Anandita Thakur End term Assignment

Anandita Thakur

Ways of Reading -Final Assignment

MS 2018

1)To the Kitten who Enters Room 404 at Precisely 11:36 Every Thursday

A fissure of light on a peeping door

Kitten looks through, tail raised

to show it’s alive

To the thrum of pages drifting, ink spilling

How does she hold together

This tiniest creature, nook of blue veins and bones

 

The room is flowering, suddenly, into blue roses

I open my hand into a shallow fan, call to her

One haunches up in her chair , “I’m scared of cats!”

While there is still some waiting-

run your palm along her spine

Listen to the quietness of her skin

And those great green eyes

Before the door clicks shut, a throat is cleared

The child slips through

2)To the Corridor that Interrupts Itself

I would go back in time to look again, at the moment of this inscription

Shuttling between was and is, will I find it here

This naked spasm of a thought, splayed

Into this wall. This brilliant light.

Will I find my mind

Will it pierce the eye’s complacency-

Or will it retreat into another

Another decade (another Diktat? Distance? dissipation?)

Another deep shelved grove of silences

Scuttled across the floor, a spreading sea of

foam.

3)On Silence in  Classroom 407

Poetry must rest in the fullness before anagnorisis

Before the coin is tossed and lies

Suspended in a copper haze of possibility

I use my footsteps to mark the passage of time

As I walk up to class

I am anticipating another footing soon

A voice slips into me,a growing echo

I find no way to describe this powerlessness, anymore

Except to soak this moment

Before the interpretation begins

The quiet finality of the text

Outside of interpretation

4)Library

The library is a somnolent being

The guard will let you in

Always making sure you enter your name

Not once but twice

The outside is inscrutable, unassuming

The inside is a labyrinthe

Growing bigger the more time you spend within it

The longest human life is 124 years  

How old is the library

A tree is measured in its circular receding into itself

How does the being of this library age

Populated with the tetris of civilization

How many lives have I spent here already?

SELF REFLECTIVE ESSAY

The first poem I wrote, entitled, To the Kitten who Enters Room 404 at Precisely 11:36 Every Thursday, I wanted to practice and maintain a new tone in my poetry, a sort of even pace where the poem plays itself out almost seamlessly and then it’s over, but at the same time, even in the seamlessness there is some sense of motion, however fluid. I tried to make this more apparent by introducing it in the line, “Kitten looks through, tail raised/ To show it’s alive”  and then again the line “nook of blue veins and bones”. In the second line in particular I wanted to give the sense of so so many nerve endings, bones, jammed an pulsating in one tiny body, that wanders in, tail swishing. That is, even in the evenness of the tone, I wanted these sensations to come through.

At the same moment I wanted to capture the moment in class where this happens, where all of us are thrown from this moment of almost pretentious erudition to just our most childish fears. I tried to capture this in the line “the child slips through” and also with, “ I’m scared of cats!”

The second poem I wrote, entitled, To the Corridor that Interrupts Itself”, I wanted to express how the graffitti I saw nearly everyday made me feel about what it might mean to see it some time from now, even a few years. Whenever I see it I tend to picture the people who made it and their motivations. When I saw it in the yellowing light the other day, it felt more ephemeral, somehow, I suppose because of the way some words were fading away from the “I have spoons” inscription. That is also why I used the word “deep shelved grove of silences” in order to assert the idea of shelving in all its senses- academic books shelved, ideas shelved, hopes shelved. The ‘d’ sound in the brackets is meant to, in an alliterative sense, assert the urgency of this feeling, and the idea of a sea of foam as well is meant to be over here a symbol of waste, as foam does not do very much.I think the idea of a sea spreading also stuck with me as I am often in the campus very early in the morning which is when I often see this area completely washed over with water spread in every direction.

In the poem entitled “ On Silence in  Classroom 407 “, I wanted to explore the moment that occurs in this class before we are told to give our interpretations of a text we are reading. I always sense around me an atmosphere of some hesitation and careful treading, and I notice myself doing this too. The time before and after I make my way to the class is strange. I take the same path every time, and in some ways I am measuring my way up in footsteps, and the familiarity of the things I see as I go up. Above all, I just mostly wanted to explore the beat and sensation of this inner passivity that occurs in me when I’m doing these things, such as walking up to class, and not really thinking about it, but also the accompanying sensation of the class itself that I begin to feel even before I enter. This is why I made the connection between ‘footing’ in two separate sentences. Above all, a solution I have found to this anxiety of interpretation is to only focus on the moment, the quietude and finality and thrum of the text before me and the centrality of the moment of interpretation itself.

In the poem entitled, “The Library”, I wanted to talk about how I usually think of the library, where the library, from the outside in Ambedkar, is only an unassuming door, when you enter the from the corridor into the . I do not think I achieved any affect here with any grace at all, I would have liked to explore further and suggest more obviously the humorous element to signing in twice. I think I also wanted to really explore the idea of an archive, and how the idea of age becomes interesting to me as far as libraries go, because it always feels like there is a chorus of different ages, topics, cultures calling to you as soon as you enter the library. The closest this felt to was the image of the tree with circular patterns, endlessly entering into itself. The library is a labyrinth, because the more time you spend in it, the more it seems like a never-exhausting source. In the end, I used the idea of how many lives I had spent here already because it often does feel like exactly that- as though I am moving into different lives, becoming fluid and interspersing with what I read, populated by the feeling of the library.
My relationships with the texts of the course were formed primarily through assiociations of how I might use them as formalistic categories. In this, the essay I liked the most was Mark Doty's, as I thought it very effectively helped me see how aspects such as sound and description would help in enhancing a poem with their strategic placement.What also really helped me was the feedback session, and my introduction to long form poetry by Akhil sir, namely, that of Agha Shahid Ali. Although I have not taken up the form in my assignment, I do hope to in my work in the future. As a creative writer, I feel the course allowed me to read poetry more as a craft, and even the emotion of it as a carefully conducted craft, which I feel I lacked in a refined sense earlier. It taught me the importance of the process of editing as well, and the knowledge that the "flash of genius" moment is usually fictional! I do not know if I am a better writer, I can't say there is such a thing at all, but I do feel I am a more careful one.