::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.