Self Reflective Essay, Nobby Roseate Uttam

After completing the course on crafting poems, I had begun to think that I had learned a lot about the different kinds of poems and I was eager to put it all into practice in this course. This time around I realized that I had begun to put much more thought into each individual poem, and even though I could not do justice to each poem, it made me really happy that I stepped outside my usual area of interest in this semester. Not so much in terms of form but content. Especially the poem about mythological or historical characters was an altogether different experience since I had never tried to put so much distance between myself and the character in whose voice the poem was written. It allowed me to think deeper on what I thought about these characters, especially in the case of Hagar, and I realized that prior to writing this poem, I had never given much thought to the duality and contradiction between the Jewish and Islamic narratives. It was also the first time when I experimented with the left and right alignment, since the majority of the poem is from an Islamic point of view. In the two lines which are written from a Jewish point of view, the lines are right aligned.

I usually write the poems in a single stretch, over a span of 15 minutes to an hour, but after analyzing each tiny detail about the poets we read in the course, I realized that I needed to think a lot more about what I wanted to say, and whether I had something unique to offer the reader, again, not in terms of form and wordplay but the message, whether what I had to say had been already said and if I could yes then why would the reader read my poem. In the poem ‘waking up’, I realized something else, that even though I should have something unique to offer, it need not be something huge and significant. It could be something as simple as watching your daughter take her first steps. The poem was clumsily written and I hope to improve it someday, but inexplicably, the poem makes me want to smile each time I go back to it.

In the last semester, I used to be too overwhelmed by good poems so that I could never grasp their nuances and hidden meanings. This semester, I found that it became a little easier for me to not only understand but also engage with the poem on a much deeper level.

The prose was a new territory for me since I hadn’t actively pursued writing prose in the past and maybe that is the reason why it was much harder for me to write a short story. The prompt I chose was to use a locality in Delhi as the setting and the place I chose was a part of Delhi which is not famous but it is extremely important to me and I felt happy that I could share the place in a story. I tried to play around with the idea of a narrator consciously creating a narrative and it was really difficult to carry on the narrative on three levels, the character being written about, the narrator who is weaving that story and finally my own voice and opinion on the piece. In fact, even though I am not sure if I have got it right, it was a very thought provoking exercise, especially in the way the prompts gently nudged us in a direction but finally a large portion was kept undefined so that we can express ourselves as creatively as possible.

And I think what I am taking away from this course is that no idea is a bad idea, provided one is willing to work on it and polish it to the extent that it gets a unique shine, as is evidenced in the numerous texts we covered and studied, how the most ordinary and mundane events can open up a vast variety of creative avenues.