two, cutting things out, adding new stuff. And it takes time. I am not the same person who started this project. So has the project changed. There are moments when I sit down with it, and think about what I am writing about, I get enormously excited. Away from it, I feel sad, listless. Even more so when I think about the institutional paradigms within which I am working on it.

In the same way, I am slowly coming to accept, I might not be the best person to write in short prose-fiction forms. This week, I met with a new friend of mine, an Iranian-American woman with an MFA. After our conversation, I felt a lot energized about beginning to think about a novel once I am done with the dissertation. So, that's something I am looking forward too.

{...}

Rainmaker poems--

when Austin evenings smell of Kolkata

((Laboring))

I started the day with a nice rejection from PANK--oh well! This Labor Day weekend has been tough. I have moved between intense anger, listlessness, sense of failure, depression and missing someone I really really love. And if I have to be perfectly honest, it's the last thing that has been causing a lot of the other things I listed above. There are other things, too. For example, the anxiety over my dissertation. But nothing fucks me up as a conflict with a childhood friend, someone who should have understood me better than anyone else! But this is also something I have come to realize in the last few days--I am an intensely ideological person. For me, the "personal" is really really "political" and vice versa. I tend to de-code the smallest moments in my life, our lives, and this often creates emotional problems and distances with people I otherwise love and cherish. I know a lot of the things I am extremely critical of wouldn't necessarily bother most others. But this is me, and I also recognize, this propensity of mine has also given me an unique voice, I don't really intend to change myself. I am all willing to try hard to be a better person. I am all willing to modify my rhetoric depending upon the context. But what I am not willing to do is, to enter into too many "compromises."

In other news, I am still working on the fourth chapter of my dissertation. I get very easily tired these days. I cannot write more than a page or a page-and-half. But I do work on it every day. So, I am making progress. Although I am far from being done, it does help me to see that I am adding on to the chapter, I am paving my way towards completion.

In the creative writing front, I have been revising a story I wrote a while back. I got some feedback on it from my workshop, so I am trying to do some revisions. Let's see how it goes!

[Summer Publications]

I haven't updated the publications list here for a while. So, here it goes:

lingerpost

Up The Staircase Quarterly

(Tuesdays Fall 2011)

I recognized today that this semester my Tuesdays are going to be crazy. Normally, I should not expect to get too much of my own work done on Tuesdays. But, it's mostly going to be preparing for my discussion sections, attending the lecture, then office hours, then teaching, and if I still retain my sanity after that, a little bit of grading. But because it was the very first Tuesday of the semester, I did succeed to revise a poem, post it for the workshop forum, write around 300 words for the dissertation. I also managed to submit to two places. Overall, it wasn't a bad day--just an extremely busy one. Now, I am waiting for the rice to cook. It's in the oven. Once that's done, all I need to do is to reheat the dal, have dinner and go to bed. Yes, I am tired.

Reception

I gave a friend of mine a poem called "Just By Sheer Mistake" to read and comment on. The poem has been accepted by a journal ever since, so I cannot post it here. Otherwise, this post would have probably made more sense. Anyways, her comments were totally off-base. She did not understand what I was writing about at all, she had problems in understanding the references to the counter-culture, she misread everything in the poem. Literally. When I first read her feedback, I was confused (and sad),because this is a woman who is extremely extremely sincere. She is a very very nice person, and she wants to understand. So I talked to M, who really did help me a lot to put the whole thing in perspective. According to him, this woman writes primarily about the home-space--there is very little in her poems that problematize domesticity. Yes, there are moments when she wants that cloak of domesticity to be better repaired, but more or less, her poems are about celebrating the familial/domestic space, rather than looking for a space beyond the familial/domestic. On the other hand, my poem was about that very tension--the conflict between the familial and the more public space of artistic exploration. Now, what does it mean when you have a father who found his voice in that public space of artistic exploration too? In other words, the young men and women who in 1960s found their voices in the so-called counter-cultural spaces, are the parents of the kids, who like me, came of age in the 1990s. How does one write about the conflicts with them? In this particular poem, I chose to explore that conflict through the lens of a "benevolent patriarchy". Although nowhere in the poem did I use that term. The poem ended up being an exploration of a space where the "public" and the "familial" intersect with each other, through the presence of the character of the father. I have never really thought how complicated this poem is from the perspective of a reader. In other words, for someone who is not that familiar with lefty/countercultural childhood, there is a lot that I am presuming in this poem. So, after I processed some of my friend's initial reactions, I recognized, my poems are going to be understandable only to a small group of people. At least for now. I don't know if it's good or bad. And I am not going to worry myself thinking about it. But this is what it's going to be for now. If I have to be true to myself, I will have to keep on writing, and just hope there is someone out in the world who would know what I am talking about.

