The Collection!

I am listening to Jeannine Hall Gailey's suggestion. That the chapbook and the full-length book do not have to be two mutually exclusive processes. So now I have a very shaky first draft for a full-length book, and a less shaky first draft of a chapbook. I am hoping to finish the compilation of the chapbook within the next two days. This has been an extremely interesting learning process. This decision, this attempt to put the book(s) together.

For example,I have learnt,the book must have a central theme. That is, not just the individual poems, but the book, as a whole must have a narrative arc. And that narrative arc must communicate something.I tend to think of poetry as a form of language-art that, by its very nature of constitution, defies realism. So, for me, it wasn't very easy to think of my prospective book in terms of a narrative arc. But then, so many of the poems I have in this collection tell concrete stories with concrete characters. Although, I should say, because I have attempted to tell these stories in poems, they have allowed me to do things that are very different from the conventional forms of prose. So, without being very conscious about it, I have engaged with the notion of a narrative arc in my poems. And after working through the first drafts, I also feel much more comfortable with the idea of a "themed" collection. Although, I would say, the word "themed" is open to interpretations.

So what is my collection about? If I have to say it in one sentence, it would be something like this. This manuscript is about one middle-class Bengali woman's engagement with history and "isms." If I have to expand on that, I would say, I have attempted to chronicle my engagement with feminism, Marxism, the intersections of the two, ideas of creativity, politics of aesthetic form, colonial violence, race and economic modes of production and the ensuing violence. Because I have also been thinking a lot about writing as a mode of expression and the ways in which it is political, during the time I have written most of these poems, a lot of that has sneaked into these poems too. All in all, it's more like an autobiography told in slant, in stories, in poetic forms, narrative genres and characters who are nothing like me.

The collection is autobiographical, but not confessional in any way.