(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.