{Saturday Happy}

School has started, I am teaching this year. This semester I am TA-ing for an American Lit. class. This first week wasn't that hectic, but I am sure it will become crazier as it moves along. My days are not that "interesting" right now. I wake up, make myself coffee, try to do some work on the dissertation chapter, read a little, write a little. So, yes, these were the three "happy moments" of this past week:

1. Breakfast Tacos at Cafe Medicci

Yes, I allowed myself two breakfast tacos this Thursday: bean and cheese and migas. They were delicious. But it wasn't just that. They also helped me to pay attention to the class while the professor I am TA-ing for, appreciate it, and then have a meeting with him and my co-workers during which I didn't think about food.

2. My Advisor Likes My Chapter 3

and thinks it's "bold." This did give me some impetus to keep on working on my Chapter 4.

3. Cappuccino and Revising A Poem

Yesterday, I bought myself a cappuccino and worked on revising a poem. I felt such a bliss! I haven't been able to write too many new poems, and I doubt I will, until I get the dissertation done. But I can still revise my old poems! And there was something extremely consoling about sitting in a cafe with a cup of cappuccino and revising my poem. It's like a date with a very close friend, someone who knows me better than anyone else, someone to whom I don't have to explain myself. I just emailed the poem to one of my readers, let's see what he has to say.

::Poetry Books I am Dreaming About::

The poetry books I am dreaming about:

1. Dhaka Dust by Dilruba Ahmed

2. In the Bus With Rosa Parks by Rita Dove

3. Black Mesa Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca

4. Wild Iris by Louis Gluck

5. Rooms Are Never Finished by Agha Shahid Ali

6.Burnings by Ocean Vuoung

These are the books I want to read during this semester (fall 2011) while I also try to finish ze diss and survive teaching.

(Sometimes on a Day Like This...

yesterday

* Made coffee for myself

* Finished reading an article by Ranajit Guha

* Wrote a little more than 450 words on my dissertation chapter

* Finished posting critiques and reading responses for my short fiction class

* Finished reading Cindy's chapbook

*Finished reading Native Guard

*Had more coffee

*Checked emails, responded to friends

*Read two short stories by Agnes Sam

* Began a ghazal

* Heated up leftover dinner, ate it

*Did dishes

* Posted critiques (two) for my poetry workshop

*Submitted poems to four places

*Went to bed

it's okay not to know what I am made of)

Thursday Happy (Late Edition)

I am still suffering from an overall feeling of listlessness--there is too much to be done, and I am always under this feeling that I am doing too little. There is the dissertation to be completed, job applications to be done, more poems to be revised, written and submitted, stories to be written and revised, feedback to be given. If I have to characterize my life, it won't be an exaggeration to say that I live within a complex cycle of relentless, continuous work. These days, I feel, time is running out. Maybe this has to do with me growing older. I don't think I have ever felt this way when I was 21 or 25. I am trying not to lose track of life in the midst of it all. So here are the three things that made me happy this week:

1.

Receiving My Friend Cindy Hochman's Chapbook In Mail

Cindy and I met when we took Michael Montlack's poetry workshop in Gotham. We kept in touch even after the workshop, reading and commenting on each others' poems, chatting and sometimes just sharing a good joke. It's wonderful to see Cindy's work published as a book, and acknowledged by the larger poetry world. No, she didn't charge me for the book, and had written a beautiful inscription inside.

The title of her chapbook is: The Carcinogenic Bride

2.

Breakfast at Hornitos

I have known for a while that this is one of the Austin institutions, but never had a chance to go. So, I did finally. Yesterday. With a friend. Their breakfast tacos are very very very delicious. There is something about the chorizos that I simply love. I wish I could do breakfasts more often (sigh!)

3.

Coffee With Komrade Andy

Whose jokes cheer me up, with whom I can share my dreams of a better world, without translating...my comrade, my fellow-dreamer in diaspora...

{Ongoing Thoughts About Femininity, Motherhood and Women's Poetry}

The poems about daughterhood I have written in the recent past, and which I have begun to send out recently, are generally more appreciated by men than by women. I didn't think about this part of the reception when I was writing them. It is only recently that I have come to recognize this aspect of the reception of my own work. I am still processing it, and I don't have any well-developed theorization about it.

But I have my suspicions. I think, men and women are taught/socialized to think about inter-generational relationships differently. Men think conflict as an integral element of inter-generational relationships. Women think of them more in terms of nurturing. Coming-of-age for girls often translates into accommodating themselves into the imperatives of the roles of nurturers and care-givers. Personally, I don't think these are either/or realities. Both conflict and nurturing can co-exist within a particular relationship. In fact, I would say, most relationships, which move beyond a superficial exchange of niceties, involve both. Where the whole thing gets more complicated is the place where our inter-generational experiences get constructed in specific ways by the societies and cultures we live in.

