(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.