Reflective Essay Thangjam Nelson Singh

I had been interested in poetry, and had written a few myself but i have never considered myself as a poet. I wouldn't say that has necessarily changed after this course, but I have a renewed appreciation for the nuances of writing and reading poetry after taking this course. Reflecting back on this course, it has been quite a learning experience. I particularly liked the insight into poetic forms like the ghazal and the villanelle, which have a certain form and rhyme scheme. I have some experience with keeping count of syllables but I have had a mixed experience with rhyme in poetry. I admire how some poets manage to use it to heighten the expressiveness of their lines without it being obtrusive, but have always personally found it difficult to conform to a sustained rhyme scheme. It used to almost feel tyrannical to me, to indulge in a bit of hyperbole. However, with the exercises in writing a ghazal and a villanelle, I found that rhyming per se is not the main hurdle, especially in today's digitally connected  era, when you can pull up a score of rhyming words for any word on the Internet. I was introduced to the pleasure of choosing certain rhymes, and then crafting lines that would fit both the word and the mood of the poem or line. I cannot attest to how successful my rhymes were for readers, but speaking for myself, I was fairly satisfied with the progress I made in rhyming. I wish I could say the same for my ability to stick to a certain meter, for example iambic pentameter as used in villanelle and blank verse, and not just a syllabic count, but I suspect that that will take more practice than a couple of weeks. Regardless of that, I enjoyed learning about the specific beauty and pleasure afforded by poetry written with a formal structure.

Which is not to say that free verse is completely formless; this course made me aware that in certain ways, writing free verse is as, if not more, strict and demanding. You are ostensibly free to use any type of lineation and enjambment for every new poem you write. However, this very freedom means that you have to work carefully with every poem that you write to ensure that the lineation, punctuation and enjambment are tailored specifically for that poem, keeping in mind certain parameters or factors, such as speed, sound, surprise, sense, syntax and space, which are crucial for giving a poem the feel that it has. Therefore, in a way, you are building a structure from scratch in every new free verse poem that you write, so if you are conscientious about crafting your poetry, then free verse can, and should be, just as rigorous as any rhymed and metered verse form.

This course also helped me to go some way towards analyzing when my poetry was leaning towards the grandiose and abstract, the cliché and the too-general. These definitely have their place in poetry, but if the poem does not have the adequate weight to support such phrases and terms, they can render the poem comparatively bland and generic. The particular and the personal, which need not be always autobiographical, can on the other hand, actually help a poem connect more to readers, I learnt. This was borne out for me most clearly through the works of Nitoo Das that we read and discussed as part of the course.

Das draws a lot on her personal experiences and feelings, and that is communicated through all her poems, even a poem such as Geeta Sings a Thumri, where the speaker is Geeta Dutt, but you can feel Das's fascination and interest in Bollywood and the lives of these larger than life characters coming through. At the same time, even though they have a particularity of detail and description, as for instance when she puts her own spin on Assamese legends such as the jokhini, or when she writes about her experiences in birding, they are not confessional in the mode of autobiography. Not that the confessional is to be abjured in poetry, but I think they were a very good example to those who want to stay away from generalities and abstractions in their poetry but are not completely comfortable letting everyone into their inner lives. I have  struggled myself with the very same issue, of trying to write fresh and new lines that would not be too graphic or personal without being bare statements full of abstractions. Through this course, then, I have found some inkling of how I should proceed. Which is to draw on what I have experienced externally in the world and internally in my mind, to compose lines on even the most abstract and general themes, such as 'love' and 'politics'.

Talking of interiority, one of the most engaging aspects of this course was the classroom sessions where we discussed the work of my classmates. The workshop aspect was actually where I learnt the most I would say. Reading others' poems and then discussing them with the poets themselves was truly eye opening. One can undoubtedly learn many things even from just simply reading poems but having the one who wrote it discuss how they crafted a particular line, created a particular emotional tone or tried to address a specific theme is, in my opinion, one of the best ways in which one can get to know poetry as an art, as a craft. It allowed us to not be mystified by the seemingly arbitrary nature of a poem's line length, word choice and phrasing, which one might have been, as an uninformed reader. We can always hypothesize of course in the absence of the writer, but actually having my classmates explicate these and then respond to our interjections and suggestions helped tremendously in my imbibing this absolutely essential knowledge.

My journey through this course has thus been one where I really started seeing poetry as a practice, as an articulation. I already had an appreciation of poetry through my literature studies background, but this helped me realize what the fundamentals of poetry are. And as I once read somewhere, fundamentals are the building blocks of fun.