By that token, women are not expected to write about conflicts, the anger they feel for their mothers. Instead, mother-poems, like grandmother-poems, are supposed to be all about nostalgia-- of finding that space of purity where mother and daughter come to share bonds. Of course, there are plenty of women poets who have written against that expectation, but in my experience, it still throws people off, and especially women readers, when they encounter a woman writing about conflict in their relationship with the mother. It is as if the denial of the mother would come to an essential denial of the writing woman's own femininity. And this is something, I plan to write about very soon, it's still very hard for women writers (and women in general) to lay claim to their own anger. The mainstream women's poetry in this country (written mostly by white women) bears important testimony to that. I can say the same thing about Bengali women's poetry too. But that's going to be a whole different post.

::Happy Weekend Thoughts--Or Things You Tell Yourself To Survive::

I often get jittery around my failures or rather my lack of success. For example, for the last two months I have been submitting to journals almost every day. I have had only one acceptance so far. While I am grateful for that, I also feel anxious that I haven't had better luck. And then I begin to think, maybe it's just that I am not good enough. Maybe. But I also keep telling myself, I have a bad habit of starting projects and not finishing them. I have wasted a big part of my 20s that way. There were other reasons why I could not be "creative" in that way during my twenties, but this is also one of it. I have had the patience or persistence to see through things. Grad school has changed that a little bit. It has made me see how sometimes you just have to show up day after day without expecting results. And then one day, you really begin to see the difference in your own work. At least that's what has happened to me.

Now, I am struggling with the next stage. In the last four years that I have been taking writing seriously, I have been able to generate enough raw materials. But a lot of these are just that: raw materials, early drafts. Interesting, but not piercing enough. So, I need to take my work to the next level. I need to keep on working, polishing and revising my drafts.

Today, I am finally giving myself the permission to admit that:

I am not really that writer who will get it right the first time. Or not even in the second or the third or the fourth. But maybe in the sixteenth. And if I stay true to myself and the work till that sixteenth time, I will probably produce something that's halfway decent.

The struggle, then, is to stick to it. To keep coming back, even on days when I am feeling low, or like a massive failure.

PS. The accompanying painting is by artist Silvia Gold. It speaks to my present mood!

{Thursday Happy}

It is not like me to perform my "happyhappyhappy" self on blog and/or Facebook. That's why, I have mostly refrained from posting status messages on my fb page. I don't want to sound "happy" to the world, neither do I want to perform depressed. But right now, I am feeling pretty low. As I said, in one of the previous posts, I know the reasons. Some, I do have control over. But those are not things that can be taken care of right away. They need painstaking labor. Others, are beyond my control. Like the mental state of my childhood friend, whom I love deeply. Or the London riots. Or the war. So, this is an exercise I will indulge in for the next three months. I will list three things that made me happy during a particular week. This the first installment:

1.

Cooking A New Chicken Dish

I have been on the lookout for a new chicken dish on the web for a while, and then I did run into one. It's a more spicy spin on the chicken korma that I used to cook. So, here is how I did it:

a. Marinate the chicken with ginger paste, salt, cumin and coriander powder, cayenne pepper powder.

b. Grind fennel seeds, peppercorn seeds, red chilli, cinnamon sticks and cardamom seeds.

c. Heat ghee/oil. I used ghee, since I am really keen on unhealthy eating.

d. Then pour in the ground spice mixture. Let it sizzle for a minute or two. Keep stirring the wok.

e. Slice onions, pour them into the mix, and put on a low-medium heat and cook it till the onions are brown and halfway between soft and crunchy. Sweat the onions so that the final dish is tastier.

f. Slice a tomato, and add it into the mix. Now, let everything turn slowly into a mush/paste.

g. Brown the marinated chicken. Once they have been browned, remove them into the main cooking pot. Stir and mix well with the tomato-onion spice mix. Feel free to add sugar, salt and chilli powder according to taste. I like to add a little sugar along with the spice, because I like the caramelized taste of the spices.

h. Then add1 cup of yoghurt. Add it one spoon at a time and mix thoroughly. Add chicken broth- about a cup and a half and cook it down till the chicken is cooked and the paste is thick. If the chicken isn't cooked and the broth is drying out, add more.

This turned out to be fairly good. And made me think, even if I cannot write a good dissertation or a good book of poems, or a good short story or whatever, I can still cook somewhat tasty meals for myself.

2.

Meeting With KA

KA and I had our poems published in a journal together. So, over the last two weeks, we had gotten in touch with each other over the email, and had decided on meeting for coffee, which we did yesterday. We hit it off immediately, and are trying to plan some activities/projects together. But, this meeting, I will count from now on, as an example of positive, productive, creative "networking", as against the totally inane "professional" kind, that I have come to hate so much in the recent years.

3.

Watching Fellini

Last night, R and I watched Luci del Varieta. As a film, it's an interesting one. But nothing that would turn my head off. But the fact that I could make time to actually sit down and see it, is something that needs to be celebrated. These days, I am so tired that I rarely find the mental peace and the intellectual energy to sit down and watch an intelligent film. I will write my thoughts on the film soon. But, for now, I am happy that I got to see it.

