Self Reflective Essay

I joined the course ‘Ways of Reading’, despite my skepticism regarding my abilities as a creative writer in order to look into the craft of creative writing which is was completely unaware of.

When we were given the prompts of our first assignment, I instinctively took to doing half of the work in Hindi, a language I have not used frequently for writing or for speaking for that matter, because somehow, my most interesting thoughts came to me in Hindi. Moreover, after having written my poems, I also felt the necessity to put two of them up as videos of me performing them. The choice of the first piece ‘ Accha Laga’ being presented in form of a performance was obvious because it was Ghazal, which happens to be primarily performative. I performed the Ghazal so that the audience of my poetry follow the meter and wordplays that it had fabricated in my works. The choice of putting up a video for the second poem, Ladki Nahi Ladka, however, was a skepticism on my part. I was not very sure if a primarily English speaking class would be able to get the various tones that I tried to convey with the refrain of the phrase, “Ladki Nahi Ladka”. So I performed it in the various moods that I intended each of the refrain to express so as to aid my audience. In a feedback, I was told that these performances really did help the audience/viewers get the intended effect of the poems.
Similarly, the visual narrative that I created around “Ladki Nahi Ladka”, added a system of visual semiotics ( the rainbow colors of the protagonist’s hair, for instance) which helped me to amplify the effects that I was trying to achieve through my work and to direct the trajectory towards which I wanted to trigger the meaning-making process for the reader-viewers
Since these works were less about the arrangement of words on paper and more on oral craftiness, it was important that I used an oral- performative medium of presentation.

Another poem, ‘Sudha Aunty’ was an extension of a classroom exercise on descriptive poetry. However, since I had used quite a few metaphors that lay scattered in the piece, it did not come out as well as I would have wanted it to be. I realized this later when I learned in the workshop how to craft metaphors in poetry. I learned that fewer metaphors, which are specific and ingenious if extended inventively through the course of the poem, generally prove to be more effective and expressive than multiple general metaphors scattered within the poem. And, although I have been fixated upon ingenuity and experimentations in poetry, I learned how even cliches can be unpacked to create exciting results in a poem! I would now invest more time and thought in a poem like “emergency baan” wherein I, earlier relied soley on the experimentative value to produce the effect of poetic delight. The fictional piece, written as the final assignment for the course is thus more relaxed in its experimentations.

I have been keeping this in mind when I write poems now.

And I have to pick, this would be my biggest takeaway from this course-- that is, change in my outlook about creative writing.
Before taking this course, my main focus while writing a  creative piece would be its ingenuity, novelty and philosophico-critical value. In other words, I was writing more critically than creatively, thinking critical thought is the more elevated form of creativity. However, after taking this course, I learned that the critical and ideological verbosity is but one of the many modes of creative writing. For example, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem‘ The Fish’ where meditative immersion in the subject of poetry to create an intricate poetic description is, after all, a poem simply about one’s experience of catching a fish. However, the delight of meditative immersion is of no less value than that of a  narratively ingenious and ideologically dense poem, such as Alice Yousef’s Seven Stone.
Now when I even read a critical essay, I intuitively look into the creative value that the text carries.
Although I can’t say that I have become a better creative writer at the end of this course, I can say for sure that I have become a better creative reader because of it.