~Why This Blog~

I am not very good in writing reviews of poetry collections, short-story collections or novels. My LONG training in academic literary criticism has taught me to think through words, plots, themes, characters in a relatively more expansive way than the usual review would permit. That's why, this blog space is important for me. Because it allows me to articulate my thoughts about writing and literature in a very different way from my formal academic training. While I wouldn't mind anyone else reading this blog, and there are some close friends of mine who read this blog, this is a space primarily for me and my own self. This is a space where I write to articulate ideas, thoughts, reflections, concerns. Maybe some day I won't feel the need for this space in the same way. And then I won't write here anymore. But for now, here I am, scribbling some fragments right before going to bed.

;;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.

Robert Frost's "Directive"

• I have enrolled in a form class. I think, as a general rule of thumb, my poems are too rowdy. Not very disciplined. Kind of like my mind. The things I write about, tend to find their own forms, rather than stay within the norms of the forms. But isn't that the thing about forms? But, I still think, it's good to try to write in forms. Like, this week, we are doing "blank verse." A form, which, admittedly leads itself to "imitation and reflection of thought." In other words, wordy! Now, this shouldn't scare me, the verbose person that I am. Except for the fact that all this wordiness needs to be expressed in iambic pentameter, in a fixed order of stressed and unstressed syllables. From what we read this week, I really liked Robert Frost's "Directive."
• Frost's poem, I think, is very much a pastoral and anti-pastoral at the same time. I was trying to read it in conjunction with Charlotte Smith's poem, where the nature has been personified, the narrator seems to be in perfect harmony with it. But in Frost's poem, “nature” and “human history” confront each other in a somewhat antagonistic relationship. The nature is beautiful in Frost's poem too, but it changes through human intervention. It is almost as if Frost feels compelled to use the same form in which pastoral poems were written to show that his concerns are very different. I think, that sentiment has been best expressed in the opening lines: “ Back out of all this now too much for us,/Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail burned, dissolved, and broken off/Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.

• It seemed to me that in lots of places Frost is lapsing into hexameter. For me, what is meant was that, he was looking for a form, which needed to be a little bit hefty. As if his thoughts are struggling to fit themselves in lines, and even a pentameter is not always adequate for him.

. Paris Spleen.

I am halfway through Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. I do want to read the original French, but I thought, I should give a quick reading of the English translation before beginning to labor with the original. Yes, it's gorgeous. I am trying to put my finger on why I like it so much, but there is something in those paragraphs that resists explanation. But still, if I have to enunciate what it is about these poems that are drawing me so much to them, it is the sense of despair. The sense of despair that invades a mind which can see more than others. The sense of despair which follows the realization that individual human beings are capable of immense fuck-up and immense greatness--sometimes within seconds.The same human being who has fucked something up gloriously, can also do something which will blow away your mind. Personally, I like those poems best, where he moves beyond his own sense of despair, where he takes a character and tries to see what lies beyond what immediately meets the eye. On the other hand, when I read his self-despairing rants, I have to keep reminding myself, this is one of the original alienationists. The ones I have grown-up reading, are more like derivates, fakes. Now, keeping that in mind, it also seems that the alienationists haven't really updated themselves much after Baudelaire! Now, this is the glitch:

Paris Spleen is so beautiful that sometimes I have to pinch myself to the reminder that Baudelaire was a jackass. A fucking egotistical jackass!

{So Far}

The days are hot, I am tired...I am slowly feeling that I am zoning out more and more from certain kinds of writing. The struggle is: how much to tell, and how much to keep outside the page. Not in my mind, just outside the page.

This weekend, so far:

• I have read two short stories by Carol Azadeh

• Worked on revising two poems

• Worked on revising a story

• Worked on revising/writing an academic article

• cooked alu-phoolkopir dalna from The Hindi-Bindi Club, of all places. Didn't turn out to be too bad

• Eaten BM's eggplant parmesan

• Watched Pyasa along with my running commentary

It seems like the most common feedback for my poems is that, I need more clarity. This confuses me, because I don't want my poems to be stories, in the same way I don't want my stories to be film-scripts. I began to love poetry because it allowed imagistic, impressionistic expression. Playing with language, fragmentation. But, a lot of my readers want clarity here. I am trying to think about the issue of “clarity” in my work. Why do I need to explain myself so much?

[Explaining Kiranmala]

I was recently asked by a writer-friend of mine about the storyteller-commentator divide I create in this poem. The way she put it:

commenting too has its place in the scheme of things, while stories, too, differ from each other

And this is what I wrote back to her:

For me, it's not the line between "fiction" and "non-fiction" that the words "commentator" and "storyteller" invoke. Although, that's how we understand those two words generally, especially within our commonsensical knowledge. Rather, the way I have tried to approach it in this poem, "commentators" are those who reproduce knowledge, rather than producing it. They do not essentially challenge the boundaries of dominant thoughts and well-established maxims. On the other hand, "storytellers" are those who push our accepted borders of thought, language, norms, knowledge and produce something that is, for lack of any better word,more original,organic and boundary-busting. There are lots of "commentators" in the world of creative writing. As there are many "storytellers" among the theorists, writers of non-fiction prose.