Writing In Forms

Writing in forms brings out the alienationist in me. Especially when I attempt sestina. Why? Because my grasp over forms is still not that strong. So, it's hard for me to exercise control over both the form and the material. So, the material begins to act more and more like a fill-in-the-gap, while I try to stay faithful to the formal constraints as much as possible. It's easier to rant about my despair than anything else in forms, especially the ones where repetition is the key structural cement. Here's a sestina I finished yesterday, for my Writing In Forms class. According to the prompt, we needed to write a sestina including a beverage, a tool, a color, a language, an animal, and an artist or an author as the end words.

Alienation

Chronicler of the unborn sisters of the iconic bards in blue,

Afraid of my own room in my father's house, dark as milk-less coffee,

I wandered around the city, craving to break it open with a hammer.

Instead, I shared my park-bench with a stray dog.

In my round schoolgirl's hand, translated entire paragraphs in Bengali

from a much-used, brittle volume by a memsahib named Woolf.

These two women in a room, of whom she wrote about—this Woolf,

exploded out of words written about them, like the knee-length tweeds in navy blue,

from which I felt bursting too, cursing in homecooked Bengali.

This city,peopled by historians alone, where men drink coffee

leaving their wives behind in locked kitchens, to pant like dogs,

I roamed the sidewalks, fingers flipping through pages, hammering

curse-words in the margins. The marble angel whispers promises, hammered

in the fountain, unable to move his head for a glimpse of a page of Woolf.

In the used bookshacks of in the rusty downtown, I, with dogged

determination, looked for foremothers. Girls my age, in satin-blue,

made out with lovers behind open umbrellas, refusing to drink coffee,

thus preserving the ivory of their skins, as befits girls of Bengal.

Me, who, more than anything else, is afraid of Bengaled,

would walk around the streets, head hammering

against illegible graffitis. Strutting in alone inside coffee

houses, inserting my own scribbles in the white spaces of Woolf's.

There was a girl with a flute,her scarf deeply blue.

Her cheeks in pink glitter, she vomited her story-quests in the ear of her per dog.

The street, that day, were strewn with broken clay birds and corpses of dogs.

The girl with the flute, out of sympathy, offered to buy my scribbles in Bengali.

Just like a Scheherazade, who had just finished a story, I felt the blues.

In an almost alley, on an old banyan branch, I learnt to hammer

strangers' stories, to avoid being beheaded. Did she ever, that (Mrs.) Woolf?

The town lunatic danced around me, stopping often enough to beg for coffee.

Trying to memorize the city streets, I see blood-drops in pots of coffee.

Money for school-lunches now exhausted, I carve clay dogs

for the toy-seller in the square, relieved she wouldn't know of Woolf

or her ghosts following me around. With callouses shaped like Bengali

alphabets in her palm, in the wings of her wooden birds, she hammers

steadiness. The nails gave her bruises, violet-blue.

The historians, while sipping coffee, try to fashion a Bengali sans expletives.

The girl, in order to avoid being beheaded, hammers her tales inside the tongues of the dog.

I burn my paragraphs from Woolf, the fire swallows the blue.

Despair

I am in that place again. I feel a listlessness creeping in, I am finding it hard to work on new poems, or revise old ones. I know the reasons behind my feeling like this—but I don't know the cures. Most of them don't depend on me. I am not sure what to do—so I keep on doing what I know best: I work on my dissertation every day, although I don't always find it easy. I keep submitting poems to journals. I am trying to read, although honestly, I am finding it hard to read too. I am typing these few lines, because I don't want this space to die.

*Revising, Rewriting*

I am figuring out that I am that kind of poet who needs to figure out the political thrust and the sociological implications of the different elements of the craft and the content before moving a project forward. For years, I have been ashamed of this character of mine. As if I am a lesser poet because of it. Now, I don't think as much of the "lesser" part. Instead, what has become important is the element of getting the work done. So, now I have retrieved my Cinderella's step-sister poems again. In the first version, that was published in Pratilipi, I had reclaimed the figure of the step-sister, given her a voice, and I would even say, it was a feminist voice. Now, that I read it, I think, there are some good lines there. Some good images. I like the overall tone, which is a combination of passion, anger and lots of bitterness. And, I was also trying to problematize homogenous, easy notions of sisterhood. The step-sister clearly feels that Cinderella has been complicit with her own silencing. Cinderella, for me, became the symbol of a certain kind of neo-liberal feminism, which is trying to find its liberation within the consumer culture, commodified ethos. (Yes, I do think, Cinderella provides a wonderful conduit to rewrite neoliberalism.)

