Self reflective Essay

It was with a lot of excitement that I took up this course since this was the first time that I was actually going to learn how to write poetry. Up till this point, my poems had developed from trying to get the lines to rhyme, to expressing inner angst and finally to spoken word poetry where the focus is the sound and eye-catchy metaphors above everything else. That was what I tried to do for the first submission, which was a love poem. Even though it had strong and interesting metaphors, it could not stand the scrutiny of the entire class, looking at me to explain why I put in a certain line or a certain word in a certain place. That is when I started to realize that a brilliant image or metaphor cannot sustain an entire poem, there has to be more finesse which has to go into it. It was the first time that I edited a poem and restructured it significantly to get a particular result. I tried to keep the first few poems as short as possible so that I could edit them properly. I also began to put more thought behind my poems since they were not intended for a one time consumption.

As the teacher had put it, “the poem has to be good for the stage but should also work on the page”, and that leads me to the second realization that I could play around with line breaks, punctuations ad spaces to create more meaning. This was something which I had never experimented with much and it was only after I had written a couple of poems that I gained the confidence to try it out myself. The villanelle was the poem where I tried to make extensive use of the punctuation marks and though it might not stand out among the other poems which were brought up during the weekly peer review, it was a personal milestone for me. It was the first time that I found a rhythm and repetition intoxicating since there was not much need for new fancy metaphors than creative and inventive manipulation of the existing lines. Due to health issues and family problems, I had to miss out on a lot of classes, which I deeply regret. One of these was the class where the ghazal was discussed and that was probably the reason why I messed up the rules to be kept in mind while writing one. However, as I realized during writing the villanelle and the second ghazal, poems which have a predetermined repetition need to be edited for much longer to find the perfect combination.

I have also realized over the course of writing these twelve poems that the initial thought in my mind about what the poem has to look like cannot and should not restrict me from changing its course while the writing and the editing is taking place. The ghazal for instance, grew from a thought where I wanted to express an absurd thought about whether the stars we see in the sky aren’t lights in a huge grid, set up by the governments as a ploy to make us believe that there are other worlds out there, the research of which needs to be funded. However, the poem turned out to be quite different, about a person struggling with mental health issues and drug abuse. The initial idea, as fascinating as it seemed to my mind, did not materialize when I began writing and the second idea made more sense but still left something lacking. The next morning I altered the narrative to that of a war veteran with PTSD symptoms. A particular set of words in the second sher still gnawed at me and I changed it after almost writing the second draft. This ever-changing relationship with my poem is something which is quite similar to a relationship with other people. Thus, in a way editing made the poem come alive for me.

If writing and editing forced me choose the words carefully, the class discussions and the background readings forced me to choose the topics on which I wrote very carefully. The poem is not just about expressing what I felt, it was also about leaving the reader with something which they could carry away from the poem. In every discussion, we were asked to pick a line or a set of lines which stayed with us and while writing, it was there at the back of my mind that would the reader actually have something which would stay with them after reading it. The trajectory which I see in my poems, from “The address” to “I am Not” and finally to “Razer way shun”, I can almost see myself trying to get accustomed to my own voice, my own identity.

The response to Nitoo Dass was another interesting exercise, which could have been more interesting had I been able to attend the discussions of her poems. But it was still a delightful experience since I decided to try something which I could never have thought of, had I not come across her. The glossary poem was born out of a curiosity to see whether I can make the glossary into an integral part of the poem, in a way that it does not explain so much so as completes and complements the meaning, as a response to Nitoo’s stance on the use of glossary in poems.

There is a vast number of little things I have gained over this course, and not all of them is about writing good poetry. As once said during the class, the expression itself is not the only thing which needs to be worked upon, in order to become a good poet. The quantum of knowledge has to be constantly increased in order to become a better poet. And I believe that my quantum of knowledge has certainly gone up a few notches along with gaining a few more techniques over this course.