Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Why, Where & How of poems

Why, Where & How...

I would like to say what I feel right now, very pompous… writing about myself, my own poems, my experiences seem like walking on a tightrope on top of narcissistic valley. Maybe I can defy.

I had to struggle to overcome the inhibitions of exhibiting naked details of my experiences. Somewhere I gathered that I don’t have to evaluate or judge self or poems positively or negatively and that helped me to expose.

I look my poems as milestones or photographs of some mental state I have gone through, and the challenge lies in expressing predominant emotions of such a state/s in a language. For me it usually comes out in a flow and I tend to keep them that way.

Thus it’s always been very difficult for me to evaluate my own poems in any sense, because I am not trying to be a professional and try to ignore analyzing them from literary perspective.

So I always like to know how others find them to be, and more as an interviewer who is dispassionate about criticism or praise and am more interested in analytical and interpretive views, and I become like a child who is sharing his new toys with others. I try to maintain an unapologetically casual attitude which keeps me moored as well as lets me fly.

While penning down a poem, the need and process of looking at self & emotions from a 3rd person’s view is something I seem to enjoy indulging in, but have not been able to find out the need to write poems.

Never been good at understanding others poems (even my own after I have finished them), as its always been an intuitive activity for me rather than conscious process. I have tried to emulate some of my friends who genuinely seem to get that ‘kick’ from reading poems, but…

I have heard that exposing the processes behind by a poem/poet is something not to be done (some literary norm?) but I like to fight restrictive thinking, conventions, things repeated blindly by even the ripened heads. But let me take that on... let me defy (again).

As it happens intuitively for me, I have written all this as another attempt to understand. If your impression of a theme/interpretation differs from my point of view then look at it as a fresh creation, as a perspective shift and be cool. I always enjoyed discussing these differences of views.

If you don’t want to experiment in such a way, then don’t read the comments that follow the previous 59 poems i have posted.

1 comment:

Cristina said...

Just catching up on your blog after a while. I liked this post about how you look at your own poems... I can connect to what you said about having to overcome the inhibitions of exposing a poem & its emotions for all to see. Doesn't seem narcissistic at all to me though... I guess some people could share in a self-centered way, but I look at it as giving the world a hand-made gift. I admire your courage, not just for sharing such close-to-your-heart poems, but for writing them in the first place!

I was also glad to read this post just now because it's a more eloquent expression of some of the struggles I was trying to describe, while just starting to share a handful of poems (on my blog). And in a further funny link, I just realized that the first poem I posted on there is about a woman in Malawi who's barefoot! (But for a different reason than you.) Good job on trying out the barefoot experiment, and hope you'll be able to continue it because it seems great!