Reflective Essay

This Elective has been one of the most enriching experiences of my postgraduate experience at Ambedkar University, Delhi.  Though I was late to join, credit to which goes to my eternal indecisiveness, I cannot be happier to have pestered Mr Potty till the very last hour and levy high amounts of emotional attyachar on him to let me be part of this course. I know that was a very long sentence, so please forgive me. There are several things that I will take back with me though I don’t think my words will be able to encapsulate it all. However, I will try. As I sit here trying to remember all that I’ve learnt from this course, I find myself failing to trace it all in a chronological fashion. I don’t want to refer to the reading list that rests peacefully in my AUD e-mail somewhere but depend on my hippocampus completely. I feel it’s important for me to write as it comes to me naturally. That’s what this course taught me - to be honest to myself and my writing.

Our first exercise and introduction to writing poetry for the purpose of this course was to write a ‘love poem’, a theme that runs wildly as an undertone of almost everything we experience and read. This exercise was a way of exploring the possibilities of absconding the tendency to fall prey to cliches and experiment with distinct ways of articulating an emotion that is so universal. This exercise resulted in me writing about an experience of love that outgrew itself; I learned how to make peace with the changing nature of love and how we perceive ownership of other bodies. It was interesting to read and engage with the poems my classmates wrote too. I have never had an entire class dissect and anatomize all my words. Having so many people contribute to one’s work increases one’s capacity to accept constructive criticism. Reading and analyzing other peoples’ poems was a great exercise in alienating oneself from one’s own literary/personal biases. One of the songs I wrote before joining this course is titled ‘I don’t want to write any more love songs’. My perspective has changed now. I want to learn how to write the same song, about the same boy, about the same heartbreak, in five different ways. Because it's possible and it's never the same song. 

The content of this course over the past few months has augmented my desire to seek newer forms of writing. As a writer, musician, future ex-poet (jokes) and oblivious literature student (truth), I always found myself getting stuck with forms. The prosody exercise, along with reading the critical essays that Akhil shared with us have immensely impact my writing. The form of the ‘ghazal’ is one such example. Not only was writing the Ghazal challenging because of the strict rhythmic pattern one has to follow but also because of the way we have been conditioned to perceive it. Writing  a ghazal in English, though initially uncomfortable, trained me to write the villanelle in one of the following weeks. 

Writing poetry, for this course and otherwise, has always been a therapeutic activity for me. I usually tended to the ‘notes’ on my phone in bed after an exhausting day or a heartbreak or an event that made me “feel something”. Sometimes I write in the interspaces of my day - in the metro, when I’m waiting and I have one percent battery on my phone. This course helped me navigate through the labyrinth of form and break free from the comfort of “writing when you want to” reminded me how important it also is to be able to say a lot in less words. The nonet is one such form and I am happy to have officially been introduced to it in class. 

The alternative structure of workshops was beneficial for it forced us all to put our thinking caps on and work brewing poems on ideas that we had encountered just previously. Though I’m not happy with everything I wrote, I realized that I was always able to come back to my own work and change it the way I wanted it.  It was surprising, strangely, to see what writing poems in pressure could do to me (good things) and we were encouraged, especially after the mid-semester assessment, to revisit and tweak our words. It’s funny how alienated one can feel from one’s own words sometimes but Akhil’s nuanced feedback on all my poems helped me articulate better. 

One of the most challenging tasks for me was to let go of my own tendencies while writing. My tendency to attach to alliterations and lurk around love are the two things I’m working to withdraw from. The workshop on writing about the city was perhaps the most beneficial for me. I’ve also struggled to make peace with my surroundings and an introduction to writing in the manner that we encountered in class has directed me towards perceiving spaces in more detail. 

It was refreshing to revisit poems I had read before too. For instance, I never caught onto the musicality of ‘A Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S Elliot before I read it in the IGDTUW (hope I got it right) grounds on that pleasant April morning, or that  ‘A Mad Girl’s Love Song’ by Sylvia Plath was a villanelle. I can feel a huge change in my writing from ‘Hypermasculinity’ to ‘En Vayasu Veenagauthe’ and it’s all because of these weekly interactions with my friend. More than the course content I will take back with me the openness with which this class - the students and Akhil - encouraged everyone to think through each other’s work and inculcate an atmosphere of acceptance. At every point of the course, we were encouraged to embrace the words we had written on our papers and read them out loud. To feel them swim on our foreheads and flow out of our fingers. To feel every letter bounce off our keywords to our tongues; sometimes they hid behind our teeth and sometimes they escaped through the gaps between them. It was fun. 

I don’t think I have done justice to this 'reflective essay'. I've missed out on a lot that I wanted to say. Perhaps because I am emotional about leaving college…but I guess all I can say I’m glad to be graduating as a frog from this pond called 'Crafting Poems'.

(Please laugh). 

Bye.

PS - It'll be nice if we can all stay in touch....