Now, you can ask me, why Kiranmala? Why am I ascribing upon her that role. Well, I was thinking about the ways in which knowledge production has always been a site of gender discrimination in South Asia (and elsewhere). It's not just gender, race, class and caste have been used too, to keep thousands of people from away from written texts and intellectual resources. Think of all the prohibitions around women and shudras listening to/speaking/ learning Sanskrit. Just think of the news that made headlines last week: a temple in Orissa does not allow the Dalits to cross its threshold. Similarly, it was illegal for slaves in the colonial plantations to learn to read and write, as it was to teach them. But does that mean that women, untouchables, the enslaved, and other marginalized folks who have been systematically excluded from literacy, did not think about the world around them? Does that mean they did not theorize about their own conditions? Not really! But they theorized differently. They theorized through songs, proverbs, stories(which "we" sometimes call folk-tale), dance-forms and numerous other aesthetic expressions. So, those very art-forms, for them, became forms of commenting. But at the same time, they are also attempts to tell stories. Stories with characters, histories, emotions embodied within the forms. They are all trying to tell a story, whether through language, through colors or through musical notes. But where they differ from, say the knowledge that was being learnt by white men, men of upper castes (esp. Brahmins) etc. is that, those forms of knowledge, as against these aesthetic expressions I have been talking about, were supported by institutions, dominant cultures. These forms of knowledge are meant to reinforce and reproduce the status quo, whereas the other forms of knowledges, often embodied in aesthetic expressions, question that social status quo. So, to put it simply,

Commentators=those who engage in institution-sponsored knowledge

Storytellers= who try to reclaim their voices from outside of the institutions

So, in my poem, I tried to give Kiranmala some agency, some creativity. As a woman, she is excluded from the world of Brahmanical knowledge production and learning. But instead of feeling victimized by that exclusion, she proclaims that she does not find that knowledge, the books her brothers are learning to memorize, aren't useful for her at all. She rejects institutional knowledge, rejects the language associated with state power/institutional power, and demands something else for herself. She is looking for alternative methods of expressing herself. The language that is specific to this context is, of course, Sanskrit. But if we move beyond that specifics, it can very well be construed as any power-language, any language that the institution upholds as exclusive and legitimate. Hence the storyteller-commentator divide.

Now, an honest admission: it does feel very weird to explain my own poem to someone. The poem, I believe, should speak for itself. And then, there is this little niggling thingie, that my years of academic training in literary criticism has taught me to decode almost all literary texts. I can justify any badly-written text, I can tear apart almost any gloriously-written piece of writing. And I don't think, those skills are useless. But at the same time, because I can do this with such ease, I prefer not to turn back my own critical gaze into my own poem after it has been published aka. gone from my hands. The poem should speak for itself.

But then, I write about things that are often considered uncomfortable-- gender, class, emotional cost of ascribing to a political ideology. Pepper this with reference to obscure texts, myths, folklore that often invade my lines. So, my poems, I do understand, can be a little dense sometimes. If I am faithful to my work as a poet, I will have to do a little bit of unpacking for my audience, precisely because I am not writing on nostalgic poems about one's childhood in an American suburb. My poems need more education than an average white-American poem. And even when the readers are Indian/South Asian/Bengali, I still might have to do some unpacking, because I am trying to debunk things that have been socially accepted. Even after all of this explanation and contextualization, some readers might not just like the poems I write. Therein, I guess, lies the test as a poet/artist.

::Publication in Hawai'i Review::

Yesterday I received two copies of Hawai'i Review Issue 74 in mail. Yes, my contributors' copies. I held them in my hand, sniffed through them, and then looked through the TOC. There it was--my name in print and my poem. My work has not been published in many print journals, so this was an incredible feeling. There is something so tangible and ephemeral at the same time in holding a book, feeling its material presence, and then realizing that I, too, played a part--however small it might be--in bringing it into being.

I read my published poem after getting out of work. Some imageries sounded cool! As if someone else had written them. But there were also things I would like to change. For example, some line-breaks. There are places in the poem where I need to strive for more clarity. So, what I realized was that, even if a journal publishes a poem, it doesn't mean that it is "final." What it means is that, at a certain point in my life, I thought this poem was completed. I had sent it out in the world. It found a home, but that does not mean that the poem itself has to remain unchanged. And once it changes, it will also have to look for a new home. The book, or something a little bit lengthier than 8 pages in a journal. I grow as a human being and a writer every day. My poems and stories also grow with me.

By the way, the name of the poem is "bildungsroman." Read it!