When I turned in a somewhat rough draft of a manuscript to KRA, I had modified these series of poems a lot. I had included Cinderella's voice within it, I have strengthened the step-sister's voice, and made it more specific. There was an implicit assumption running through the poems in this particular version --- the step-sis is a folklorist herself. She can break her deal with the Grimms Brothers, precisely because she is a folklorist herself, and does not need male folklorists who will tell her story. I have suggested this implicitly, but didn't really expand on it. Now that I am reading through these poems, I think, this figure of the folklorist needs to be developed and spelled out a lot more in these poems. The implicitness was a starting-point, but it won't work, until and unless the poems delve a little bit more into the politics of a woman becoming a folklorist. And how folklore as a discipline brings up all sorts of problems. I am hoping to finish giving the whole series a read within the next two or three days, and then I will have to think about the re-writing part. But at this point, I am excited just to have figured this out.

::"I Don't Like Poetry"::

In the past two weeks, I have heard from two (no, three) young friends of mine, "I don't like poetry." I should have felt defensive, I guess. But I didn't. Probably because I could relate to that feeling. I loved to read, and by the time I was college-age, I was fairly well-read. Yet, I didn't sign up for an English major, inspite of getting in at Jadavpur's famous program, because I couldn't stand the thought of going through pages and pages of Romantic poetry. But then, it wasn't that I didn't like any poetry-- I spend all my allowance to buy collections by Pablo Neruda. This was in eleventh grade. I liked Mayakovosky, and a lot of the Bengali poetry I found in my parents' bookshelves. But it's also true, there were a huge number of poets whose work I didn't necessarily like or understand. The funny thing is, now I LOVE Romantic poets. A lot of the poets I dismissed then, I now love. Or, think of as plain problematic. I mean, there is no middle-ground here. Now, when I think back on the process of what brought me back to poetry, I would say, it's a combination of my increasing politicization, my conviction that art plays an extremely important role in building up a liberated world (and not just in a propagandist kind of a way), and my last twelve years of serious engagement with literature. A lot of that engagement did happen within academic spaces, but not all of it. For example, I have never studied poetry academically. But I do think, the kind of academic work I have done with prose, has helped me to think about poetry in more complex terms. The thing is, I understand the world of the Romantics much better now precisely because I am more familiar with the Euro-American social histories of those times. I have a better idea about the ideological, political, aesthetic, philosophical forces the Romantics were engaging with. Yes, it's precisely a better grasp of the social, cultural and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that leads me to appreciate Romantic poetry better. But the kind of poetry-teaching I encountered when I was a teenager, excluded precisely these complexities. Consequently, I had no yardstick or context to think through the poems. I guess, this is precisely the kind of literature pedagogy that Gauri Vishwanathan writes about in her book Masks of Conquest. The pedagogy that came about from the cultural/education/ideological projects of the empire. So, I would say, at the cost of sounding reductionist, one of the ways in which poetry can be democratized is by engaging more and more with the sociology and social history of the form itself. By showing how poetry is not something that stands apart from the rest of the society and world, but is one way of writing that world. And therefore, inextricably related to the social, political, other art forms of its times.

::Life Now::

Writing...er...Dissertation

Drinking

Reading

::Post-Workshop Thoughts::

The last five days were busy. I now have a lot to process: my trip to DC, the workshop I did with the youth. Ideally, I would have liked the workshop to be longer. It's hard to fit in discussions of a cultural/social history with discussions of art-forms and then combine the two with some kind of writing exercise--- all within 90 minutes. What would have worked better was a three-day workshop where I could divide up the stuff into little bits and pieces. Something like

DAY 1: Discussions about food, cultural/social politics of it

DAY 2: Reading and discussing the poems together

DAY 3: Writing, critiquing and reading aloud each others' poems

But I didn't have that kind of luxury. Neither did the organizers. So, after I was done facilitating the workshop, I myself felt overwhelmed. And it made me think, how everything, and especially art-making is a process. It takes time. It needs time. One of the things that came up during the discussion was, how poetry is "abstract'. One of the workshop-participants categorically stated, I don't like poetry. This is something I would have definitely liked to explore more within the space of the workshop. One of the things that I have been thinking about ever since, I had no time/opportunity to talk to the workshop-participants about their familiarity with poetry or even literature. Is poetry something they relate to at all? If they were given a choice to choose their genres for the workshop, how many of them would have chosen poetry? What would have prompted their choices? I would have loved to know. So, I was also thinking, how very very logistic concerns like time, our scanty resources often end up reproducing the very myths we are trying to dispel. When I sign up for a poetry workshop, I sign up for it because I want to work on my poems. I have chosen the form as my genre, I want to get better at it, and hence my decision to sign up for the workshop. But the youth I worked with, did not necessarily sign up for a poetry workshop. They signed up for a three-day event where they would interact with their fellow South Asians on things. My workshop was something the organizers chose to present to them. So, in spite of all the good intentions and best of efforts, when working within structures like this one, we cannot really avoid centralized decisions.

