Processing Feedback

One of the feedbacks I received in class about the revised version “Nomenclature” poem was that:

The newer version has more of a focus on the mother and even the generation before then. That takes me away from the narrator, who I really like and care about.

So I am thinking, this is a series about the conflicts of a mother-daughter relationship. The daughter, who is the narrator, does not stand as a fully autonomous figure (if there is ever such a thing). Instead, these are poems which explore the relationality. The daughter's stories are implicated in her perceptions of her mother, of her mother's stories, and in one or two cases, even the generation before. Am I bumping here against an American aesthetics which wants to see the narrator as a self-contained individual, and nothing but a self-contained individual? I don't see the contradiction between “caring” for the narrator and getting glimpses of the generations before her. If anything, it explores the narrator even more closely within a history and thus provides more space for the reader to know about her. Although I wasn't necessarily thinking about it that way, this poem, the entire series even, go against that notion of self-contained individual autonomy. Our stories are implicated in each other's and therein lies the complexity for me. It is specifically that complexity that I want to represent in my poems, stories, essays!