Reflective Essay

During my literature classes in school, poetry use to be the hardest classes. Figuring out what the poet meant used to take seemed much harder than comprehending the key points of a short story or passage. Still continued even in college- the courses on poetry seemed to take up too much effort. Poetry then, for me, was not the cathartic or romantic experience that many of my friends who do write poetry describe it as. Reading poetry was hard enough, I couldn’t even imagine writing some.

After my Bachelor’s in English, I decided to do my Master’s in Literary Arts instead of in English because I wanted to focus on my writing. Since I had always preferred prose over poetry, I only wrote prose. In my last semester of the course, I decided to choose the Crafting Poetry elective to force myself to go out of my comfort zone and engage with this form.

In the early classes, the sheer amount of love my classmates already had for poetry took me by surprise. In a way, it was intimidating and made me question whether I was too cynical or too ‘unromantic’ or something to appreciate poetry. I got scared and started comparing myself to a classmate I had in school who could not understand or appreciate fiction or rather, the entire concept of reading books voluntarily.

The fear of not being considered poetic enough, or that my poems would look like prose on the page made me ensure that I only wrote poems that rhymed. A strict rhyme scheme or stanzas that looked similar were initially very important to me; in a way to overcompensate for this insecurity of mine. That is why, even though it was difficult to come up with words that rhymed, the ghazal and villanelle were exciting challenges for me. In a way, I thought that if my words rhymed, I could somehow call myself a poet.   

Since I had never written poetry before this course, my focus for when I wrote a poem was always my ideas. There are some students who claim that it is the sound of the words, repetition or structure of the poem that enthralls them, for me, it is always the idea and the imagery used to describe them. In a way, I was still stuck in my school literature class, comprehending poetry by unraveling similes and metaphors, using dictionaries to understand the meaning of the words used. I’m not trying to say that in a negative way, this is just the way I like to read poetry. I can appreciate repetitive sounds in a poetry, but consistent revisiting and unraveling of a metaphor in a poem and a strict rhyme scheme (the rhyme scheme can be broken, but only if the break is scheme is reflective of the mood or concept being explored in the poem) are the things that I enjoy the most in a poem.

The day the form of poetry really inspired me was the day when we focused on enjambment. Enjambment was something that couldn’t be used in prose, and I saw the possibilities of how the form itself could lend emphasis on the concept I was trying to explore in the poem. Before that, I think I was focused too much on the concept and simply thought about how I could hammer it into stanzas and lines. This is especially true for the poem Mother Earth to Sita. What the poem intended to say was clear to me from the very beginning; it was the sitting down with dictionaries of synonyms and figuring out the rhyming words that was the majority of the effort.

An interesting exercise I did with enjambment was when I took some dialogues by Lady Gaga and cut them and structured in my poem Dear Stefani Joanne Germanotta. It was interesting to note how cutting her statements into lines of a poem gave a different note or in way, heightened her anguish compared to when she says them herself in the documentary Five foot two. 

After being so taken in by enjambment, I actually started marrying the concepts or intentionally clashing my concepts to the structure I wanted to write them in. For example the poet persona of Blood! Blood! Blood! is supposed to be an obviously masculine voice, a powerful patriarchal one which is chanting it to a mob almost. It is supposed to be stoic, the repetitive structure supposed to reflect the same age old things men say about violence. The words of the poem are however, not supposed to be repetitive age old things one would say to a mob rather, the implicit conditioning everyone receives about blood, especially women. The aggressive voice is supposed to explicitly acknowledge and self reflect on taboos, castesim and how it glorifies violence.   

In The Typewriting Mouse I have tried to invoke the feeling of the nursery rhymes that we used to read in school. Featuring an whimsical anthropomorphic mouse, his story is supposed to be an adventure with a happy ending, but not only does it not go there, the poem tries to hint at plagiarism and question the responsibilities writers ought to take upon themselves.  

This treatment of poetry continues in the poems I submitted as ‘satellite poems’ for my Strategies of Writing memoir. I think I enjoy writing accompanying pieces for my prose much more than ‘stand alone’ poems. Perhaps it is due to the slight confident I feel writing prose (writing anything cripples my confidence anyway).

At the end of this course, I will not venture to call myself a poet, but I will definitely go on writing poetry, mostly to act as a nucleus or a essence for prose pieces.