Now having said that, I would also say, I am happy that I got a chance to do what I did. Maybe some of them will think about poetry as a form of self-expression now. Maybe some of them will take to writing it. Maybe some of them will begin to read it. And that's why, I am in favor of doing workshops in all kinds of settings. I think, it's important to do writing/poetry workshops in settings where the emphasis is clearly not on poetry or writing or even art. Because, I think, something about conducting a workshop in such so-called non-literary/non-artsy setting democratizes the very process of art-production. It demystifies art-forms and encourages people who wouldn't have ever thought about these forms to engage with them. It's especially important when the form is something like poetry--a form which lends itself to abstraction, and therefore, also to elitist obscurantism.

::Imperial/Racial Privilege And Workshops::

There was a time today when I was angry. It wasn't a personal sort of anger, but anger which emerges from the helplessness of someone who is trying in her own way to be a better writer. Now, I will record the same questions I was asking myself this afternoon:

a. Am I responsible as a writer for my readers' lack of sociological knowledge?

b. I am not writing an ethnography of my neighborhood in Kolkata. I am writing stories--damn it. So, no, I am not going to explain the "social and cultural differences." Yes, someone said that in my fucking workshop-- Explain the social and cultural differences! I am pissed, because I read around 50 books every year. Almost 60% of them are on contexts into which I wasn't born. No, I don't expect any of the writers to "explain" to me the "social and cultural differences." When I feel like I don't know the history, I do the work. Period. So, this very assumption that it is the responsibility of the non-American writer to explain to the American reader what's going on, the "social and the cultural differences", clearly reeks of an imperial, white privilege. There isn't any other way to think about it.

c. A lot of the feedback I get from the workshops want me to do the work for my readers. They want me to fill in the gaps in their sociological/historical/anthropological knowledge. So, I have to do a lot of separating the wheat from the chaff, if I still want to get some benefits from the workshopping.

d. This makes me mad because the white and/or American writers can throw in a story to the group, sit back and not have to ever think of how "social and cultural differences" are working within their stories.

e. I don't bring up these issues inside the workshops. Why? Because I know none of these people are being deliberately racist and/or imperialist. More importantly, none of them wants to think of himself/herself as such. So my pointing these things out will cause them to have a knee-jerk reaction, they will stop commenting on my stories frequently. I don't want that to happen. The thing is, I have signed up for these workshops so that I can learn. I am not yet in a space as a writer to take up these issues. (Yet, I am, no? Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this post.But I am not ready to take them up publicly yet.)

f. One would think, after the work of Gloria Anzaldua et al., this country, especially those who want to write, will have a better awareness of these kinds of representational/cultural politics. Nope! No such luck! Seems like every one of us colored folks will have to launch and plunge through our individual struggle!

Now that I have vented, and written this post, I need to go back to the actual work: writing my poems and stories. Maybe some day I will be able to talk about these things more explicitly. But now is not the time! Inshallah!

.Facilitating Youth Workshop.

I am going to Washington DC in a couple of weeks to facilitate a writing-workshop with South Asian youth. I do not have a whole lot of time for the workshop-- only 75 minutes. Now, it's hard to do anything remarkable during that time. What can be done though, is to open a door or two, and then hope that the young people in the workshop will pick it up. There is no substitution for long-term work, and none of the fruits of a long-term project can be attained during a 75 minute workshop. So far, I have thought of centering the workshop on food.

In my experience, most young people in USA do not necessarily think of food as something political. Some brighter ones might think about it as cultural, but rarely have I met with kiddos who think of food as political. Consequently, they do not have the knee-jerk reaction to it in the same way they have to something like race or class, which they have always associated with politics. These young people I will be workshopping with, are more socially conscious. A lot of them are already involved with community projects. So, I do not think apolitics is going to be an issue. What is going to be an issue though, is to restrict myself. As a workshop facilitator, I need to have clear sense of goals. A 75 min workshop cannot be both a seminar on food-justice issues and a writing workshop. For that to happen, we need at least a month of regular meetings. So, I am trying to remind myself, this is primarily a writing workshop. And I am not someone who is "cool" in that edgy kind of a way. When I talk about writing, I talk about in a very old-style way. Why? Because I think, the book, the printed page and the very act of physical writing can (still) give us things which other art/media forms cannot. So, one of the things I will try to do is to, encourage the young people I will meet to be more cognizant of the form "book" as a whole--not an e-book or a kindle. But an actual paper book which one can grab between one's fingers. I will update more on this workshop as I go along! But I am EXCITED!

~Why This Blog~

I am not very good in writing reviews of poetry collections, short-story collections or novels. My LONG training in academic literary criticism has taught me to think through words, plots, themes, characters in a relatively more expansive way than the usual review would permit. That's why, this blog space is important for me. Because it allows me to articulate my thoughts about writing and literature in a very different way from my formal academic training. While I wouldn't mind anyone else reading this blog, and there are some close friends of mine who read this blog, this is a space primarily for me and my own self. This is a space where I write to articulate ideas, thoughts, reflections, concerns. Maybe some day I won't feel the need for this space in the same way. And then I won't write here anymore. But for now, here I am, scribbling some fragments right before going to bed.

