:: white space blank space breathing space::

Not that I have much time these days between applying for jobs and the dissertation. But whenever I get some time, I try to work a little on my manuscript. A lot of my earlier poems had this tendency to put within its folds almost everything. Consequently, they ended up sounding passionate, but also had the effect of reading extremely didactic. I would load up a single poem with image after image, thus giving it a kind of sensory overload. So, now that I am revising the mss, I am paring down a lot of my poems. I am realizing, a poem is just that-- one poem. It doesn't need to do everything. On the other hand, sometimes a long poem divided into multiple sections, needs some more breathing space than say, a sonnet. I am trying to organize and re-organize my mss in a way that my poems have more breathing space. More white space. I am not someone who believes in "less is more." No, less is less. In order to make less into more, we have to expand ourselves. Work harder. Figure our more imaginative ways to think through both the material and the language. But what I have come to recognize, more needs its own space. Sometimes that "own space" means more than just 'one poem." And sometimes, it means "more than one book." Aka more work.

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.

{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.

;;Individual Poems Vs. Manuscript;;

As I am sending out poems to journals from the manuscript 2, I am learning that the book and the individual-poem-in-the-journal-from-the-book are two very different genres. Although inter-related. The individual poems, when they are being sent out to the journals, as stand-alone poems, often need to be tweaked, modified and given more definite shape, because they need to function as one whole piece, something autonomous. On the other hand, when they are part of a manuscript, especially if the manuscript itself is functioning as one whole thematic unit, they are not standing alone. Rather, they contribute to the meaning making process by being one of many. Of course, the individual poems still need to be strong enough and autonomous enough so that they can stand on their own two feet, but the pressures there are slightly different. At this point, this whole process of sending individual poems out in the world is turning out to be an extremely productive one. I am revising the individual poems, making them stronger, better. Without the deadlines of the journals, I don't think I would have done them so promptly. Besides, it's easier to take one poem at a time and revise it, rather than a whole manuscript.

.Mother-Daughter Poems.

I have refrained from making any long-term writing goals this summer because my dissertation is wearing me out. It is hard for me to concentrate on any other big project at this time. The best I can manage is to give at least 30 minutes to my creative writing every day. Beyond that, it is hard for me to plan my creative writing projects in a more sustained kind of a way. I need to get the dissertation done first. So far I have been keeping up with that schedule-- I haven't written any new stuff recently, but I am revising. And the truth be told, I have too many first drafts lying around which need my more focused attention. So I am not too anxious that I am not producing/generating too many new texts right now. And also, revising is HARDER. At least for me. Because it demands that I dig deeper. The poems that I am working on revising right now, are more personal and autobiographical than I have ever written. So, when I try to revise, I re-visit parts of myself which I have kept hidden from my own eyes for way too long. It's almost as if the poems are holding up the mirror in front of me, and forcing me to look into the contradictions of the Post-Partition Bengali-Hindu lower middle-class/middle middle-class gender roles, and the way they played out in the everyday mother-daughter interactions. I cannot work on these poems for too long. I often feel that I am talking too much. Then there are times I feel I am saying too little. And I keep wondering, how will these poems be classified by others who read them? Confessional? Autobiographical? Will there be anyone who will consider these poems as remotely political? I don't know!

:: Manuscript::

I finished compiling the first draft of the manuscript. So far I have 46 poems spanning 62 pages, divided into three section, one prologue and one epilogue. Most of them, that is, around 35 were written during the NaPoWriMo challenge and the week before that. According to this, these are the most commonly used words in the manuscript:

Word	Frequency
one	83
mother	52
did	46
word	39
without	38
story	37
way	28
never	23
ma	23
know	23
myself	22
once	22
around	22
every	21
time	21
finger	20
hand	19
through	19
ne	17
page	17
little	16
make	16
ever	16
thing	16
old	15

I am still not sure what to think about it, because I have just compiled the whole thing. I haven't yet read the whole manuscript through. Later today or tomorrow I want to print out a copy of it and read it to figure out where it stands. But for now, I am happy that I have a tangible manuscript to work with. I also have some tentative titles. But again, I want to read through the entire manuscript to see if I can find some other catchy lines to do the work of the titling.