;;Individual Poems Vs. Manuscript;;

As I am sending out poems to journals from the manuscript 2, I am learning that the book and the individual-poem-in-the-journal-from-the-book are two very different genres. Although inter-related. The individual poems, when they are being sent out to the journals, as stand-alone poems, often need to be tweaked, modified and given more definite shape, because they need to function as one whole piece, something autonomous. On the other hand, when they are part of a manuscript, especially if the manuscript itself is functioning as one whole thematic unit, they are not standing alone. Rather, they contribute to the meaning making process by being one of many. Of course, the individual poems still need to be strong enough and autonomous enough so that they can stand on their own two feet, but the pressures there are slightly different. At this point, this whole process of sending individual poems out in the world is turning out to be an extremely productive one. I am revising the individual poems, making them stronger, better. Without the deadlines of the journals, I don't think I would have done them so promptly. Besides, it's easier to take one poem at a time and revise it, rather than a whole manuscript.

Robert Frost's "Directive"

• I have enrolled in a form class. I think, as a general rule of thumb, my poems are too rowdy. Not very disciplined. Kind of like my mind. The things I write about, tend to find their own forms, rather than stay within the norms of the forms. But isn't that the thing about forms? But, I still think, it's good to try to write in forms. Like, this week, we are doing "blank verse." A form, which, admittedly leads itself to "imitation and reflection of thought." In other words, wordy! Now, this shouldn't scare me, the verbose person that I am. Except for the fact that all this wordiness needs to be expressed in iambic pentameter, in a fixed order of stressed and unstressed syllables. From what we read this week, I really liked Robert Frost's "Directive."
• Frost's poem, I think, is very much a pastoral and anti-pastoral at the same time. I was trying to read it in conjunction with Charlotte Smith's poem, where the nature has been personified, the narrator seems to be in perfect harmony with it. But in Frost's poem, “nature” and “human history” confront each other in a somewhat antagonistic relationship. The nature is beautiful in Frost's poem too, but it changes through human intervention. It is almost as if Frost feels compelled to use the same form in which pastoral poems were written to show that his concerns are very different. I think, that sentiment has been best expressed in the opening lines: “ Back out of all this now too much for us,/Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail burned, dissolved, and broken off/Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.

• It seemed to me that in lots of places Frost is lapsing into hexameter. For me, what is meant was that, he was looking for a form, which needed to be a little bit hefty. As if his thoughts are struggling to fit themselves in lines, and even a pentameter is not always adequate for him.

. Paris Spleen.

I am halfway through Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. I do want to read the original French, but I thought, I should give a quick reading of the English translation before beginning to labor with the original. Yes, it's gorgeous. I am trying to put my finger on why I like it so much, but there is something in those paragraphs that resists explanation. But still, if I have to enunciate what it is about these poems that are drawing me so much to them, it is the sense of despair. The sense of despair that invades a mind which can see more than others. The sense of despair which follows the realization that individual human beings are capable of immense fuck-up and immense greatness--sometimes within seconds.The same human being who has fucked something up gloriously, can also do something which will blow away your mind. Personally, I like those poems best, where he moves beyond his own sense of despair, where he takes a character and tries to see what lies beyond what immediately meets the eye. On the other hand, when I read his self-despairing rants, I have to keep reminding myself, this is one of the original alienationists. The ones I have grown-up reading, are more like derivates, fakes. Now, keeping that in mind, it also seems that the alienationists haven't really updated themselves much after Baudelaire! Now, this is the glitch:

Paris Spleen is so beautiful that sometimes I have to pinch myself to the reminder that Baudelaire was a jackass. A fucking egotistical jackass!

{So Far}

The days are hot, I am tired...I am slowly feeling that I am zoning out more and more from certain kinds of writing. The struggle is: how much to tell, and how much to keep outside the page. Not in my mind, just outside the page.

This weekend, so far:

• I have read two short stories by Carol Azadeh

• Worked on revising two poems

• Worked on revising a story

• Worked on revising/writing an academic article

• cooked alu-phoolkopir dalna from The Hindi-Bindi Club, of all places. Didn't turn out to be too bad

• Eaten BM's eggplant parmesan

• Watched Pyasa along with my running commentary

It seems like the most common feedback for my poems is that, I need more clarity. This confuses me, because I don't want my poems to be stories, in the same way I don't want my stories to be film-scripts. I began to love poetry because it allowed imagistic, impressionistic expression. Playing with language, fragmentation. But, a lot of my readers want clarity here. I am trying to think about the issue of “clarity” in my work. Why do I need to explain myself so much?

[Explaining Kiranmala]

I was recently asked by a writer-friend of mine about the storyteller-commentator divide I create in this poem. The way she put it:

commenting too has its place in the scheme of things, while stories, too, differ from each other

And this is what I wrote back to her:

For me, it's not the line between "fiction" and "non-fiction" that the words "commentator" and "storyteller" invoke. Although, that's how we understand those two words generally, especially within our commonsensical knowledge. Rather, the way I have tried to approach it in this poem, "commentators" are those who reproduce knowledge, rather than producing it. They do not essentially challenge the boundaries of dominant thoughts and well-established maxims. On the other hand, "storytellers" are those who push our accepted borders of thought, language, norms, knowledge and produce something that is, for lack of any better word,more original,organic and boundary-busting. There are lots of "commentators" in the world of creative writing. As there are many "storytellers" among the theorists, writers of non-fiction prose.

Now, you can ask me, why Kiranmala? Why am I ascribing upon her that role. Well, I was thinking about the ways in which knowledge production has always been a site of gender discrimination in South Asia (and elsewhere). It's not just gender, race, class and caste have been used too, to keep thousands of people from away from written texts and intellectual resources. Think of all the prohibitions around women and shudras listening to/speaking/ learning Sanskrit. Just think of the news that made headlines last week: a temple in Orissa does not allow the Dalits to cross its threshold. Similarly, it was illegal for slaves in the colonial plantations to learn to read and write, as it was to teach them. But does that mean that women, untouchables, the enslaved, and other marginalized folks who have been systematically excluded from literacy, did not think about the world around them? Does that mean they did not theorize about their own conditions? Not really! But they theorized differently. They theorized through songs, proverbs, stories(which "we" sometimes call folk-tale), dance-forms and numerous other aesthetic expressions. So, those very art-forms, for them, became forms of commenting. But at the same time, they are also attempts to tell stories. Stories with characters, histories, emotions embodied within the forms. They are all trying to tell a story, whether through language, through colors or through musical notes. But where they differ from, say the knowledge that was being learnt by white men, men of upper castes (esp. Brahmins) etc. is that, those forms of knowledge, as against these aesthetic expressions I have been talking about, were supported by institutions, dominant cultures. These forms of knowledge are meant to reinforce and reproduce the status quo, whereas the other forms of knowledges, often embodied in aesthetic expressions, question that social status quo. So, to put it simply,

Commentators=those who engage in institution-sponsored knowledge

Storytellers= who try to reclaim their voices from outside of the institutions

So, in my poem, I tried to give Kiranmala some agency, some creativity. As a woman, she is excluded from the world of Brahmanical knowledge production and learning. But instead of feeling victimized by that exclusion, she proclaims that she does not find that knowledge, the books her brothers are learning to memorize, aren't useful for her at all. She rejects institutional knowledge, rejects the language associated with state power/institutional power, and demands something else for herself. She is looking for alternative methods of expressing herself. The language that is specific to this context is, of course, Sanskrit. But if we move beyond that specifics, it can very well be construed as any power-language, any language that the institution upholds as exclusive and legitimate. Hence the storyteller-commentator divide.

Now, an honest admission: it does feel very weird to explain my own poem to someone. The poem, I believe, should speak for itself. And then, there is this little niggling thingie, that my years of academic training in literary criticism has taught me to decode almost all literary texts. I can justify any badly-written text, I can tear apart almost any gloriously-written piece of writing. And I don't think, those skills are useless. But at the same time, because I can do this with such ease, I prefer not to turn back my own critical gaze into my own poem after it has been published aka. gone from my hands. The poem should speak for itself.

But then, I write about things that are often considered uncomfortable-- gender, class, emotional cost of ascribing to a political ideology. Pepper this with reference to obscure texts, myths, folklore that often invade my lines. So, my poems, I do understand, can be a little dense sometimes. If I am faithful to my work as a poet, I will have to do a little bit of unpacking for my audience, precisely because I am not writing on nostalgic poems about one's childhood in an American suburb. My poems need more education than an average white-American poem. And even when the readers are Indian/South Asian/Bengali, I still might have to do some unpacking, because I am trying to debunk things that have been socially accepted. Even after all of this explanation and contextualization, some readers might not just like the poems I write. Therein, I guess, lies the test as a poet/artist.

::Publication in Hawai'i Review::

Yesterday I received two copies of Hawai'i Review Issue 74 in mail. Yes, my contributors' copies. I held them in my hand, sniffed through them, and then looked through the TOC. There it was--my name in print and my poem. My work has not been published in many print journals, so this was an incredible feeling. There is something so tangible and ephemeral at the same time in holding a book, feeling its material presence, and then realizing that I, too, played a part--however small it might be--in bringing it into being.

I read my published poem after getting out of work. Some imageries sounded cool! As if someone else had written them. But there were also things I would like to change. For example, some line-breaks. There are places in the poem where I need to strive for more clarity. So, what I realized was that, even if a journal publishes a poem, it doesn't mean that it is "final." What it means is that, at a certain point in my life, I thought this poem was completed. I had sent it out in the world. It found a home, but that does not mean that the poem itself has to remain unchanged. And once it changes, it will also have to look for a new home. The book, or something a little bit lengthier than 8 pages in a journal. I grow as a human being and a writer every day. My poems and stories also grow with me.

By the way, the name of the poem is "bildungsroman." Read it!